
Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures - misener
http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/
======
MicahWedemeyer
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I run a website in the tabletop RPG
space, and there is an average of 1 new kickstarter _per day_ for someone
trying to fund their new game, new module, new idea, new iphone dice roller,
new virtual tabletop, etc.

They all point to the massive successes, but very few seem to understand that
failure is a definite possibility.

Thanks for putting this together and I'll definitely be talking about it on my
podcast: <http://hastepodcast.com> We're always covering new kickstarter
projects, and this is an invaluable tool for people who get all starry-eyed at
crowdfunding.

~~~
acgourley
It seems like 75-80% of the card/board game projects are funded according to
kickback.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Yeah, that was surprising to me as well. Maybe the whole picture is rosier
than I thought.

~~~
osxwm
Kickback's corpus only goes back to June 2012.

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blhack
"Success" should be more than just getting funded, it should be following
through with the project.

I could "kickstart" a trip to the moon with no engineering knowledge, and a
budget of $5000, and by this metric I would be "successful". Probably within
an hour if I properly attached the ideas of unseating a major tech company,
and using android to do it. Also video games.

That doesn't mean I went to the moon. It means I successfully got $5000 out of
people.

~~~
its_so_on
>I could "kickstart" a trip to the moon with no engineering knowledge, and a
budget of $5000, and by this metric I would be "successful". Probably within
an hour if I properly attached the ideas of unseating a major tech company,
and using android to do it. Also video games."

BLHack: Your idea is interesting, but a bit vague. Could you send a brief
summary of the project? Please find enclosed $500k just in case you need a
seed for you know whatev. Looking forward to more: your new board.

~~~
blhack
Here's a really nice computer render of the moon. Also, we filmed this in a
coffee shop and know how to use shallow depth of field to demonstrate to you
that we KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING!

~~~
its_so_on
BLHack:

Thanks - couple of thoughts here. You demonstrate good potential to disrupt
some big companies with the coffee shop video. But you need a lot more
momentum, so please hold off on coffee shop work until series A.

I would also have loved to share the render with my niece's dog, who's really
crazy about the moon, but I couldn't find any social buttons. This takes
precedence.

I'd like to introduce you to a social media director who would be a very good
fit (cc). Please set up an interview.

Thanks,

Your board.

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brechin
This site answers a lot of questions for a lot of people. It's a really great
site that closely mirrors the KS design. Nice work!

Things I'd like to see added:

Length of campaign, also search by launch/end date

Search funding goal with upper/lower constraints, not just a "close to $#"

Search success by % of goal reached or $ pledged (again, with upper/lower
bounds).

# of backers

# of updates posted

An API for access to the data, so others can do analytics on it

Having scraping experience myself, I'd be happy to contribute code to
accomplish some of these if you're interested in outside contributors.

~~~
noinput
Would love to see an option as well if the campaign included a video

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Smudge
As soon as I realized how difficult it was to find a comprehensive list of
failed Kickstarter projects, I frantically began building a private database
of them so that I have the data if I ever need it. Information on failed and
cancelled projects is really quite valuable for anyone wanting to launch a
successful one.

If I'd gotten around to it, I might have tried to build something like the
KickBack Machine, but seeing as it has already been done, I'll leave the job
to Dan Misener. (And he's done an excellent job.)

Edit: seems I was wrong about the launch date being hard to find.

~~~
brechin
The launch date is on the page, in a list item, like this: <li class="posted">
<b>Launched:</b> Jun 18, 2012 </li>

~~~
Smudge
Wow, thanks. Was this always there, or did it come as part of the recent
redesign? I remember searching the source of the previous project pages for
anything resembling what should have been a launch date, and couldn't find it
anywhere. Maybe at the time I was just delirious.

~~~
brechin
Not sure how long it's been there, but I feel like it's not a super-recent
addition. I never really paid much attention to the launch dates.

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danielna
I love how even simple adjustments can make a twitter-bootstrap site appear
more personalized. Maybe it's the black bar, but I tend to groan a little bit
whenever I see it on new sites I come across. This design, on the other hand,
I really like. Nice work!

~~~
prezjordan
I agree wholeheartedly. Changing the top banner and buttons (the buttons are
the first thing I notice) really personalize the site. Great job on using
Bootstrap as its intended to be used.

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sidwyn
Right now the 'Successful' word is glaring at me for each project [0]. I'd
like to see the project title instead of whether it was successful or not. Try
swapping the word 'Successful' with the project title?

[0]<http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/successful/>

~~~
misener
Solid suggestion. I suppose that the length and colour of the progress bar is
probably enough to signal whether a project was successful or not. Thanks.

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ChrisNorstrom
Woah.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the-
grassroots...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the-grassroots-
project-jason-biggs-saves-american)

Hollywood Actor Jason Biggs (from American Pie) had his $5,000 goal
kickstarter campaign FAIL. F.A.I.L. And he's in Hollywood. People know him. He
knows people. Wow.

I guess this goes to show that success is never guarenteed. One cannot predict
future success based on past success, or future failure based on past failure.
It also makes me feel really good about my own kickstarter campaign failing.

Wow this made my day. Poor guy though, it must have been a huge "wtf" for him.

 _edit: Changed "oh my god" to "woah" to avoid getting any more downvotes. As
an atheist I'm curious to know weather it came from offended christians or
vengeful atheists._

~~~
miahi
If it's not entertaining it fails. His project is boring. Probably 99.9% of
the page's visitors couldn't keep their eyes open to read it to the end.

~~~
mwilcox
I watched the whole video and I'm _still_ not sure what it's about.

