Over two billion dollars have been raised using the massively successful crowdfunding service, Kickstarter, but not every project has found success. Of the over 300,000 projects launched on Kickstarter, only a third have made it through the funding process with a positive outcome.
Since getting funded on Kickstarter requires meeting or exceeding the project's initial goal, many organizations spend months looking through past projects in an attempt to discover some trick to finding success.
This is an Excel Analysis of four thousand past Kickstarter projects to uncover hidden trends by examining the funding process and success rate.
A. The lower the goal the higher the probability of success, and the lower the probability of cancelation. This seems evident in the “Outcomes Based on Goal” chart. Kickstarter campaigns with a initial goal under 1000 have been successful 71% of the time. Whereas, Kickstarter’s who’s initial goal is greater than 50,000 have a 16.37% chance of success.
B. Three strong Kickstarter categories are Film & video, Music, and Theater respectively 300, 540, and 839. These categories demonstrate an area for future investments for investors.
C. The majority of the projects set a goal between 1000 & 4999 with a 66% success rate and a 4.25% cancelation rate
There is missing information that would be critical in making business investment decisions such as market data. Location, demographics and market conditions at the time of launch are critical to the success and failure of the kickstart. This data set also does not represent the competition of each kickstart. The degree of competition within the given market has a great impact on the outcome.