
Kickstarter hides failure - misener
http://misener.org/archives/1354
======
paulsutter
There's a much more insidious way that Kickstarter hides failure: by calling a
project "successful" merely because it has reached the funding goal and raised
money. For anyone making a contribution, that's hardly a definition of
success.

Do they even have a word for projects actually completed that fulfill their
promises? (ie, the definition of successful project for the entire world
outside of Kickstarter). Can this information be found on the site without
reading the discussions for each project one by one?

EDIT: I love Kickstarter. I'm thrilled by it's success. Which is all the more
reason I'm disappointed that they have a misleading use of the word "success".

~~~
netcan
Come on... What is it about Kickstarter that bugs people so much?

Kickstarter handle the funding end of things. When a project is funded they
did their bit. People contributing know they are getting promises that may not
turn out. They're not buying stuff. They are getting enjoyment out of being a
part of something. Celebrating when a project succeeds. Getting disappointed
when it doesn't.

Maybe the hype will end and this'll all blow over. Maybe Kickstarter is here
to stay. Either way, it's obviously not malicious.

~~~
paulsutter
I didn't say it was malicious, I said that it's misleading. And I suspect that
their claims about the percentage of "successful" projects are misleading to
many of the contributors. You can imagine some class action lawyer gleefully
waiting for the right moment to strike.

I point this out because I want Kickstarter to succeed in the long term. If
they don't create a way to discourage projects that ultimately fail, adverse
selection could become a real problem.

~~~
marknutter
It's not misleading at all. The goal of kickstarter is to fund projects, not
make them successful. That's why they explicitly say "successfully funded" and
not "successfully successful."

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boredguy8
As a consumer of Kickstarter projects, I don't see why I care that they hide
their unfunded (I wouldn't call them 'failed') projects. I can't contribute to
them AND those projects don't hurt me anyway: if they don't get funding, I
don't lose money.

I much rather wish there were a way to know what percentage of funded projects
fail to deliver their product. Are some categories more risky than others?
Would there be a class action if, say, the Pebble folks just walk away with
their 10 million dollars?

~~~
samineru
This article isn't directed at you then, it's directed at people considering
starting Kickstarter projects of their own. I believe the author's thesis is
that the current Kickstarter policy of hiding failed fundraising efforts is
detrimental to the capacity of future Kickstarters to run successful
fundraisers.

~~~
larrys
"current Kickstarter policy of hiding failed fundraising efforts is
detrimental to the capacity of future Kickstarters to run successful
fundraisers."

Agree. No question there is something to be learned from projects that have
failed by reverse engineering or seeing and analyzing patterns of _what didn't
work_.

This is a problem also with the business press. Sure, you hear about
spectacular failures (if it bleeds it leads as they say in the news business)
but you don't hear about less than spectacular failures and therefore you
can't learn from the mistakes of others.

The raw numbers of success and failures are helpful, but I'd additionally like
to dig into the specifics.

~~~
jyu
More transparency also gives more data points into gaming Kickstarter.
Although not 100% effective, obfuscation is a first step to prevent gaming the
system and ruining the whole experience.

------
nhangen
As someone offering a product in the same competitive set, I have to be
careful how I say this, but here goes.

The more I watch Kickstarter in action, the more I see them not as an
innovator and entrepeneur aide, but as a middle man trying to profiteer on
people that don't necessarily need their help.

The heavy hitters, celebrities, and true product engineers use Kickstarter not
because they need to, but because it's hip...and that makes sense for both
parties.

However, there are thousands of solopreneurs and dreamers trying to raise
funding for really neat projects, but can't because Kickstarter isn't designed
to help them. There are many that think they can post their project and watch
the money roll in. It just doesn't work that way.

Additionally, Kickstarter never highlights projects that are near failure or
underperforming. They only highlight those that make Kickstarter themselves
look good. They do the same thing on their blog. Every time a project reaches
a million dollars (or a new, similar milestone), the blog entry is more about
the Kickstarter team than the project team.

