Question
We're building a social language app. We're a developer and a designer so we've been able to bootstrap to beta. We want to stay bootstrapped and take the whole process somewhat slowly - soft launch in a small country, launch in Canada, launch in the US. The only immediate, recurring cost we see is our backend - we're using Parse.
So we want to raise $10k-$20k. Still getting product validation but if that goes decently well, I'm imagining $20k will be relatively easy to raise.
We thought about Indiegogo a while ago (Kickstarter doesn't allow apps), and our circumstances are changing for the better as we progress, so it's not our main option at the moment.
But here our the advantages as I see it:
- The money is free, and $10-20k can cost a lot at this stage
- It's our initial marketing campaign
Disadvantages:
- It's a lot of work to run a campaign. But since it is a first initial marketing campaign, we want to do that work anyway
- Apps don't do well on Indiegogo in general. However, there was a social soccer app that raised I think $25k when I saw it, and the campaign wasn't over. But that was definitely the outlier.
- Legal issues with taking/using this money?
Answer
Apps are difficult to fund on IndieGoGo as few are successful, and we rarely take them on as clients. Websites like http://appsfunder.com/ are made for that very reason, but again, difficult to build enough of a following willing to pay top dollar for an app that could very well be free, already existing in the marketplace. A site that is gaining more traction you may want to look into would be http://appsplit.com/. Again, Appsplit Is Crowdfunding For Apps specifically.
