How We Crowdfunded $350,000 in 30 Days — 2019 Crowdfunding Tips

We successfully raised over $350,000 on Indiegogo in just 30 days for Shine Bathroom. This is my 7th crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo platform and things have changed a lot since I first started using crowdfunding to launch new products. Here is what I learned

Indiegogo Distribution is Legit

When I first started crowdfunding in 2012, campaigners had to drive almost all of their own traffic to their page. While the Indiegogo platform enabled some organic discovery it was very minor in comparison to the campaigner driving their own press and email traffic.

Things have changed. In my latest campaign, Indiegogo has driven over 50% of the sales. This is a huge testament to the power of their email list, internal audience, and website discovery designs.

Press Doesn’t Matter

Previously, press could drive a lot of traffic and sales to a campaign. In one of my first campaigns, TrackR wallet, a single press article drove nearly $50,000 in revenue. Over time, I saw that press articles drove less and less traffic & sales. This is mainly due to the fact that the press is running stories every 15 minutes or so on their website and doing a lot of short-form articles vs long-form articles that stay on their site for a few days. Also, there are just more places people get their news than in 2012 which has a dilutive effect on any press that has been earned.

Media coverage is nice to have for helping boost legitimacy for the campaign and can help boost conversion rates a little bit. However, I would advise most campaigners to not worry about media & focus on social media.

It’s Not All About Email

Email effectiveness has significantly deteriorated as a marketing channel with the advent of tabs in Gmail, the world’s most popular email service. This means that much of the sign-ups that you gather for your campaign won’t see the emails that you are sending them. There are further restrictions on rapidly growing email lists that prevent the kind of email tactics that made crowdfunding campaigns extremely successful in the early days.

However, the rise of Facebook messenger and text messages have prevailed as extremely interesting channels where open rates are frequently 90% or more! A multi-channel approach to owned media is more critical than ever.

Evangelism — Back to the Roots

The one thing that has mattered most to crowdfunding campaigns has been evangelism and that hasn’t changed in 2019. People sharing the campaign is more important than ever and the idea of the crowd rallying behind a new idea is the core of crowdfunding.

It’s been great to see the evolution of crowdfunding over the last 7 years. Crowdfunding has always been about individuals rallying behind new ideas that can change the world and it’s great to see that idea become a reality.