I'm not saying all of this to bash Kickstarter, but I find it frustrating that
so many people think Kickstarter is the only option. I find it more
frustrating that people feel Kickstarter is out to help the little guy, which
if you read the post, you'll see they aren't doing that at all.

~~~
jedahan
Kickstarter lets you test your idea and get better (accurate) interest
metrics. Kickstarter let's innovators set the terms of engagement and not have
to chase after some angel investor. In some fields, it is not necessary, but
in hardware production, it is costly as hell to start even if you have a good
designer, developer and businessman.

The most valuable service kickstarter provides is in gauging real-world
interest in your product.

BTW, I am not affiliated with kickstarter, but I did interview with them and
we discussed the creation of a job 'open hardware consultant' that would have
me try to ensure the success of any open hardware project on kickstarter. From
design & development, supply chain, marketing, that job would be a resource
much like meetup's constant helpful aides for ensuring successful events.
Question their motivations, but they are trying to help 'the little guy'
because its in their best interests to.

~~~
Codhisattva
"The most valuable service kickstarter provides is in gauging real-world
interest in your product."

I don't think it even does that as a product can fail to garner interest due
to lack of adequate marketing. I think most projects fail because they can
never reach their intended audience.

~~~
shawnc
"The most valuable service kickstarter provides is in gauging real-world
interest in your product." Kickstarter doesn't exactly provide this - they
provide a place to host a site to gauge that interest. The project creator
themselves do all the legwork to get that interest dredged up (as they
should).

------
eykanal
The argument here seems to be that Kickstarter, by hiding failures, is doing a
disservice to others who may want to start a similar business.

Kickstarter is a business. Showing failures would be a bad business move, as
the author admits; they obviously don't want to do that. On the other hand,
entrepreneurs starting a business have a ton of work to do to ensure their
business is viable. Kickstarter is doing them a tremendous _favor_ by keeping
failed attempts on their site; they don't have to do that! Writing a post that
calls them out for not doing more to showcase failures seems pretty misguided
to me; the only person served is the budding entrepreneur, and it has
potential to significantly harm Kickstarter, as it could induce fewer people
to start projects.

I guess I completely disagree with the post's intention.

~~~
samineru
I would agree if there were a way to find these failed cases if you looked
hard enough. Other than acquiring the link before the end date of the project
there doesn't seem to be a way. This may be a good way to check what happened
to project X, but not to answer the question:

"How have other projects in field foobar done, which ones have failed or
succeeded, and what does each group have in common?"

~~~
misener
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be able to do. For instance, I'd
love to know which categories have the highest success rates, etc.

~~~
roc
That sounds like an interesting project. Create a spider that crawls funding
sites (more and more each day it seems) and collects statistics and timelines.

It could even search for references to individual projects on the popular
search engines, to gather data on what sources for attention have what kinds
of impact on which kinds of projects, etc.

~~~
egypturnash
There's one doing that, but only for Kickstarter - check out
<http://www.kicktraq.com>.

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didgeoridoo
>>>56% of Kickstarter projects fail to meet their funding goal.

Intuitively, this seems like an incredibly _low_ failure rate, doesn't it? I'm
amazed it isn't something closer to 80%, considering the fairly relaxed
guidelines for getting listed.

~~~
misener
Kickstarter certainly seems to have a higher success rate than rival
Indiegogo, where 2/3 of projects don't meet their funding goals.

------
ori_b
> _it doesn’t help to remind people that 56% of Kickstarter projects fail to
> meet their funding goal._

Is it just me, or is that actually an amazingly high percentage? If you'd
asked me to guess, I would have expected it to be hovering between 5% to 10%.

~~~
masterzora
I make a regular habit of clicking through a large number of Kickstarter
projects and back a fair number and that number doesn't surprise me at all. I
suggest you also look through a few sometime. A lot of projects on Kickstarter
are, quite frankly bad. They are trying to build something nobody wants or
their projections or idea are unrealistic. They provide little to no
information about the project. Their reward tiers are unattractive or poorly
built. Their creators lack credibility and have nothing to back them up. They
are obvious scams. They have ridiculously short or ridiculously long funding
periods. They do no promotion outside of Kickstarter. The creators provide no
updates and don't communicate with backers.

The projects you see are the ones that overcome all or most of these potential
issues and I'd suspect that the numbers for those are much, much better. But
I'm honestly surprised that only 56% fail given what I've seen.

