Indiegogo acquires assets of Celery to keep selling crowdfunded winners
Indiegogo wants to step out of Kickstarter’s shadow by embracing commerce beyond crowdfunding. That means helping sell pre-orders and finished products from entrepreneurs who are done raising money. So today Indiegogo announced it’s acquired select assets of Celery, the “pre-commerce” platform that specializes in beautiful, fully-tailorable sites for taking product pre-orders.
“We had certain customers who wanted a really customizable platform” Indiegogo CEO Dave Mandelbrot tells me. “It’s not something we couldn’t build ourselves, but we wanted to be in market with a really good solution quickly.” The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
[Update: The deal here is a bit abnormal. Indiegogo tells me it has acquired the IP of Celery’s pre-order business, including its domain, logo, and licenses to its source code, yet somehow Celery will remain a standalone company through and after the transition of the assets. It’s unclear whether Celery will have to rebrand, or how exactly it will operate.]
Celery was founded in 2013 by Groupon’s VP of biz dev Chris Tsai and went on to raise $2 million from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Max Levchin. Instead of disappearing when a crowdfunding campaign ended, Celery was built to be a home for selling products throughout their journey from raising money to pre-orders to traditional sales. It could make standalone sites, work at your custom URL, or be plugged into an existing website as a widget.
Now Indiegogo will be absorbing Celery assets into its InDemand product that it launched in January 2015 to sell products post-crowdfunding.
All Celery customers will get an InDemand site auto-populated for them until the transition is complete. Unfortunately for makers, they’ll now have to pay out Indiegogo’s higher 5% cut. But in exchange, they’ll get free promotion to Indiegogo’s 15 million monthly visitors, plus there’s no monthly fee.
InDemand was already taking in $20 million in pre-orders per quarter. With Celery’s skills in customization and rapid check-out, that number could grow fast.
Tsai tells me some polished brands might have been reluctant to sell through a platform known for scrappy crowdfunding. Celery could get these more professional UI and UX-focused merchants into the Indiegogo family of products. Plus, now an entrepreneur who builds a customer base on Indiegogo crowdfunding can stick with it and keep selling after their campaign ends.
“Our strategy around commerce is to be a solution that enables entrepreneurs to get all the way from concept to market” Mandelbrot concludes.
The acquisition represents an evolution for the crowdfunding industry. Instead of being thought of as a completely distinct way to sell, platforms like Indiegogo now see crowdfunding as a natural part of a product lifecycle they should be embracing in full.