Indiegogo, a media that understands new manufacturing
Indiegogo is a crowdfunding platformer that started service in 2008. It is used in about 240 countries, and has collected a total of about 2 billion dollars (about 230 billion yen) of support so far. East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) alone has raised about $260 million (about ¥30 billion). It is one of the two major platformers along with Kickstarter, which also started service in 2009 in the United States.
Indiegogo implemented a joint support program with JETRO from January to September 2021 for the purpose of promoting Japanese startups to expand overseas. 10 companies participated in the program, and as a result of the crowdfunding of 4 companies at the time of the article's first publication, the total of 4 companies succeeded in collecting support of about 70 million yen (at the time of the article's first publication). We asked Ms. Nobuko Oshima, who is in charge of the Japanese market at the company, about the background to this program. He also talked about the differences between crowdfunding in Japan and overseas, points to prepare when starting a project from Japan, and examples of mistakes that Japanese people tend to make.
——First of all, please tell us about the background and results of the project with JETRO (Indiegogo × JETRO Japan Fast Track Program Plus).
Mr. Oshima:From the beginning, JETRO knew about our company, and he introduced Indiegogo when we received a consultation from a company that wanted to expand overseas. Since there were several successful cases, we planned a program in 2020 to back up the use of crowdfunding by JETRO and our company for Japanese startups that develop highly novel hardware products. It was around spring.
The project ended in September 2021, but 4 of the 10 adopted companies have implemented crowdfunding, with a total of about 70 million yen from about 120 countries and regions (article At the time of first appearance) succeeded in gathering support. The remaining six companies are also preparing to start crowdfunding, and we are continuing to support them.
