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If you’ve read the other posts in this series, you may have asked, “Why go through all the trouble of collecting this data? Why not just ask what potential backers want?”

Well, there are a couple of reasons for preferring hard data over surveys. Let’s go over a few of them.

The Case for Hard Data

Response Rates

Getting people to respond to survey’s can be difficult. Personally, my usual channel is Twitter and/or Reddit. So far, the highest number of responses I’ve gotten to any question I’ve asked has been about 10 people maybe, and that’s just not a lot of info to work with. To be honest, even if I got a phenomenal number of responses, it would still pale in comparison to the literal thousands of projects that I can analyze on Kickstarter.

Surveys Can’t Answer Everything

If I surveyed 100 people, and asked them “What’s the best month to launch a Kickstarter campaign?”, most answers would probably congregate around 6 different months or so. Sure, most would say December isn’t a good time to launch, but what about August? Or March? That’s a bit harder to know, and can really only be answered by analyzing the hard data.

Stated vs Revealed Preference

There’s often a real and measurable difference between what people care about and what they say they care about. For example, people may say they like blue boxes better than red, but if you measure their actions, you may find that red boxes are actually bought more often. Or, to give a real life example, someone may say that data privacy matters… until they’re offered some pizza.

This disconnect could easily affect Kickstarter as well. For instance, when you ask backers about shipping, usually the majority say they prefer to have shipping “baked in” to the overall price, instead of added separately. But what if doing that takes the price of your game from $30 to $42? That might start triggering the “sticker shock” reaction and actually cause people to not pledge. Even though $30 + $12 shipping = $42, seeing the $42 all at once can definitely have an effect.

That might seem odd, but the human mind is sometimes an odd thing. This, of course, was just a made up example. Usually, the disconnect is a little more subtle than that, but it is definitely there. Because of that disconnect, measuring actions is often better than measuring opinions.

The Case for Surveys

Don’t get me wrong, surveys are still incredibly useful and are sometimes vastly superior to hard data. One of their biggest advantages is their ease of access. What might take months or even years of effort to gather through other approaches could be a single question on a survey.

For instance, if I wanted to know the most popular color in America, there are a number of hard data points I could use to guess it. In theory, I could broker a deal with credit card companies to get everyone’s purchase history and scan it for the colors of the clothes and bath towels they buy. I could use google maps to collect the color of everyone’s house. I might even be able to access a vehicle purchasing database to see what color car everyone owns.

Well, not only would that be super creepy, it would also be super difficult. Why not just ask you what your favorite color is?

When playing board games, what’s your preferred player color?

(More colors below)

— David (@ddaviddx2) May 4, 2020

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

A few months ago, a Twitter friend of mine made an interesting statement:

Kickstarter pet peeve #39: creator’s not making their profile public . I’ll back anyone that’s backed us but I can’t tell if you haven’t changed your default profile setting. =)

— Kate & David (@subquark) September 24, 2019

It got me thinking. Is that a common pet peeve? Are there other ways a private profile might hurt your chance of success? Does it affect anything enough to even be noticed?

Well, that’s what I’d like to find out in this post!

Arguments

On one hand, David makes a great point. A private profile blocks other Kickstarter users from seeing what projects you’ve backed. If another creator wants to return the favor and back your project, having a private profile makes it much more difficult to verify that you actually did back their campaign.

Private profiles also give the impression that you either (a) haven’t really done your Kickstarter homework to realize that your profile is private by default, or (b) don’t really care about being a transparent creator. And if there are two things that Kickstarter backers value above all else, it’s transparency and homework. Now, is it always true that private profiles mean a lack of planning and transparency? Of course not, but you have to admit those assumptions are understandable.

On the other hand, private profiles still let others see how many projects you’ve backed, even if they can’t see what they are. So as long as you’ve backed at least a few campaigns, you should remove any negative effects of looking too self-centered. Maybe that’s enough to counteract the negative effects of a private profile as a whole.

Analysis

Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward to separate campaigns by the creator’s profile being public or private when they launched. There’s not really a lot of extra explaining to do with this one, so lets get right into graphing the raw numbers.

So it does appear that creators with private profiles do worse on average than their public counterparts. Before we end there, however, we still need to look at a couple of possible lurking variables that could be confounding these results.

