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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Appsblogger is one to watch. Thanks for sharing.