Andy Yang joined Indiegogo at a turbulent time. As the crowdfunding platform’s then-CEO stepped aside for personal reasons, the service also reportedly grappled with layoffs. Coming on board after a stretch with Reddit, the new CEO would have less than a year at the helm before COVID-19 turned the globe upside down.
Now 13 years old, the San Francisco-based site matured alongside the world of online crowdfunding. And, certainly, Indiegogo had a front-row seat for all of the ups and downs. Indiegogo introduced several million-dollar campaigns, but the platform has often suffered from comparisons to Kickstarter, a service that has become synonymous with the category for many.
Yang sat down to discuss how Indiegogo has changed under his tenure, how crowdfunding has evolved and what both will look like in a post-pandemic world.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
What was your primary objective coming on as CEO?
I was at Reddit doing core product, and when Indiegogo’s board and founders reached out, it was really around, “Hey, we would love somebody with product experience, a background in community.” What was going on in Indiegogo was really an evaluation of, “What’s our core values?” When I took the saddle and the reigns, it was really focusing on that core of who we are, what segments do we want to go after, and where do we want to focus. Where do we want to focus our product?
“We’ve had our number of failures on our site, of campaigns that haven’t fulfilled or just, the campaigns have ghosted their backers, and we own up to that.”
From that perspective, we’ve been really heads-down for the last two years, just working on ourselves, internally, and focusing on the core — what we’re terming “bringing the crowd back in crowdfunding.” I think a lot of the platforms have been very transactional in nature, and so I think backers and consumers and users have been trained by Amazon to click a button and get things two hours later. The premise of crowdfunding is very different.
You may or may not get this perk delivered in the time frame that you’re expecting, and to help educate backers and the community around that is really core to who we are. We’ve been through the last two years with COVID, but we’ve been profitable since I’ve joined, which is huge. We can control our own destiny and really take the time to do things right and invest in areas like trust and safety, like community, that we really wanted to.
The company wasn’t profitable when you joined?
We weren’t profitable. I joined and then we cut to profitability, or at least kind of a neutral state, and with any kind of change in leadership, some tenured folks opted out, and we basically became a new team overnight to kind of re-found the company, and we’ve been slowly adding people over the last couple years, but always with that eye on profitability and controlling our own destiny.
Beyond people changing roles, what had to happen in order for the company to become profitable?
Really doubling down on making sure that we understood our sales pipeline and making sure that, from a supply perspective, that we had a number of campaigns from across a number of categories. Obviously, our bread and butter is what we call tech and innovation, consumer electronics hardware, but also seeing what other categories that we can lean into. We’re definitely strong in comics, travel, outdoors, and what can we do from expanding our wedge and our categories in different areas that we’re seeing growth. I think a trend that we’re currently seeing is a lot of green tech. Just trying to understand what categories are growing, where our brand resonates with entrepreneurs and backers.
That’s what needed to happen — just making sure that we had adequate supply on the platform, and also just from the backer side, we had not traditionally focused on the backer side. We had heavily focused on the supply side, but really starting to, again, return back to the crowd in crowdfunding, leaning on my Reddit experience, just making sure that we can engage the community in new and interesting ways.
What does it mean to reach out to the actual backers, and what do you do to foster those relationships?
Obviously, without backers, these crowdfunding sites would not exist. We rely on the entrepreneur, and we partner with entrepreneurs to do what we call community building. We say, “Look, how do you get more people interested and your first enthusiasts to help get the word out once you do launch your campaign?” We partner with the entrepreneurs to help their storytelling and build their community. On the other side, that’s where a lot of the internal work has gone. Internally, we like to use the terms “campaign-agnostic” or “campaign-independent.” How do we foster a love for Indiegogo independent of campaigns, and can we engage them through supply, through our blog, through our social channels, to really illustrate some of the journeys that our entrepreneurs are going through?
Mention crowdfunding to somebody, and they’ll often tell you the story about the company that they backed that either didn’t deliver a reward or abandoned a campaign. What can you do to bring people back into the fold who have been burned by crowdfunding in the past?
We’ve had our number of failures on our site, of campaigns that haven’t fulfilled or just, the campaigns have ghosted their backers, and we own up to that. Over the last two years, that’s been a major focus for us, of what can we do from a trust and safety perspective. It starts with education, making sure that the backers understand that crowdfunding is not shopping. It’s very visible in our checkout site, but again, Amazon and other companies have trained people, just click a button and I’m going to get it in two hours.
In terms of just, people that have been burned, absolutely. We own up to that. For us, it’s partnering with the entrepreneur to make sure that they are communicating with their backers along the whole journey, because I think most people understand if people are walked through the process of “this is why I failed” or “I’m encountering a chip shortage” or “the Suez Canal, or global supply chains, are disrupted,” etc., and entrepreneurs are keeping their backers updated … there’s a little bit of leniency for most backers.
It has been historically easier to get a project on Indiegogo than Kickstarter. Is that something that’s changing under your watch?
