Indiegogo launches InDemand, a feature that allows pre-orders to continue after crowdfunding ends
Harrison Weber / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
With InDemand, Indiegogo stops treating the end of a campaign as the end of a product's life on the platform: projects can keep collecting pre-orders after funding closes. It is the opening move in a longer arc the related coverage traces clearly — from one-shot fundraising toward a permanent commerce layer, later extended with an Indiegogo Marketplace that takes roughly a 10–15% cut on sales of successfully crowdfunded products.
That direction also runs toward new customer segments: the same year-after trajectory brought equity crowdfunding with a 7% cash fee plus 2% stake (equity for backers) and Enterprise Crowdfunding for large companies such as GE and Hasbro testing products with crowds. InDemand is the hinge between 'campaign' and 'storefront' in that sequence.
First-order effects
- Campaign owners no longer have to shut off demand when their funding window closes — they can keep converting late arrivals into pre-orders on Indiegogo rather than sending them elsewhere.
- Indiegogo extends its own revenue per successful project beyond the initial campaign fees, since every InDemand sale is another transaction it hosts.
Second-order effects
- InDemand creates the inventory of post-campaign products that the later Marketplace monetizes, turning backers into ongoing shoppers and giving Indiegogo a take-rate business layered on top of fundraising.
- Rivals anchored to fixed-campaign models — Kickstarter among them, which alongside Indiegogo has drawn criticism over high-tech scam projects like Futurefön — face pressure to justify why a funded project should ever leave their platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crowdfunding platforms consolidate the whole demand-creation-to-fulfillment chain — pre-orders, marketplace sales, equity, even token offerings via its ICO listings — making them less like Kickstarter-style fundraisers and more like storefronts with validation attached.
The trend: Crowdfunding is evolving from time-boxed fundraising events into always-on commerce platforms that capture the entire life of a validated product.