First-time Creators

We’ve already shown that the number of projects you’ve launched affects your current campaign’s chance of success. What I’m willing to bet here, though, is that first-time creators are also more likely to have private profiles. If that’s true, then that means being a first-time creator is linked to both success rates and profile privacy, which makes it a potential lurking variable.

The difference here seems big enough to justify balancing on creator experience levels. So let’s do that.

Number of Projects Backed

My last blog post showed that the number of projects a creator has backed could greatly affect success rates. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to predict that there’s also a strong link between that and whether or not the creator’s profile is public or private.

I’d say it’s quite likely that private profiles back far fewer projects on average than public profiles. Why? Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it boils down to a lack of community. Kickstarter profiles are private by default. If a creator doesn’t see the value of a public profile, then they might not be too concerned with making connections with other people in general, and thus would back fewer projects. Are there plenty of other factors going on? Certainly, but I’d say that’s a big one.

The best way to see if there’s any correlation between private profiles and number of projects backed is just to graph it. So let’s see if my prediction is correct.

That looks like a pretty obvious connection to me. Just knowing if a Kickstarter profile is public or private is a good indicator of how many projects they’ve backed.

Since the number of projects backed is linked to profile privacy and also linked to success rates, that means that the number of projects backed could be confounding the effects that profile privacy has on success. So, we’ll have to remove that confounding as well.

Results

After adjusting for the above two factors, we can now say with reasonable confidence just how much having a private profile affects your campaign’s success.

Conclusion

I figured private profiles would hurt your chance of success, but after accounting for first-time creators and the number of projects you’ve backed, the performance gap drops pretty substantially. However, even though a 1.5 point gap is certainly less than the original 7.7, I still wouldn’t consider it negligible.

Kickstarter backers value transparency. You may have done your homework, designed a great product, and created a killer campaign page, but if switching your profile to public gives potential backers just a little more confidence in you, why not do it?

Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash

Common sense tells us that backing other projects on Kickstarter will help get your own campaign funded. It’s true that the people you back might return the favor, but that’s not the important part. What’s really important is that it shows others you’re not focused entirely on yourself. I know that I, personally, most enjoy helping those who help others. I imagine I’m not the only one who feels that way either. On top of that, it also gives you valuable experience with what it’s like to be a backer, which I believe many people consider before deciding on whether or not to back a campaign on Kickstarter.

Because of all that, I’m certain that backing other Kickstarter projects does affect things, but the question is “by how much?”. Does backing other projects affect a campaign’s success enough to make a tangible difference?

Hypothesis

My personal guess is that backing other projects is one of the best “tweaks” you can make to a Kickstarter campaign. I expect it to be even greater than what day of the week you launch, or even the time of year you launch. I also feel like the effect of backing other projects starts to level off after about four campaigns or so. Don’t ask me why I think that last part, though – it’s just a hunch!

Analysis

As usual, let’s start with a simple trend line showing campaign success rates versus the number of projects the creator has backed at the time their respective campaigns launched. Each point here represents multiple campaigns that all had the same number of projects backed.

As expected, this is a fairly strong correlation. Notice, however, that I didn’t say causation. Before we can start suggesting causation, we need to look at a couple of possible lurking variables.

First-time Creators

If I were a betting man, I’d be willing to wager quite a bit that there’s a strong link between first-time creators and number of projects backed. If nothing else, veteran creators have probably been using Kickstarter longer and, as a side-effect, have seen more projects that they’ve felt are worth backing.

I also think there are far too many first-time creators out there who know very little about Kickstarter other than “Hey, free money!”. Creators like that typically have very little interest in finding a community to support.

But enough of my reasoning, let’s graph it to see if I’m right.

Holy moly! That might be the most right I’ve ever been in my entire life! First-time Kickstarter creators, on average, back 2.6 projects by the time they launch their first campaign. Veteran creators, on the other hand, back a whopping 25.4 projects by the time they launch their respective campaigns!

That’s definitely a strong correlation, and since we’ve already shown that being a first-time creator strongly affects your chance of success, we now have some evidence that it’s also confounding the effects of projects backed. So, we’ll need to adjust for that.

Results

All of this adjusting stuff can get really boring really fast, so I’ll just skip the explanation and jump to the results! How does the number of projects you back affect your chance of success? The below chart shows you just that!

