This seems to be the eternal question, there’s a million articles out there with the pros and cons about each one. In the end, I realized it doesn’t matter that much.
For our campaign we decided to go with Kickstarter mainly for two reasons:
Recognizability
First I thought Kickstarter would be more recognizable, hence, more trustworthy for people.
This didn’t exactly turned out to be true. Yes, historically, Kickstarter has had the bigger projects. But when it came down to it, most people either knew both or didn’t know either. Most didn’t even know what crowd funding is.
There were a few exceptions that knew Kickstarter and not IndieGoGo, sure. But not enough to play a significant difference. Freddie Wong and his pals at RocketJump switched from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo on the third season of their show Video Game High School and raised almost $90,000 more than in the previous season.
Fixed Funding vs Flexible Funding
The second reason for choosing Kickstarter was more debated in our team. At the time we thought Kickstarter would be more recognizable, but IndieGoGo was the only one with Flexible Funding. That would’ve meant that we would’ve gotten whatever money we raised even if we didn’t meet our goal.
This sounded good at the time. I knew that we didn’t raise as much money as we wanted I could take all the post-production for free and we could cut a bunch of stuff from the shoot.
But what if we got way too little?
We would still have commitments to send the rewards like DVDs and stuff, but we couldn’t afford to make the show at all. That didn’t seem fair to the backers, so we decided to go with Kickstarter and it’s all or nothing model.
And boy, I’m glad we did! Our campaign failed miserably, and if we hadn’t done the all or nothing model at Kickstarter, we would have needed to find a way to make 40 minutes of content for $926 just to send 20 digital downloads, 2 DVDs and 1 ticket to the premiere (for my mom, who could’ve gone anyway).
Just to be clear, you can also do the all or nothing model on IndieGoGo, but because of the first reason we decided to go with Kickstarter anyway.
This article is part of a series with tips and lessons I learned from my failed Kickstarter campaign. Go to the main article here.