I work in a crowdfunding startup where GoFundMe is our #1 competitor. We knew they were dominating the personal causes space, but we didn't know they were doing THIS well. I have much respect for their huge revenue/growth while taking 0 VC money.
A huge part of their success is SEO/PR (which is just a huge positive feedback loop). The product has great onboarding and they offer good customer support (guaranteed 15 min or less response times, which is important when you're dealing with people dealing with tragedies from natural events). While I agree that the design is horrible, from a pure UX standpoint their site is extremely simple to use. The typical user is someone who's not tech savvy, and they're won't care if they raise thousands of dollars.
Also, let's get off our high tech horses here and stop blasting GFM. The reason why a lot of people here on HN haven't heard of them is because we here most likely are educated and have good jobs. We can afford for whatever shit comes our way. Also, most donations come from personal networks i.e. friends and family members, while larger campaigns get additional support from local communities. Crowdfunding sites like Fundly and GFM really do affect people's lives for the better.
The only GoFundMe campaign's I've truly been exposed to are scammy or digital panhandling. I know real people are using it legitimately, but that's my experience. I remember distinctly there being virtually nowhere to report abuse, whereas on Kickstarter it's pretty easy.
I found a "how do I report a campaign I feel is fraudulent" FAQ within about 30 seconds. You can also contact their support team, and they say they'll get back to you within five minutes.
It sounds like you might have tried this in the early days, it set an impression, and haven't checked since.
I found the FAQ, but my experience was that actually reporting something was a bit of a circular journey. You shouldn't have to contact support; abuse reporting should be a first class feature when the core business is people soliciting money.
Am I wrong in saying that the user base if different? It seems to me that kickstarter is more for products/businesses, but from my limited experience I think gofundme is more of a humanitarian kind of crowdfunding.
Not at all! I feel like it's silly to compare the two sites at all.
The user base for GoFundMe is completely different from Kickstarter -- they're aimed at personal fundraising (e.g, "medical expenses, education costs, volunteer programs, youth sports, funerals & memorials" [1]), whereas Kickstarter is aimed at "projects" with a "clear goal" and a tangible result.
The mechanics of the sites are also very different: Kickstarter projects run for a fixed period, and release money to the project owner only if the project has hit its goal at the end of that period, whereas GoFundMe campaigns can run indefinitely, and give money to the project owner as soon as it's donated. (GoFundMe campaigns can have "goal" dates and/or dollar values, but they usually have no effect on how donations work.)
Additionally, Kickstarter has the concept of "tipping", which means that contributions get refunded if projects don't reach their fundraising goal. Sites like GFM have no such requirement (which makes sense when you'll take every dollar you can b/c of a tragic event).
>While Kickstarter helped popularize crowdfunding in the areas of creative projects, music and film, GoFundMe’s personal fundraising platform is focused on enabling people to raise money for personal causes and life events
My advice: if anyone needs to run an online fundraiser for a charity cause don't use GoFundme, they charge 7.9% + 30 cents. Use http://www.youcaring.com they charge 2.9% + 30 cents AND they show the transaction cost to your donors so they can opt to give more to cover it.
My biggest complaint with gofundme is that they don't make this blatantly obvious. It feels like they're hiding behind this veil of charitable causes and sneaking their hands into the collection plate when nobody is looking.
I've talked to numerous people who have donated to gofundme campaigns and most of them didn't realize exactly how much of their donation went to the platform.
If price is a concern, I recommend checking out Indiegogo Life (https://life.indiegogo.com/). It's a pretty stripped down product compared to the rest, but they only charge credit card fees (total of ~3%).
[Note: I work in Fundly, a startup competitor to GFM]
Thanks John, I work at Indiegogo and we launched Indiegogo Life in response to the growing personal cause market. We're always focused on responding to our users' needs, which is why we decided to remove our platform fees and simplify our fundraiser creation process to less than 8 clicks on Indiegogo Life.
I ultimately found there was not enough promotion/marketing done on tilt's end of things. It would have been nice to see a weekly tilt email of all the cool things featured like indiegogo and kickstarter both do.
I love the customization, the price and the fact that open tilt is completely open source. That's absolutely the reason why I went with you guys, I want to support 100% open source. But at the end of the day, if I can't get enough eyeballs seeing my project because nobody is scrolling through tilt projects the way they scroll kickstarter projects, I'm going to lose out.
I'll happily take some of the blame for not launching a good enough campaign, but I sure as heck could have used more support. Here was my campaign btw and thanks for working to constantly improve your product.
We appreciate the feedback, and you'll start to see more and more cross promotion of campaigns on the platform in coming months (especially for our projects on the open source version Tilt/Open which has been powering some really cool stuff lately). If you have any additional feedback, i'd love to hear it - my email is james @ tilt.
Oddly-toned press release considering they serve completely different audiences and markets - it's as if a product search engine started crowing that they're bigger than a flight search engine. Yes, Kickstarter and GoFundMe are both great crowdfunding businesses, but they're not really directly comparable.
I wonder why GoFundMe felt they needed to release this - perhaps they've decided to raise? Usually bootstrapped businesses keep their numbers to themselves.
