How Indiegogo survived 93 rejections to pioneer crowdfunding

Executive overview

Before Kickstarter or GoFundMe, Indiegogo launched in 2008 with a radical premise: anyone should be able to raise money for anything, with the crowd — not gatekeepers — deciding what deserves to exist. The founders built it on personal savings, faced 93 investor rejections, and nearly shut down twice before achieving profitability.

Open platforms beat curated ones when the mission is democratising access — but only if founders stay long enough to protect that mission.

Origins: personal frustration with gatekeepers

• Slava Rubin's father died of cancer when Slava was 15; fundraising for myeloma research using MySpace and PayPal was painfully clunky.
• Danae Ringelman watched a veteran theater producer beg a 22-year-old analyst for funding — standing ovation didn't move the money.
• Her parents' moving business went bankrupt in a recession; investors later stole her father's energy-efficiency idea after flying him to New York.
• Both saw the same pattern: worthy projects failing not on merit but on lack of connections.
• Eric Schell introduced the two; Slava's prompt — "if you want to change finance, use the internet" — reframed Danae's original democratic-fund idea.

Launch strategy and early model

• Each founder committed $30,000 of personal savings; they raised no external capital for three years.
• Launched at Sundance 2008 with guerrilla marketing: scarves and "Go Go Bucks" cards (all worth $5, one worth $500) to seed campaigns.
• Started with 10 film campaigns; tagline was "DIWO — do it with others."
• Initial model: all-or-nothing funding — hit your goal or backers get refunded.
• Revenue model was clear from day one: take a percentage cut of money flowing through the platform.
• Turned down early investor offers, betting they could raise at a higher valuation after Q2 momentum — the 2008 financial crash ended that plan.

Surviving the 2008 crash

• Bear Stearns collapse hit just as momentum was building; VC meetings went cold.
• Danae's father died in the weeks after the crash; Slava and Eric covered operations.
• 93 investor rejections before the first yes; Slava tracked Indiegogo mentions on TweetDeck and drew energy from strangers changing their weekend plans to work on campaigns.
• Mid-2009 "last stand": upgraded the product, committed to sales, agreed that failure to gain traction meant shutdown.
• Stayed bootstrapped by cutting personal expenses to near zero; no formal runway metric — just founders deciding whether to keep investing their own savings.

Opening the platform

• Always planned to expand beyond film; used Amazon's "start with books" playbook deliberately.
• Opened to all categories in 2009; growth turned hockey-stick almost immediately.
• By end of 2010: over 10,000 campaigns from around the world.
• Rejected the curation model on principle — becoming a gatekeeper would contradict the entire point.
• Handled controversial campaigns (climate-denial groups, far-left projects) by applying identical rules to all: no harm, no hatred, treat every side equally.
• Fraud, not ideology, became the bigger operational challenge as the platform scaled.

Building the team and raising capital

• Roles fell naturally: Eric built, Danae ran operations and culture, Slava handled sales and strategy.
• Founders described themselves as: Eric = the hands, Danae = the heart, Slava = the eyes.
• Slava and Danae had the most friction; Eric often mediated and helped them appreciate each other's styles.
• First external round: ~$1.5M in September 2011.
• Series A: $15M the following year — went from cold rejections to all-partner meetings and same-day term sheets.
• $15M enabled first senior hires and a shift from scrappy garage operation to structured company.
• Danae insisted on structured culture interviews; Slava initially skeptical, later called her back from maternity leave to "remind people who we are."

What went wrong after the founders left

• Danae stepped back in 2018: pregnant with second child, relocated to Norway, doing midnight calls for meetings, felt less impactful after a CEO change.
• Slava transitioned from CEO to Chief Business Officer after losing a board debate about growth strategy; he wanted to build "the Airbnb of crowdfunding," owning all verticals under one roof.
• His view: removing founders too early handicaps a company's potential — Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Patreon, and equity platforms each took a vertical Indiegogo should have owned.
• Indiegogo prioritised unit economics over capturing adjacent markets; Slava calls that "a shame" and "a massive understatement."
• Eric left in May 2019; all three founders gone before COVID.
• 2025: Indiegogo acquired by Ravensburger (via GameFound) — a notable decline from its peak cultural footprint.

Legacy and lessons

• At its 2018 milestone, Indiegogo had raised ~$1.5 billion for projects worldwide.
• code.org — which teaches coding to millions — started on Indiegogo; a 22-year-old founder told Slava he learned to code from it, illustrating generational impact.
• Slava's formula: preparation + opportunity = luck.
• All three founders stayed together far longer than typical — a head of PR called it "quite unusual" and attributed it to how much they cared.
• Danae: the world has shifted away from arrogance that a few gatekeepers should decide what exists — Indiegogo was a key part of that unraveling.