Remember when I predicted that the effects would taper off after four projects? Turns out I wasn’t terribly far off. Success rates jump a full 20 points from zero to one projects backed! From there, they continue to go up, but by increasingly lower amounts until around five projects or so. After that, any gains seen start to become pretty negligible.

On a side note, you may notice that this final graph doesn’t look much different from the first graph in this post. Most likely, that’s due to creator experience levels not really being a major confounding factor here, even though we had evidence to suggest that it was. But that’s okay; we didn’t know that beforehand, and in this case, adjusting for it doesn’t really harm the analysis.

Conclusion

Now, I’m not saying that backing projects somehow magically increases your Kickstarter’s chance of success. I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. I believe what this analysis is really showing us is the power of putting others first. If all you do is show up on Kickstarter, never bothering to connect with anyone – to help them succeed in their endeavors – don’t be surprised to see your campaign never really take off itself.

I know that may sound harsh, but I really believe it’s the truth, and these numbers support that. So get out there, find a community to be involved in, and start creating together!

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Kickstarter itself claims that campaigns lasting 30 days or less are more likely to succeed. I suppose that seems reasonable, but the original claim was made way back in 2011. A lot has changed since then, so I thought it would be best to take a look at it again and see what we come up with.

Arguments

On one hand, longer Kickstarter campaigns mean more time to fund. On the other, longer campaigns also reduce urgency by giving potential backers too much time to decide what they want to do, which may lead to them not backing at all.

Most people would say that reducing urgency has a much stronger effect on success, which means you should avoid longer campaigns. That certainly makes sense, but let’s see if the data supports it.

Analysis

To start, let’s create a simple chart showing Kickstarter project success rates by campaign length (the size of each point represents how many campaigns share that same length).

At first glance, it looks just like what Kickstarter says: longer campaigns hurt your chances of success pretty much across the board. However, we know there may be some lurking variables that we need to account for.

First-Time Creators

We already know that first-time creators have lower success rates than their veteran counterparts. Why does that matter? Well, it may not – at least not on its own – but it could mean that there’s some confounding going on. To check for confounding, we need to show three things:

• That campaign length is linked to success rates
• That creator experience levels are linked to success rates
• That campaign length and creator experience levels are correlated to each other

We’ve already shown the first two. If we can also show that campaign length and experience levels are related to each other, then we have a strong case for saying that they are confounding each other. So let’s graph the average campaign lengths of first-time creators vs veteran creators to see if there is any relationship.

It’s no surprise that first-time creators have longer campaigns in general. They tend to have smaller audiences, and so it’s only natural to increase the length of their Kickstarter campaigns to help make up for that.

This link between creator experience levels and campaign lengths means that we can’t say for sure what’s going on. Do shorter campaigns do better because they’re shorter, or because they tend to be run by more experienced creators? Do longer campaigns do worse because they’re longer, or because they tend to be run by less experienced creators? At this point, we just don’t know.

So how do we separate the two? How do we determine the effect that a campaign’s length has on success without it accidentally being affected by a creator’s experience level as well? We use a little statistical analysis.

I won’t go into all the details here, but essentially, what we want to do is re-weight the data based on the concentration of given variables. In this case, there are comparatively fewer first-time creators with short campaigns. So, we’ll adjust those numbers to make it seem like there are as many with shorter campaigns as there are with longer ones. In this way, we help to remove the effect that experience has on success.

Results

After accounting for the different experience levels of Kickstarter creators, we come up with an interesting relationship between campaign length and success rates.

The negative trend is still there, but now, instead of it being clearly linear, it appears to be better explained with a curve. It seems that the higher success rate of very short campaigns – say, less than two weeks or so – is largely due to a heavy concentration of veteran creators. Once their effect was removed, we see that decreasing your campaign length isn’t always the best idea. At some point, making your campaign too short will begin to hurt you rather than help you.

I think this makes sense. Is it really reasonable to think that shortening your Kickstarter campaign will always help? If that were the case, why not make it one day long, and shoot your chances of success up to 90%?! No, what we see here is that you should shoot for the “sweet spot” – not so long that you remove urgency, but not so short that it’s finished before anyone even realizes it began.

So where is that sweet spot? Apparently somewhere around 2-4 weeks. And right in the middle of that is 21 days, which according to this analysis, is just about the best you can get.

