Crowdfunding lets you test the market for your product before you even make it
Before designers and entrepreneurs spend all their savings making a product idea come to life, crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo allow them to test the demand for their product and even develop new features.
The hardest part about designing a new product or service is that you don’t really know what your potential users might want — but using crowdfunding services like Indiegogo allows you to test the demand for various features before you spend a lot of time on them, designer Mladen Barbaric of Pearl Studios told attendees at Gigaom’s Roadmap 2013 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Barbaric, whose design agency helped create the Misfit Shine — a wearable activity monitor that was one of the highest-funded projects on Indiegogo, raising close to $900,000 over the course of the campaign — said that he and his partner found using the crowdfunding platform “allowed us to iterate faster, design faster and get to a successful product faster.” The company went through more than 2,000 iterations of the device, he said, and it was extremely important to know ahead of time what features users wanted.