Anastasia Emmanuel, European director, Indiegogo. Photo: Connor McKenna
Large brands are now using crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo to validate and market new products, Indiegogo’s European director Anastasia Emmanuel told Siliconrepublic.com.
Indiegogo was founded in 2008 by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell at the Sundance Film Festival and today it battles with Kickstarter as one of the key means by which start-ups, activists and non-government bodies raise finance.
But now brands like GE and Sony are encouraging teams to use it to explore new market opportunities and assess demand for new products.
Finance is broken
“From day one we went out there and said finance is broken,” Emmanuel said.
“Anyone in the world can place an idea on Indiegogo and raise money.”
Emmanuel said that in Europe, in particular, burgeoning tech scenes in Paris and London are rife with entrepreneurs using the platform to test product demand and raise money.
However, now corporations are also getting in on the action to nail marketing and validation objectives.
“GE recently put their product out there and got a huge amount of awareness,” Emmanuel said in relation to the Opal Nugget Ice machine, which has attracted $2.7m in crowdfunding so far from 6,395 backers.
Emmanuel said that Indiegogo has been steadily adding functionality to the platform, including ad spend tracking tools and new e-commerce technology that allows promoters to move from campaign phase into pre-commerce e-commerce. “We have created the ability for people who may have missed campaigns to still fund a campaign to join the pre-order phase.
“We are constantly innovating and asking customers what do they want to see and we are constantly trying to improve analytics so they can get a better product,” Emmanuel said.
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