by mpauer » Mon May 18, 2015 4:12 pm
Same thing happened to our project, and on the same dates as yours, curiously enough.
Indiegogo is very careful NOT to say in plain English that they will HIDE your project from searches until you hit some magical Gogofactor level. I was getting frustrated with how evasive their Customer Happiness rep was so I explicitly asked, "TRUE or FALSE: Indiegogo will not return a new project in search results until the project has reached an undisclosed level of Gogofactor."
The rep answered, "I thought I had answered that."
All they will say is that your Gogofactor affects "searchability". Although semantically speaking the ability to search for a project AT ALL could be called searchability, I'm confident any reasonable person would interpret searchability to mean how high or low in the search results a project can be found.
So, Indiegogo becomes nothing but a hidden landing page for your new project. And they still charge you 9% for the privilege of being hidden from searches. I can't imagine how this tactic profits Indiegogo.
Also, the vague description of the Gogofactor seems equally counterproductive. The whole point of managing by metrics is to let people know exactly what actions result in a specific level of benefit so they can consciously do what brings benefit. With the Gogofactor you can promote the heck out of your project but never know if your press releases, tweets, Facebook updates, or direct emails helped at all or to what amount.
Just infuriating.
Marcel Paüer, Providence RI USA