Indiegogo runs two parallel conversation surfaces on every campaign. The Comments wall is the free-for-all. The Discussions tab is the structured one — backers post questions, the rest of the crowd upvotes them with "Me too", and the campaign owner is supposed to answer. Discussions are gold, because the crowd has already done your prioritisation work for you. The top-voted thread is, by definition, the question that's costing you pledges. And of course, Indiegogo gives you no way to export any of it. This guide walks through pulling every Discussion thread off any public Indiegogo campaign into Excel, CSV or JSON — question text, asker, vote count, owner reply, reply latency, timestamps. The whole structure.

Why export Indiegogo discussions

Discussions aren't Comments. They behave differently, they rank differently, and they're worth more per row. The exporter unlocks workflows the campaign UI buries under infinite scroll:

  • FAQ candidate mining — sort by vote_count descending and the top 10 questions are your campaign's actual FAQ. The crowd ranked it for you. Stop guessing.
  • Unanswered-question audit — filter owner_reply_text IS NULL and you've surfaced every high-vote question you haven't answered. Each row is a pledge you're leaving on the table while you read this.
  • Pre-launch concern map for competitors — export the Discussions tab of every campaign in your category and you have a ranked list of objections to pre-empt in your own copy. Free competitive research.
  • Owner-reply latency tracking — calculate owner_reply_at − created_at per thread. Median under 24h is healthy. Past 72h is when backers start losing faith — and the data shows it before the comments do.
  • Discussion vs. Comment volume mix — track the ratio over time. A rising Discussion share usually means the wall has matured into structured Q&A and your backers expect substantive answers, not emoji.
  • Sentiment-weighted question prioritisation — multiply vote_count by a negative-sentiment score on the question text. Sort descending. Those are the questions that are both popular and worried — your highest-impact replies.

Why two separate exporters? Comments are free-form chatter. Discussions are vote-able Q&A threads with their own asker name, vote count and owner-reply structure. Mash them into one export and you'd lose the vote_count and reply-latency columns that make Discussions actionable in the first place. So we keep them distinct.

How to export — step by step

Step 1 — Copy the campaign URL

Open the Indiegogo project page (e.g. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/<project>) and copy the URL. Either the main page URL or the URL of the Discussions tab works — the exporter routes both to the Discussions endpoint. Campaign has to be publicly viewable.

Step 2 — Paste it into the Indiegogo Discussions Exporter

Go to exportcomments.com/download-indiegogo-discussions and paste the URL. No browser extension. No Indiegogo login on your side. No OAuth handshake. The scrape runs server-side.

Step 3 — Pick an output format

Excel (.xlsx), CSV or JSON. Excel is the most useful default — pivot tables make vote-count sorting and unanswered-question filtering trivial. JSON is what you want if you're piping the data into a CRM, BigQuery or a Looker dashboard. Schema is identical across all three.

Step 4 — Run the export

Hit Export. The job runs in the background — close the tab, the file lands in your account history, email follows when it's ready. Discussions exports usually finish in seconds because the volume per campaign is much lower than free-form Comments.

Step 5 — Bulk-export multiple campaigns

Doing competitor research across a category? Paste a list of campaign URLs into the bulk input, one per line. You get back one file per URL, bundled in a single ZIP — not a merged sheet — so each campaign's Discussions stay clean and you can diff vote-count distributions side-by-side.

Step 6 — Open in Excel and sort by vote_count

Drop the file in. Sort the vote_count column descending. The first thing you see is your campaign's real FAQ — the questions backers cared enough about to upvote. Then filter for owner_reply_text IS NULL and put the high-vote rows at the top. That's your action queue for the rest of the day.

Inside the export — what fields you get

One row per Indiegogo Discussion thread. The columns:

  • discussion_id — Indiegogo's stable identifier for the Discussion thread.
  • question_text — the full body of the question as posted by the asker.
  • asker_name — display name of the person who started the thread.
  • is_backer — Y/N flag for whether the asker actually contributed to the campaign.
  • vote_count — number of "Me too" upvotes the question has received from other users.
  • reply_count — total number of replies in the thread.
  • owner_reply_text — the campaign owner's official reply (empty if no owner reply yet).
  • owner_reply_at — UTC timestamp of the owner's reply (empty if no owner reply yet).
  • created_at — UTC timestamp of when the original question was posted.

Common workflows for crowdfunding creators

Once the Discussions live in a spreadsheet, a few patterns dominate:

  • FAQ candidate mining. Sort by vote_count descending. The top 10 are your campaign's real FAQ — paste the answers into your page's FAQ section and the inbound question volume drops measurably the same week. Star Citizen's team did this for years; their public FAQ is basically a transcript of the top-voted concerns.
  • Unanswered-question audit. Filter rows where owner_reply_text is empty and vote_count is greater than five. Every row is a high-priority question you haven't answered, and likely a pledge you're leaving on the table.
  • Pre-launch concern map for competitors. Export the Discussions tab of the top five campaigns in your category, union the question_text columns, cluster by topic. The result is a ranked list of objections to pre-empt in your own campaign copy before you launch. Cheaper than a focus group, more honest too.
  • Owner-reply latency. Add a calculated column: (owner_reply_at − created_at). Median under 24h is the benchmark for active campaigns. Past 72h is when backers start losing faith. Watch the median, not the mean — one runaway thread will lie to you about everything.
  • Backer-asker share. Pivot on is_backer: what percentage of question-askers actually backed the campaign? A high share is healthy — people pledged before they had every answer. A low share means a lot of pre-pledge browsers are still on the fence and your reply quality is now a conversion lever.
  • Sentiment-weighted prioritisation. Run a quick sentiment score over question_text, multiply by vote_count, sort descending. Those are the questions that are both popular and worried — the highest-ROI replies you can write today.

Plan limits & API access

Free accounts cap at 100 Discussion threads per job — usually plenty for a single campaign, since Discussions are inherently lower volume than Comments. Paid plans raise it: Personal 5,000, Premium 50,000, Business 250,000. Full breakdown at exportcomments.com/pricing.

If you want a recurring export — say, a daily refresh that emails you any new question above a vote-count threshold — or the data piped into your own dashboards, the REST API returns the same schema as JSON, with a webhook firing the moment an export completes.

FAQ

  • How are Discussions different from Comments on Indiegogo?
    Comments are free-form chatter on the campaign wall. Discussions are structured Q&A threads with vote counts ("Me too") and a distinct owner-reply field. We ship a separate exporter for each because they have different schemas — the Comments export wouldn't capture vote_count or owner_reply_at.
  • Do I need to log into Indiegogo to export Discussions?
    No. The exporter works on any public Indiegogo campaign without you signing in. You only need an exportcomments.com account.
  • Are replies inside a Discussion thread included?
    The export gives you one row per Discussion thread, with the full owner_reply_text and a reply_count for the rest. If you also need every reply as its own row, use the Indiegogo Comments Exporter alongside this one.
  • What does vote_count actually represent?
    It's the number of "Me too" upvotes the question has received — the canonical signal that other backers are waiting on the same answer. Sort by vote_count descending to find your real FAQ.
  • Can I export multiple campaigns at once?
    Yes — paste a list of URLs (one per line) in the bulk input. You get back one file per URL bundled in a single ZIP, not a merged sheet, so each campaign's Discussions stay clean.
  • Is there a row limit per export?
    Yes, it depends on your plan: Free 100, Personal 5,000, Premium 50,000, Business 250,000. The exporter shows the cap before the job runs.