UPDATE: There is now a strong case to be made for either a 17- or 24-day campaign. Why? because of the best day to launch and the best day to end a campaign.

Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

Did you know there’s a link between a population’s life expectancy and the average number of TVs per person? It’s true. You can increase your lifespan just by getting another TV!

Now, if you have your wits about you, you may think that’s an absolutely ridiculous claim – and you’d be right! Of course buying another TV isn’t going to increase your lifespan. The reason more TVs correlates to longer life spans has nothing to do with TVs at all; it has everything to do with a particular lurking variable.

What are Lurking Variables?

Lurking variables are variables that influence your analysis, but aren’t accounted for in your study. They’re often hidden in the background and can even be completely unknown to the researcher – hence the name “lurking variable”.

In this example, the lurking variable is wealth. The more wealthy a population is, the more money it has to spend on TVs and healthcare.

That’s a silly example, I know, but it gets an important point across well. Correlation does not imply causation. Sometimes there are other factors at play that we’re just not aware of. This is one of the reasons why data analysis and statistics can be so tricky.

Kickstarter data is no exception. It’s common to hear people talk about what day of the week is best to launch a project, or how campaign length affects your chance of success, but it’s really important that we don’t assume causation too quickly. It’s only after a thoughtful analysis that accounts for many different factors that we can safely say there is true causation there.

And that’s what I plan to do with this Kickstats blog series. I want us to get as close as we can to finding out just what exactly causes a campaign’s chance of success to increase or decrease. And hopefully we’ll have some fun along the way!

Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash

Did you know that 66% of Kickstarter campaigns in 2020 came from first-time creators? With so many projects coming from newbies, it made me wonder how much a creator’s chance of success changes with the number of campaigns they’ve launched.

What’s my first-time chance of success on Kickstarter?

Well, that’s a difficult question to answer, since estimating chances of success for individual projects is an incredibly complex endeavor. I’d like to work up to a model that does that, but we’re not ready for that yet. For now, I can give you the overall success rate for creators who launched their very first campaign. This should at least give you an idea of what your campaign is up against.

To be honest, this actually isn’t all that surprising to me. If it’s true that Kickstarter’s success rate on the whole hovers around 51% or so, it makes sense that first-time creators would be significantly lower than that.

What this tells me is that there’s a pretty tough road ahead for creators. Success certainly isn’t guaranteed. So if your first campaign fails, just remember that you’re right there with the rest of the 61% of creators who failed their first time too.

But that leads right into the next question. What if my first project does fail?

What if my first Kickstarter campaign failed?

What if this isn’t your first Kickstarter campaign? Maybe it’s your second… and your first one failed. Will that stain your chance of success for this one? It seems like it would, but let’s take a look at the numbers.

I’m honestly surprised at how little of an effect failure has if it’s your first time. Take at look at “0 previous campaigns, 0 previous successes”, also known as “first-time creators”. Just like we said above, the chance of success is 39%. Now take a look at “1 previous campaign, 0 previous successes”. The success rate for that cohort drops by only one point! It’s really not until you’ve failed twice in a row that it starts to drag your chances down.

Conclusion

It’s true that failing will hurt the chances of success for your next campaign, but it’s not a crazy drop, and if you can get even one success behind you, you’ll be right back in the running. Kickstarter backers tend to be very forgiving when it comes to first-time creators. Most of them realize that it can be a steep learning curve and sometimes failure is your best teacher. If you get back up, learn from your mistakes, and try again, you just may be happy you did.

So what are your thoughts? Do you have any lessons learned from failed campaigns? What do you think has helped your successful campaigns the most? Let me know in the comments!

Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

UPDATED 2021-03-04:
This article now includes all Kickstarter campaigns that launched in 2020. The significant increase in sample sizes has resulted in minor changes to the outcome of our original analysis. Portions of this article have been rewritten to reflect those changes.

It often takes a lot of data to properly analyze complex issues, and Kickstarter is no exception! But while we wait for the data to slowly pour in, I thought it would be interesting to look at the different categories Kickstarter has to offer, and how they make up the whole.

Kickstarter Categories

Kickstarter has 15 parent categories for different projects, and those parent categories break down into even more standard categories. Here’s a quick look at the top 10 based on percentage of total projects launched from January through December 2020.

