IndieGoGo Archive

Last night at the Web 2 NY meeting, IndieGoGo co-founder Slava Rubin presented their independent movie making marketplace. We covered IndieGoGo back in January and called it a, “online social marketplace to connect the needed people and tools to make films.” You can search ideas that are already in the system and get involved or upload your own movie ideas. Artists post, promote and produce their movies through IndieGoGo and fans discover, support, and get perks from the artists. There are a variety of community features and widgets to bring artists and fans closer together to create movies that the fans want.

Here’s Slava’s demo:

This week on nextNYers, Courtney sits down with NY-based Indaba Music co-founders Matthew Siegel and Dan Zaccagnino. Indaba Music is an online social network and web application that not only provides musicians and artists with the ability to locate and communicate with one another, but also to collaborate with fellow artists. Musicians can use Indaba as a tool to finesse already composed tracks, or create brand new material from scratch with their peers. They are privately funded and aren’t seeking any additional funding at this time.

Last month we covered a similar service, IndieGoGo.

Check out all of the previous nextNYers episodes along with our review of online video in NYC.

IndieGoGo is an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. The platform provides filmmakers the tools for project funding, recruiting, and promotion, while enabling the audience to discover and connect directly with filmmakers and the causes they support.

Founded on the principles of opportunity, transparency, choice, and action, IndieGoGo launched in 2008 to address the fundraising challenges and market inefficiencies affecting independent filmmaking today. IndieGoGo enables this “filmocracy” by providing filmmakers an open platform to pitch their projects to the world, and giving the fans a vehicle to experience and influence the once inaccessible world of filmmaking.

Filmmakers get new resources to build and engage a loyal fan base to assist in making their projects happen. Filmmakers can raise money and awareness, find cast and crew, and gain credibility through the help of their number one resource: their fans.

Fans get the opportunity to discover and impact the films of tomorrow while getting insider access and VIP perks for their contributions. But beyond the VIP perks, fans get an everyday opportunity to support the people, films, or causes they believe in.

Earlier this week a new NY-based startup launched called IndieGoGo. The site is an online social marketplace to connect the needed people and tools to make films. You can search ideas that are already in the system and get involved or upload your own movie ideas. I spoke with founder Slava Rubin to learn more about the service. He said most of the ideas come from writers and producers but anyone is encouraged to participate in the movie making process. It’s all about engaging the audience was a theme I heard throughout the conversation. Here’s their official launch release.

They have three working taglines:

1. Where independent happens
2. Don’t just choose the movie to watch, choose the movie to make
3. DIWO – do it with others

Artists post, promote and produce their movies through IndieGoGo and fans discover, support, and get perks from the artists. There are a variety of community features and widgets to bring artists and fans closer together to create movies that the fans want.

The core differentiator of IndieGoGo Slava said is in the fund raising portion of the site. He said this the most difficult part in the logistics but believes this is what will make them succesful. My concern is whether it will draw in a lot of scams, the artists could easily take the money and run. Slava says that they have policies in place to protect from any scams and the process works like this: the filmmaker posts the request for funds, the community sends in the funds via Paypal to IndieGogo, once the funds reach the requested amount, then IndieGogo receives the plan from the filmmaker, and disburses the funds.

The community members who submit funds do not receive any equity stake in the film but will receive VIP perks. If the funding does not reach the amount requested, then all of the money received is refunded back to the community members. This seems like a bit of a logistical nightmare but I guess it can be done.

They currently have over 50 projects submitted and a couple hundred community signups in their first few days since launch. The business model is two-fold. There are targeted ads on the site (I see Google AdSense) and the second piece is based around taking a processing fee when the artist/writer/etc. receives the funding from the community. IndieGoGo takes a 9% fee which includes the Paypal fees for collecting the funding.

The IndieGoGo team is currently six people with three founders and is self-funded. They use ruby on rails for development.