Andy Young joins Indiegogo at a turbulent time. As the then CEO of the crowdfunding platform moved away for personal reasons, the service was reportedly involved in layoffs. Coming to the board after a tug-of-war with Reddit, COVID-19 will have less than a year in the hands of a new CEO before the world can be turned upside down. Now 13 years old, the San Francisco-based site has matured alongside the world of online crowdfunding. And, of course, Indiegogo had front-row seats for all its ups and downs.
Indiegogo has launched multi-million-dollar campaigns, but the platform often suffers from comparisons with Kickstarter, a service that has become synonymous with the division for many. During his tenure, Young sat down to discuss how Indiegogo has changed, how crowdfunding has evolved, and what it will look like in the post-epidemic world.
I was doing the original product on Reddit, and when Indiegogo’s board and founders arrived, there was really all around, “Hey, we’ll love the product experience, someone with a background in the community.” What was going on at Indiegogo was really an assessment, “What are our core values?”
When I take saddles and kingdoms, we were actually focusing on who we are what segment we want to go after and where we want to focus. Where do we want to focus our products? From that perspective, we’ve really been bowing our heads for the last two years, working only on ourselves, internally and focusing on the core-what we call “bringing the crowd back to the masses.”
I think a lot of platforms have been very transactional in nature, and so I think supporters and consumers, and users have been trained by Amazon to click a button and get things done in two hours. The basis of crowdfunding is very different. You may or may not get this park delivered within your expected time frame and help educate supporters and the community around it about who we are.
We’ve been with COVID for the last two years, but I’ve been profitable since joining, which is huge. We can control our own destiny and take the time to do the right thing and invest in areas like trust and security, such as the community, which we really wanted.