That’s pretty cool, but we’re probably more interested in what categories have the highest success rates:

And Anthology Comics takes the gold, at an impressive 85.7% success rate! Board games – the largest category – is still pretty impressive though, at 71.8%, which is good to know as Grumpy Spider works toward launching our first game.

But all this got me curious – what if we looked at popularity of a category vs success? I wonder what that would look like. Thus, I present this hub & spoke chart of Kickstarter’s category hierarchies showing popularity vs success rates!

The lines show category hierarchies, the size represents the percentage of total projects that are from that category, and the brightness shows the success rate of that category. Also, in order to get a dedicated node, a category had to make up at least 7% of its parent node. Otherwise, they were lumped into their respective “Other” buckets.

The success rate of Kickstarter overall in 2020 was just over 51%, but individual categories can differ quite a bit from that, obviously. Just look at poor Technology… a relatively popular category, but really low success rates overall. I almost feel bad for Apps, which takes last place, at a measly 7% success rate.

Meanwhile, Comics seems to do the best overall, with several of their categories doing unusually well.

Conclusion

I can’t say that I have many conclusions to draw – I just thought it was interesting. But there is one important thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this series…

Be careful not to take general information and assume it always applies to specific cases. For instance, Tabletop Games as a category has a 72% success rate. Does that mean that your next tabletop campaign has a 72% chance of success? Absolutely not! Individual cases are much too complex for such simple predictions – that’s why we need lots of data, and solid methods of statistical analysis to help us find what really helps or hurts the average campaign. And that’s just what this series is all about!

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

If you’re like me, you’re anticipation is growing uncontrollably as you approach your Kickstarter launch! At this point, you may have started wondering what tweaks you can make to give your campaign just a little bit more of an edge. Well, that’s what this series is all about! I plan to use data from literally thousands of Kickstarter projects to find out what changes you can make to your campaign that will maximize your chance of success.

But before we dive in to all that data goodness, there’s an important point that I need stress as much as possible.

There are no shortcuts. The biggest factor to your Kickstarter’s success is the quality of your product and campaign page.

I know it may seem obvious, but it’s incredibly important to understand that the biggest factor to your success is the quality of your product and the quality of your campaign page. Preparing for and running a Kickstarter campaign takes a lot of effort, and the questions I plan to address in this blog series should not be viewed as shortcuts – because they aren’t. No amount of launching at the right time, having the right number of pledge tiers, or having the ideal campaign length will save a project that doesn’t have the necessary effort to back it up.

Every blog entry that I write from here on out will be based on this one idea. We will always start with the assumption that you have a good idea, and that you’ve put in a reasonable amount of effort toward its success. Now, I do have plans to cover a few things you can do to improve the quality of your campaign page overall, but most aspects of a page are just too difficult for me to quantify.

On a more upbeat note though, I don’t think that assumption is a very difficult one to make. The fact that you’re even reading this blog suggests you’re willing to put in the effort to help your campaign succeed.

Photo by Gia Oris on Unsplash

We all want our Kickstarter campaigns to do well, right? So it’s only natural for us to wonder about things like:

• What day of the week would be best to launch?
• Does the time of the day matter?
• Are Early Bird pledge levels worth it?

as well as a host of other questions.

Well, now that Grumpy Spider Games is getting ready for its first Kickstarter launch, Rucksack, I found myself asking those same questions. But the more I looked, the more disappointed I became.

I was able to find some answers, but they often weren’t quite as helpful as I had hoped. Many were based on anecdotal evidence, or just what seemed reasonable to the person answering the question. I found very few answers that were based on real numbers, and when they were, there were other aspects that limited their usefulness.

I was just about to resign myself to the dark reality of a data-less world when I came to a sudden realization. I am a statistician – as in, my day job is all about collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data. If I couldn’t find the answers I was looking for, why wasn’t I answering them myself? I mean, Kickstarter is a treasure trove of information just waiting to be mined!

So with that, I’ve decided to start “Kickstats“, a series of blog posts dedicated to answering data-centric questions about what affects the average campaign’s success rate.

What questions do you have?

I’ve got several questions that I personally want answered, but I’m sure I haven’t thought of everything. So, if you have any questions that you’re curious about, let me know in the comments, and I’ll see if I can feature them in a future post!