But that stereotype may just be flat out wrong — at least according to Danae Ringelmann of crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

I caught up with Ringelmann earlier this week in Belgium, and heard how the company has been putting a lot of effort into Germany recently, including partnering with Google to support the Gründer Garage competition in Berlin.

Why? Germany’s Indiegogo user base is “blowing up” she explained. It’s already one of the biggest countries on the site, and Indiegogo’s biggest non-English market full stop.

“They’re embracing it so much,” she said — and in doing so, the site’s German users are blowing away all the old jokes and assumptions.

“From the outside what you hear is that Germans follow the rules, they’re highly structured — these are all the stereotypes,” she said. “I kept looking at our data and it didn’t make sense why Germany was one of our top markets: if Germans are so structured and need to have everything perfect, well, crowdfunding is incredibly cavalier, sometimes it can feel like flying by the seat of your pants, it’s incredibly experimental.”

“I wouldn’t have necessarily expected Germans to have embraced it because of that stereotype. I’m still trying to figure it out, but… maybe it’s a load of bullshit.”

It’s not just a mindset that other people apply to Germany either, she pointed out. In fact, some of the most strict adherents to the idea of the stereotype are the Germans themselves.

“I was actually in Germany and a lot of people were saying ‘we’re so passive’. I think you need to stop believing yourself; I think that’s what is said, but that’s not what the data says.”

Increasing competition

Germany is not alone, though, in its love for crowdfunding. It’s clearly a hot time in Europe for the market, with Kickstarter opening up to UK-based projects for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Indiegogo has long been an international platform, but it looks like the conflict between the two may step up as Kickstarter expands.

Ringelmann was keen to stress the differences between the two — for example Kickstarter, she said, took more of an editorial approach, while Indiegogo tried to use neutral algorithms to promote projects — but it seems fairly clear that the two sites are going to compete for some of the same attention, especially when Kickstarter is seeing a huge amount of growth.

But, she argued, Indiegogo’s data-focused approach can help it grow and stick to its core philosophy by building out more tools around relevancy, filtering and recommending projects to users.

“We have all the data scientists, we’ve built our data science team to figure all that stuff out,” she said. “And I think that’s the future.”

Whatever happens in the end, though, it is all a very long way from where things started — and Ringelmann seems genuinely happy to see the market as a whole grow, even if it is starting to generate the often-disliked sub-industry of specialist consultants.

“Five years ago I was grabbing anybody I could to say “this is possible, you can raise money online through social media means” and people were like ‘you’re crazy.’ But now everyone’s like ‘I’m a crowdfunding expert, let me tell you how to do it’,” she said.

“It’s good. The moment there’s ecosystems — ‘I’m a consultant who helps campaign raise money via crowdfunding’ or ‘I’m a consultant who consults to crowdfunding platforms’ — and when you get all these consultants around something, I think there’s clearly a market. It’s a little annoying, but it’s part of the whole thing because if they’re helping people learn how to do it, great.”

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Speaking at Telefonica’s Campus Party Europe event in Berlin, Ringelmann told me that even if the SEC doesn’t implement the rule changes described in the JOBS Act, which aims to make investment crowdfunding legal, the company would consider allowing proper investments for projects outside the U.S..

“Our original vision was around investing and we pivoted towards non-investing given all the SEC regulations and the illegal nature of it,” she said.

The issue of raising funding for new companies through crowd platforms is developing fast right now. The JOBS Act has passed through the Senate, though the outcome of it will only be seen once the SEC reveals its revised regulations early next year.

But Ringelmann says that Indiegogo may use its global footprint to sidestep the issue in some cases — big rival Kickstarter is still mostly limited to the U.S., while Indiegogo makes much play of the fact that it’s operational around the world (it’s currently opening up its first non-English-language site in Germany, and just started accepting euros as well as dollars for the first time).

“The reason the JOBS Act passed was a lot of good work by a lot of people, but what really helped was our customers’ case studies,” Ringelmann claimed.

Those who opposed the Act have generally argued that throwing equity into the crowdfunding mix puts inexperienced investors at risk: essentially, that these people don’t fully understand what they’re
getting for their money.

Ringelmann chalks this up to a misunderstanding of the nature of crowdfunding. The way she sees it, crowdfunding is “fundamentally social” and will stay that way.

“It’s not a transactional experience, and we envision the social nature continuing,” she said. “When people raise money via crowdfunding, it’s rare you see a campaign raising 100 percent of its
funds from strangers. Nobody wakes up in the morning and funds a stranger they don’t know anything about. It’s human behavior for people to put money behind people they know, and we encourage campaign managers to reach out to friends and family, then Facebook and Twitter followers.”

“People trust a friend’s opinion, or see if the crowd has funded something. On the equity side I don’t see that changing a whole lot,” Ringelmann said. “What equity crowdfunding will unlock is the story of a local neighbourhood drycleaning shop being able to open, because it will be able to raise money from local people. I see the local coffee shops definitely benefiting the most.”

The logic makes some sense. If you throw cash at some recording project to get your name in the liner notes, or at some new gadget’s development to get one when it’s done, you know exactly what you’re
hoping to get. Make it a proper investment, with all the uncertainty that brings, and trust becomes even more of a factor.

If Indiegogo did go into the equity business, however, it wouldn’t be the first mover. Early players in this space include Seedrs in the UK and Innovestment, a kind of crowdfunding-auction hybrid, in Germany.

It does, however, suggest the direction that this industry may go.

It’s pretty clear that crowdfunding is something of a revolution: providing not only an alternative to traditional startup fundraising, but also an entirely new kind of boost for causes and artistic projects. But as with all revolutions, the fundamentals of crowdfunding are already starting to evolve.

It’s a concept that’s also starting to be mashed up with other startup-related projects in interesting ways. Case in point: Ringelmann was in Berlin to promote a new local startup competition and academy called Gründer Garage, in which Indiegogo is involved alongside Google.

The revolution isn’t over, not by a long shot.

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