Yes. I would say we want to do more. You’ll see our stance has been much more proactive, and, again, it’s things that we’ve been doing behind the scenes that we just haven’t announced but we want to make sure that, internally, we’re buttoning down everything before we go out with a public launch of something. But you can start to hear and see the things that we’ll do in the coming months. We know we need to do better as a platform. I go on the subreddit Shitty Kickstarters, and we all have empowered the team to look at that, and we want to bring that ethos of having the community also help vet and provide feedback to entrepreneurs and create that dialogue, because I think what a lot of platforms are learning over the last 10 years is responsibility for what’s on their platform. That’s definitely a sea change overall in tech.
Is part of the process of changing expectations and changing the relationship between backers and entrepreneurs perhaps taking some of the focus off of rewards and shifting some of those expectations going forward?
Not necessarily. Especially from a trust and safety perspective, we’re really at that turning point for the company when it comes to that reputation of crowdfunding, and “Indiegogo’s just not the most reliable,” and so, we’ve been hearing from backers and been working on these features and the platform changes and community initiatives that enhance those trust and safety paradigm. I want to be a company that says, “Hey, judge us by our actions, not by our words.”
What has incentivized people to back a campaign is transactional. Is that still the model that makes the most sense? Is part of the future of crowdfunding shifting toward a more equity-based incentive?
I think there’s a model for that, for sure. Staying within our lane of just rewards-based crowdfunding, we’re seeing the segmentation of a certain amount of backers that just want to seed this product into life and are more mission-driven. There’s a clear opportunity where there could be a little bit more of a formal expectation between backer and entrepreneur, and whether that’s pushing deeper into the value chain — like a pre-order kind of segment (which is the terminology that gets used within the space, anyways) — and I think the beauty of Indiegogo is we have Indiegogo crowdfunding, and then we have Indiegogo InDemand, which is the post-crowdfunding, which has been another synonym for pre-order.
What is the Global Fast Track program?
It’s for companies or entrepreneurs in Asia Pacific, specifically China. We’re launching this in Japan. It’s more of what we call a concierge or white-glove service, where you have a campaign, a project, a product that you want to launch on Indiegogo, and we’ll basically help with a lot of the storytelling asset, visual assets, copy, and work really, really deeply in a partnership to help make sure that campaign launch is successful.
Why did that launch in Asia? And is it something that could potentially come over to a market like the States?
Why we started in China was, again, just to help bridge that gap between cultures, language barriers, and the general translation and global launch that entrepreneurs have in Asia. There was just a lot of demand specifically coming out of China. I do believe this concept is exportable for every geography, and we do work hand-in-hand with select campaigners to just help their campaigns become more successful.
I assume that when you took the job, one of the biggest questions hanging over your head was, “What can we do to best differentiate ourselves from, specifically Kickstarter?” You’ve been in the job for a couple of years now. How has the answer evolved?
Early on, the answer is, every platform in this space has a specific segment of the market or category that they’re known for. For Indiegogo, it’s tech and innovation, so, you look at our homepage, we’re highlighting consumer electronics, technology, really interesting things along that line. Others in the space like Kickstarter are very popular for creatives, with products like board games and films, comic books, etc. I think those are less complex products, but they’re obviously very diverse in what they highlight, so I have a high respect for them and what they do. GoFundMe is another one. It’s more of a donation platform, more focused on that human and community side. Patreon’s another one about the creator economy — more of a subscription model. Where we’re different is in terms of providing that ecosystem and making sure that we’re servicing our entrepreneurs throughout the lifecycle. The breadth in campaigns and products, the tech innovation, really go hand-in-hand with our hands-on support, and go-to-market guidance is, I would say, unparalleled.
How has COVID impacted Indiegogo specifically and crowdfunding generally?
It was a net tailwind for us. It really accelerated our business, and especially in categories that we were strong in. E-bikes were very popular right when the pandemic hit. It was almost impossible to get any type of bike, and then we saw a lot of mass campaigns. We saw a lot of health. We saw a lot of home fitness, those types of categories, all the categories you would expect to be very popular in a shelter-in-place environment, and so, overall, it really accelerated our business, and then, internally, yeah. We were very pragmatic, which a lot of startups and companies were right when COVID hit. We have five people based in Shenzhen, they really gave us foresight into the environment of what to expect. Our team was telling us about what was happening in China in November, and so we had ample time from a company perspective to really anticipate all the nuances of working in a sheltered environment where you couldn’t go out and meet entrepreneurs. It really helped us prepare.
How does the flexibility or nimbleness that you speak of come into play when we’re dealing with worldwide component shortages?
That’s where that communication is going to be very important. The expectations that the teams are setting. We want to make sure that the entrepreneurs are setting the right expectations, and to the extent that we can — from a product and feature set — make sure that they’re being reasonable and understanding the macro context when they’re setting those expectations is super important, especially from a trust and safety perspective. That’s where we’ll start to segment different parts of the ecosystem and be much more transparent as a platform around those expectations that we’re setting.
Do you see the pandemic having any sort of potentially long-term implications for crowdfunding?
It’s a hard question to answer, but I would say, we’re now seeing just the types of campaigns and the categories changing. I think there’s a lot of green tech that is showing up on our site, which is great, and I think, maybe if you take the leap that the pandemic happened because there’s just a lot of things happening in the environment, it means we have to build the future that we want.