Fundpop Crowdfunding

A lot more flexible than Kickstarter. And cheaper. Their support team always gets back to me super quickly, too.

The app works great, and the support team is really helpful. They got back to me super quickly and helped me with my questions. Really appreciate the great support and smooth experience!

I was looking for an alternative to IndieGoGo for a project that I crowdfund every year (it's a yearly planner/diary that I put out and print/publish myself). I used IndieGoGo for seven years, but I was looking for an alternative this year for a few reasons:

First, I really didn't like sending people out of my ecosystem. Especially if you're running ads and getting a lot of traffic to your crowdfunded project, sending people to IndieGoGo instead of to your shop where you can collect email addresses even if they don't support you financially right now - that was really bothering me. I do ads for this planner and every year I was sending thousands of people to IndieGoGo's site, and I didn't even want to think about all the email sign ups I was missing out on.

Second, I don't like giving them 5%. Yes, they help you with marketing, but really the only way they help you with marketing is if your project takes off and gets funded right away, so they feature you in the new and successful projects. Okay, but the whole point of IndieGoGo marketing me is to make me successful, so if I'm putting in the work to make myself successful in the first place, how are you helping? I noticed year over year that only between 5-8% of my funding would come from IndieGoGo directly. Okay, so I'm giving them 5% and potentially getting up to 8% more funding, so that's a net of 3%? I guess that could be good except for my third point which is...

Third: their payout schedule stinks. My planner operates on a very strict timeline because it's a dated calendar so the file has to be submitted and the project has to be paid for by June or July at the very latest to have it arrive in time for the holidays and January. I normally run my crowdfunder in the spring - I'm not going to do it in February when people only just received their planner in December or January - and with the new changes in IndieGoGo last year their payout schedule changed so that I was waiting for months going through their safety team checks. Like, I've been using you for seven years! You don't know that I'm not a legit person by now? It made me very nearly miss my shipping deadline to my backers.

So all of that made me want to look for another option. I did some research and found Fundpop. It was super easy to set up multiple tiers. When I ran into some questions, their customer service was great. And you get payouts on the normal Shopify schedule, so I was able to pay the printer and get my file to them a month earlier than even past years with IndieGoGo (before the weird payout schedule change) this year. And their plans are much less expensive, obviously.

I guess if you're brand new, and don't already have an audience, then using IndieGoGo or Kickstarter would be good for the credibility to potential backers, as opposed to just your Shopify store. And I guess they send you some extra traffic. But if you already have an audience, if you're doing ads anyway, if you have a Shopify platform already (which, clearly you do because you're here), then why would you give them the extra money away, AND lose email signups?

So yeah, I'll be using Fundpop in the future for this project, and any others I do. Thanks for building an awesome app!