

Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats - appsblogger
http://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/

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pooriaazimi
God. The design of this site is just _aweful_.

Nagging for subscribing to her _private_ newsletter THREE TIMES (one in top of
page, another in the middle, another at the bottom), flashing her new Android
app and asking you to download it TWICE, 'Add me to your circles :)', about 10
sharing buttons, 'Tweet me' in every other paragraph, 'Click here to vote this
up in HN' THREE TIMES, a disturbing lightbox (when you're halfway through the
article)... Everything you hate about tech blogs is here.

I read <http://daringfireball.net> because John Gruber is an Apple and Kubrick
fan (like I am), but more importantly because I think the design of his site
respects _me_ , the reader. I would never, ever visit this appsblogger.com
ever again, no matter how many retweets its articles get.

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jedahan
Don't try signing up for the mailing list. A video immediately starts playing
at ridiculous volume, yelling CHECK YOUR INBOX NOW. My ears are still ringing,
as I was listening to quiet music on my headphones at 50% volume.

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jonnathanson
Looking at the stats is a very useful exercise, but it's limited in one
crucial capacity: it tells us only about the performance of Kickstarter
campaigns after they've launched. It tells us very little (inferences and
guesses aside) about the work leading up to the campaign launches. Or the lack
thereof, in some cases.

As much as I hate some of Seth Godin's cutesy/quirky buzzwords about "tribes,"
he's crucially right about one thing here. Kickstarter is, as he puts it, "the
last step" in a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. You need to have the
product reasonably well researched, if not prototyped, ahead of time. You need
to have a compelling description and video. You need a realistic projection of
your costs and revenue expectations, and you need to set your funding tiers
carefully (and the rewards for those tiers even more carefully). You need to
scout out your influencers, your bloggers, your best-connected connections,
and so forth, well ahead of the project's debut. You have to have a plan for
activating them.

The whole thing is basically a product launch, much more so than a call for
R&D funding. It's a marketing push, much more so than an investment round.
It's also a pre-sale. It's all of these things, _even if_ you truly need the
R&D investment to build the thing you're pre-selling.

This is not necessarily intuitive, because the site presents itself as a place
to pitch the crowd on R&D investment. People who actually believe that will
set themselves up for failure. Conversely, people who realize that Kickstarter
is more of a marketing and sales tool will better position themselves for
success.

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blahedo
This is nasty: I got halfway through the article and then got lightboxed into
a signup form for an email list; the lightbox had no "close" button, and the
now-background text no longer scrolled. FAIL.

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appsblogger
Just press Esc to get out of the lightbox. The directions were underneath the
image.

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bdfh42
I had clicked the link and got called away. When I got back the page was
"blocked" by some stupid message. So I closed the page - always do - never
coming back.

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ljd
While I enjoy these statistics just as much as the next guy, it's funny that
they rarely talk about an obvious commonality that successful projects tend to
have.

The easiest projects to fund are ones that have founders with experience
building either a previous version or a functioning product close to the one
they want to build, not just a partially working prototype. I would rather
fund a project to get manufacturing cost down because everyone benefits from
that. Funding to do R&D -- it's just a harder sell for me.

It helps immensely if the product is compelling or solves a problem but the
founder(s)' ability to deliver is the main reason why I will invest in a
kickstarter project.

If someone comes along and tells me they want to build X product or Y app but
have never done such a thing before. The real question I have is, "How did you
arrive at $500,000 being the perfect funding requirement?"

It doesn't even have to be a similar product they've built. If Elon Musk did a
kickstarter and said he wanted to do deep sea drilling, I would think, "He has
done big projects in industries that have entrenched players before."

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potatolicious
Exactly my thoughts - I'm very willing to fund projects with leaders and teams
that have a strong history of delivering. I threw in for Pebble because I knew
the team had experience delivering product and working with design and
manufacturing.

This is also why I'm entirely unwilling to fund the enormous number of gaming
projects led by first-time game developers, full of wild-eyed wonder and
promises of the sun and stars. I want to help great people do great things,
not pay so a completely green newbie developer/designer/artist/whatever can
cut their teeth flailing about.

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lubos
It's funny how most projects either succeed by a very small margin or fail
spectacularly.

since Kickstarter is all or nothing model, it's obvious if the project is only
let's say 20% off its funding goal, family members or even founders themselves
quickly fund it out of their own pockets to ensure 100% goal.

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appsblogger
Actually, the research data suggests that Kickstarter's efforts to make self-
funding (making up the difference) difficult do seem to be working.

Quoting Prof. Mollick's paper: "...the percentage funded of failed projects
remain very similar for smaller projects (mean .149, SD .18 for projects under
$1,000) and relative larger ones (mean .101, SD .14 for projects over $1,000).
We would expect that, if self-funding was the reason that few projects were
moderate failures, that cheaper projects would be more easily self-funded, and
therefore would have a lower, not higher, mean percentage funded for failed
projects, since relatively larger funding gaps would still be cheap to self-
fund."

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wangarific
One other factor to consider is that if you're close to reaching your goal, it
might make sense to fund yourself just to get access to the contributions thus
far. So if you're at 90% of your goal, you kick in the difference of 10%, pay
the fee (5%), and get access to the 90% that people kicked in. So if you're
close, it makes sense to pay... which probably eliminates all 80-99% funded
failed projects.

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impendia
Something a bit sad about how the map is dominated by a few huge circles, and
the circles in "flyover country" are small indeed.

Suspecting wrongly that the mapmaker had goofed, I checked: the amount of
funding is indeed proportional to the _area_ , as it should be.

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KarenC
Appsblogger is one to watch. Thanks for sharing.