~~~
MengYuanLong
Seconded. His Kickstarter video and copy seemed like a stream of thought joke.
Why should I give a rich Hollywood actor money when I can give a well planned
and spoken individual the same funds.

Further, it seems pretty unlikely that a person ought to make a movie about
how to lead a grassroots campaign if they can't even lead one for their own
project.

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ecmendenhall
This is a great tool! Along with Kicktraq (<http://kicktraq.com/>) and
Kicksaver (<http://www.kicksaver.net/> \- I made this a while ago), there are
now third party projects like this for every stage of a potential campaign,
from the planning stages to last-minute rescues.

We're all lucky that Kickstarter's pages are so pleasant to scrape.

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iblaine
Seems like unsuccessful projects get burried. Cancelled ones are quietly swept
away. Case in point is glospex. One day the project was there, the next day it
was not. No word...maybe kickstarter is too tiny to have a customer service
department...maybe they want the unsuccessful projects to remain unseen.

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tsieling
I like this. Simple and focussed, and invaluable to anyone willing to learn
from what worked and didn't for others.

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ColinDabritz
What would be incredibly useful to me is a 'follow-through' indicator for the
funded projects. When I read the link I thought 'success' was going to be
"funded and delivered on promises".

It would clearly take a lot more work to track, but I could see a Politifact
promise-o-meter style 'Delivery Status' with simple indicators like 'In
Progress', 'Failed', 'Partial', 'Late', and 'Delivered' or similar.

Also for the funding side, having simple counts on each category and % funded
for a given filter would be very informative.

Excellent and clear presentation overall though, very useful as it stands!

~~~
DuoSRX
I replied the same thing to another post, but these stats are already
available on KS. <http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats>

~~~
ColinDabritz
For the % stats regarding funding it's nice to have Kickstarter's page, but
integrating that data with rest of the information on the linked page could
help inform your decision making.

For the follow-up, I didn't see anything on Kickstarter about stats.

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sequoia
Looking thru <http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/all/> it appears the
projects are overwhelmingly successful. In the first 163 project, just under
75% were successful. Am I interpreting this incorrectly, or are projects
funded successfully an overwhelming majority of the time?

    
    
        jQuery('h2:contains("Successful")', 'div.caption').length; //successful
        jQuery('h2:contains("Unsuccessful")', 'div.caption').length; //unsuccessful

~~~
misener
According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all
projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all-
time success rate of ~44%. Successes seem to be increasing.

~~~
jjb123
But does this stat of ~72% success rate (28% failure rate) include
canceled/removed projects, which happens quite often after a failed attempt?

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nordicnomad82
I had a friend who started something similar one night when he was drinking.
But this is much cleaner looking. ;)

I find digging into stats and broad psychological trends relating to human
behavior kind of exciting on one level and depressing on another. From one
perspective you can really increase your likelihood of getting people to do
what you want with small tricks and tweaks. But then you realize that we're
all just a bunch of manipulate-able sheep. :/

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jkbr
For macro-level research, it would be useful if every category and filtered
view featured accumulated stats (e.g., # of projects/successes/failures).

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acgourley
That is a shockingly high success rate. It seems like 75% when I would have
guessed 20%

~~~
misener
It's an incomplete list. TKBM has only been tracking projects that ended since
mid-June 2012.

According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all
projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all-
time success rate of ~44%.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've been suspecting their success rate might go up as more people become
comfortable with the idea. A lot of small projects should be very do-able if
their community is familiar with kickstarter.

------
danso
Very cool...what I would like to see is duration of fundraising, if you were
able to collect this?

What I mean is to have that in the current view...seems more useful than how
many days ago it ended?

~~~
fudged71
That would be really interesting. I'd like to see specific categories that are
more successful now than they previously were, for example. Or correlate that
success of specific projects based on how long ago they were.

~~~
misener
As requested:
[https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DIOMYdWksR-
xbqoGdVxTvkTfPfYwwgNXhJs)

The KickBack Machine dumps _lots_ of data into this Fusion Table on an ongoing
basis. Please feel free to slice and dice it however you like.

------
z2600
Great resource. Would it be possible to have search functionality?

~~~
misener
Search is on the roadmap, for sure. That said, Kickstarter's existing search
function performs very well.

The primary purpose of TKBM is to collect Kickstarter projects together by
outcome (success/failure) and goal -- two things that Kickstarter's site
doesn't make easy.

~~~
thehodge
Am I the only one who finds kickstarter search so frustrating? all I want to
find is all the technology products orders by recently added.. am I missing
something blatant

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brador
Any chance of kickstarter releasing a dump of this so we can all have a play?
Even at just a month of data it'll stop us all scraping the hell out of the
site.

~~~
misener
Here's an ongoing dump of TKBM's data:
[https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DIOMYdWksR-
xbqoGdVxTvkTfPfYwwgNXhJs)

~~~
dwwoelfel
How do you get the pids?

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zalew
is there a way to check which of the 'successful' were actually built, not
only backed?

~~~
misener
Right now, it only tracks funding, not follow-through.

~~~
unimpressive
Follow through would be an amazing feature. It would start giving us real data
about the success rate of crowdfunding.

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pfisch
This is the best thing I have ever seen on hacker news.

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phreanix
Hmm, is an "events" category possible?

~~~
misener
Not sure what you mean by this? What would be in the "events" category?
Currently, the category list mirrors Kickstarter's own.

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sritch
You have a great radio voice.

~~~
misener
That's kind of you to say. Radio's my day job.

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kleiba
My advice: drop the "the".