I've seen lots of local causes run through GoFundMe. A friend's son desperately needing dental work, a local family losing a mother or father and needing help to pay medical expenses, and so on. I've found that some of the accounts are pretty hard to read, perhaps because it is not easy to consider the hardships that are occurring right in our neighborhood.
Never been to that site, but after only a brief review the site kind of gives me the creeps.
First I looked at "Popular Now", and alot of the specific campaigns looked somewhat legitimate, then I looked at "Near Me" and after several pages of campaigns noticed:
"85 - 96 of Thousands"
Granted the campaigns appearing seem to be coming primarily from 2 major cities, but "Thousands"? People seem to be really catching on to this "blind trust" and giving internet. Several were just outrageous, for example asking for $25k, and in return providing only a fuzzy portrait photo, and 1 small paragraph explanation.
Maybe it's just me, but IMO people asking for $25k for FREE should put a little more effort into the campaign info page.
I've mostly seen GoFundMe used by individuals that are self-employed to other individuals (such as selling art), but they have a calamity happen, like their tablet or workstation breaking down. It's never 40K-100K USD stuff, mostly under 5K.
Huh, I would've thought that Kickstarter was way above and beyond, given the amount of press they get. Perhaps it is because the things funded on Kickstarter get a lot of press themselves.
I had not heard of gofundme prior to this. I think this is because the places where I would naturally see news about such crowdfunding sites are heavily biased towards the kinds of projects that Kickstarter specializes in, namely games. As duskwuff wrote here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889346), gofundme is "explicitly aimed at personal fundraising (e.g, "medical expenses, education costs, volunteer programs, youth sports, funerals & memorials" [1]), whereas Kickstarter is aimed at projects with a well-defined goal and a tangible result."
I would guess the general difference in expectation of outcomes help GoFundMe, and hurt Kickstarter and IndieGogo.
Kickstarter has an extremely narrow market of early adopters of tech. They also have developed a reputation of late shipping, or completely failed projects. The more this continues, the less people will be inclined to contribute. Even though failure SHOULD be expected, as these are nascent businesses, it is not.
Contrast that with GoFundMe. Their market is anyone who is charitable. They're not being sold on a product, they're being sold on someones struggles/death/illness/etc. If you are interested in donating to something, you don't question its chances of success. You aren't expecting anything in return. You are spending money to help someone else, not yourself (ignoring tax implications). In this case, if the donated amount fails to achieve the stated goal, barring fraud, there probably won't be any backlash. Everyone knows you can't cure diseases or other problems with money alone. Failure may not necessarily be expected, but is definitely more acceptable than in Kickstarter and Indiegogo's cases.
You're right in general. In fact, comparing Kickstarter and GoFundMe is a bit odd, because they're not competitors.
Kickstarter is more than just pre-shipping tech products like the Oculus Rift. In fact, they originally marketed it as a way for authors to pre-sell books, musicians to pre-sell albums, etc. and there's still a lot of that.
Curious to see some of the roots of GoFundMe? Check out Fanbox, previously known as the startup SMS.ac. That's where the founders of GFM worked before they moved on to their current, highly successful venture. I imagine that's where the startup bug bit them and they learned the value of being the middleman for transactions while leveraging social networks. SMS.ac was a middleman for SMS billing and a social network, generating text messages that were sent to users and receiving a share of the text charge from the cellular carriers. I worked with them there, crazy but good times.
Easier to transfer money? Can use a CC/debit card, etc.? Don't even have to leave home to donate or maybe the cause is further away (your hometown but you live far away now).
If Kickstarter is Google then GoFundMe is Bing. While GoFundMe may claim to be better, none of my friends use it and I can't find any reason to use it myself.
I automatically ignore any GoFundMe campaign, after they let the contributions for Darren Wilson continue. Even when donors were making explicitly, unambiguously racist comments along with their donation.
If they had a policy of making no judgement at all on their campaigns that might be at least logically consistent, but given that they (by official policy) shut down campaigns related to pro-choice fundraising, it is clear that they have a systematic set of values which I do not share.
Given that a funding platform is explicitly designed to empower activist groups, and that they clearly support a certain racist, conservative type of group to a much higher degree, I believe it to be unethical to support them in any way.
I don't know about Darren Wilson. My suspicions aren't relevant.
Here are some quotes from people who gave him money after the fact:
"Waste of good ammo"
"He did a great job removing an unnecessary thing from the public"
"Wake up white america"
"After 60 years of supporting the blacks I give up"
"One down many more to go"
And that's just a sampling from what was reported on news sites, since the campaign itself was taken down (by the originators, not by GoFundMe itself.)
A huge part of their success is SEO/PR (which is just a huge positive feedback loop). The product has great onboarding and they offer good customer support (guaranteed 15 min or less response times, which is important when you're dealing with people dealing with tragedies from natural events). While I agree that the design is horrible, from a pure UX standpoint their site is extremely simple to use. The typical user is someone who's not tech savvy, and they're won't care if they raise thousands of dollars.
Also, let's get off our high tech horses here and stop blasting GFM. The reason why a lot of people here on HN haven't heard of them is because we here most likely are educated and have good jobs. We can afford for whatever shit comes our way. Also, most donations come from personal networks i.e. friends and family members, while larger campaigns get additional support from local communities. Crowdfunding sites like Fundly and GFM really do affect people's lives for the better.