~~~
ori_b
That's exactly what tried to say. I would have guessed that about 90 to 95%
would fail. I suppose I wasn't clear. And now it's too late to edit.

------
DanBC
I clicky the link he provides. I type [amplifier] in the box. I get a list of
projects; the first few are still active, the next few are successful, and
then there's a bunch of unsuccessful projects.

I didn't even have to click "See all results", so they're not that hidden.

~~~
misener
Of course. As I mentioned in the piece, search still turns up unsuccessful
results.

The point of the piece is that failed projects don't show up in: a)
Kickstarter's Discover interface b) Google results

~~~
leephillips
You gave me the impression, in your article, that I would not be able to find
failed projects by searching on Kickstarter unless I had been following them
and knew their exact names. But this is not true. Your example, Instaprint,
illustrates this. I need only to search for (for example) "instagram" or
"print photo" and the failed project turns up. I don't need to know that there
was a project called "Instaprint". Kickstarter makes it _easy_ for me to find
failed projects in any area that I am interested in. This puts the lie to your
main point, that they are making it hard for entrepreneurs by hiding
information about unfunded projects. That they selectively ban robots from
indexing unfunded projects is interesting, but this is not the kind of thing I
would use Google for. If I wanted to find out the fate of various types of
projects on Kickstarter, I would naturally search on Kickstarter. And this
seems to work perfectly.

~~~
misener
Good point. I could have chosen a less specific example to point out that
"failed" projects still show up in search results.

------
pgroves
>>> _First, failed projects aren’t actionable. No one can back a project
that’s already missed its funding goal._

Right. This is common-sense UI design. Why would it be better to see a lot of
information that no one can do anything with?

The successful projects also aren't actionable, those probably get displayed
for purely marketing purposes. That seems like a pretty normal sales tactic
(like testimonials on an infomercial).

------
akoumjian
I would do the exact same thing. As the author points out, unsuccessful
projects can't have any action taken on them. All they serve to do is get
people less enthused about the website.

As DanBC points out, it is definitely possible to find failed projects by
performing a simple search. All this says to me is that Kickstarter doesn't
want to broadcast them or use up valuable screen real estate for them.

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waterlesscloud
Interesting data here on 599 projects. Which looked likely to hit goals, to go
over, by how much, etc.

<http://creativepark.net/1381>

One interesting point was that most that failed did so by an order of
magnitude. There weren't a lot of near misses.

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tylermenezes
Kickstarter's frontend is targeted at consumers. As a consumer, why would I
want to see failed projects?

Seeing failed projects would probably make me significantly less likely to
back other projects, not to mention how much more difficult it would make it
to find them.

Not to say they couldn't add some advanced search option or something. But in
terms of features, that's probably pretty low, and I understand them not
having implemented it.

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ZanderEarth32
Why exactly would Kickstarter make unsuccessful projects easily found? Nothing
can be done with a project that has been unsuccessful, so Kickstarter is
actually providing a better experience to it's users who are looking to fund
projects that still can be successful.

The reason eBay might keep already sold, or not sold items indexable is
because they just might not care if users find those items. eBay also deals
with 'commerce' on a completely different scale than Kickstarter. They sell
millions of items, daily I would think. One unsold copy of a book doesn't
tarnish the service. As for Amazon, if an item is sold out it doesn't mean the
item won't become available at a later point. The shopper can probably add the
item to a wish list, find a used version or be notified when the item is
available again. You can still perform an action on the item, unlike
Kickstarter where there is nothing that can be done with the unsuccessful
project.

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newobj
TL;DR 44% of Kickstarters are successful. WHAT! That's amazingly high.

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kaolinite
Wow, 56% of projects aren't funded - so 44% are. That's really high. I was
thinking it'd be a lot, lot lower - maybe 5-10%.

------
TwiztidK
"if you’re going to use a crowdfunding service like Kickstarter, it’s
important to figure out what’s worked for others in the past, but also to
figure out what hasn’t worked for others in the past."

This is exactly why it would work in Kickstarter's favor to make failed
projects visible. Since they only make money on successful projects, they
stand to make more money if users don't continuously remake the same failed
ideas.

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tseabrooks
I'm surprised only 56% of projects fail to get funding. I expected it to be
much higher.

EDIT: Reading all other comments after posting this... It seems other people
are equally as surprised as me. I wonder if this is related to the sort've
pre-sale / reward economy that kickstarter has created.

------
debacle
> 56% of Kickstarter projects fail to meet their funding goal.

I would have expected the number to be much higher.

~~~
liamondrop
Agreed. 44% funding rate? Compared to other methods of fundraising, I'd take
those odds any day.

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fbnt
I'm not sure how he got this figure, but a 56% failure rate doesn't seem too
bad to me.

~~~
Udo
I analyzed some projects in progress once (<http://creativepark.net/1381>) and
that number is about right. There is some variability based on the financial
scope of projects but not as much as I expected.

The main issue in my opinion is that Kickstarter tricks "ordinary" people into
thinking they have a decent chance of getting funded. In reality of course
only socially well-connected projects have a good chance.

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dclowd9901
>Second, to clarify that I don’t think there’s anything nefarious or ill-
intentioned going on here. Just that Kickstarter has made an interesting
design decision when it comes to how it displays (or doesn’t display) “failed”
projects.

Oh please. If you're going to do a writeup like this, fucking own it. I'm so
tired of someone putting out something that bears down on what can only be
described as "shady" behavior, but then doesn't have the balls to call a spade
a spade.

If Kickstarter is darkening the portions of their site that would undermine
their product, that's shady. Plain and simple.

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Codhisattva
"Successful" also only means "funding goal met" not "product shipped" or
"project complete".

Kickstarter says that accountability is enforced by the community of backers,
but Kickstarter really needs to be part of that process.

------
tocomment
Do people get their money back if a project fails?

~~~
Kronopath
If by "fails" you mean "fails to reach the funding goal", then yes.

If by "fails" you mean "is successfully funded but fails to deliver" then no.

~~~
tocomment
I mean the latter. Is there anything to prevent someone from just running off
with the money?

~~~
wccrawford
Kickstarter's TOS states that if the project owner can't provide a tier's
reward to someone, they have to refund the money. And they must make a 'good
faith effort' to do so on time.

I am not a lawyer, but I suspect the backer could take them to court for
failing to follow through, since this is basically an agreement between the
backer and the project owner, and the project owner didn't do their part.
It'll be fun to see it tested in court.

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ctdonath
So create a service that scrapes the "in progress" projects, then highlights
them when they disappear.

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vmyy99
Thanks for the post. I disagree with Kickstarter approach - "You have to learn
how to fail in order to succeed" -
<http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/famous_failures>

------
appsblogger
In case anyone's interested, I was able to scrape Kickstarter's failed
projects. I made it into an infographic here:
<http://www.appsblogger.com/kickstarter-infographic/>.

------
dot
A little off-topic, but does amazon charge a fee for the authorization that
kickstarter does before the project is successful and they charge you? In
other words, do unsuccessful projects cost Kickstarter something?

~~~
Haxtro
If the Kickstarter project get's funded, and reach the end date, only then the
pledge will be charged from your amazon account, at the ETA (if there are a
lot of pledgers then it can take some time). Therefore no costs will made. So
if you pledge a project who doesn't get funded, no charge will be made (;

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uptown
This seems like a pretty good list of failed Kickstarters:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/37-saddest-failed-
ki...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/37-saddest-failed-kickstarters)

------
opminion
Success tends to hide failure. The general problem here is that we, as
hackers, scientists, friends, humans, prefer to read stories of success rather
than stories of "quantitative results".

------
JacksonGariety
Should be re-titled as "web startup does business as usual".

------
a3d6g2f7
It's sort of like Facebook having a "Like" button but no button to signal
caution. It's a distortion of reality.

If everything we ate smelled and tasted "good", we'd die. Because we would eat
poisonous things. There is a reason why some things smell or taste "bad".

As another commenter points out, it's a shame because knowing what projects
did not work, and when, would be helpful.

Trial and error is a proven way to reach success.

Kickstarter is hiding the errors.

