Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures

Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures(thekickbackmachine.com)

187 points by misener 13 years ago | 63 comments

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 13 years ago | |

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

MicahWedemeyer 13 years ago | | |

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

sch1705 13 years ago | |

Agree, great resource. Also, cool podcast.

blhack 13 years ago |

"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.

nimblegorilla 13 years ago | |

I think this tool is geared to people who want to create kickstarter projects that are successfully funded. It isn't geared to people trying to figure out which projects will end up delivering.

Success in the context of Kickstarter means you raised your money. Just like a successful round of venture funding means the company was able to raise money (and not necessarily deliver a real product).

kibibyte 13 years ago | |

But how would you define "success"? For example, let's say that Ouya delivers the consoles to those who funded the project, but after a year or two, it dies out from lack of developer interest. Would you define that as a "success" because it delivered, or would you call it a "failure" because it died out?

For Kickstarter projects, I think it's better we use more precise terms, like "successfully funded", rather than the vague "successful".

its_so_on 13 years ago | |

>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 13 years ago | | |

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!

brechin 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

Smudge 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

misener 13 years ago | | |

Indeed, the launch date is there, but it's only accurate to the day. To figure out the actual launch date+time, you need to look at the deadline and subtract the project duration, both of which can be found in this element on each page:

Smudge 13 years ago | | |

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.

danielna 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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.

sidwyn 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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.

ChrisNorstrom 13 years ago |

Woah.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the-grassroots...

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

I watched the whole video and I'm still not sure what it's about.

waterlesscloud 13 years ago | |

That's odd. If nothing else, his wife has a huge social media following. Doesn't seem like he'd have trouble getting the word out if he wanted to.

ecmendenhall 13 years ago |

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.

iblaine 13 years ago |

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.

tsieling 13 years ago |

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

ColinDabritz 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

ColinDabritz 13 years ago | | |

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.

misener 13 years ago | | |

Indeed, the aggregate numbers are there, but it's extremely difficult to find individual examples of success/failure by category or goal. That's the point of TKBM.

sequoia 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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

nordicnomad82 13 years ago |

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. :/

jkbr 13 years ago |

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

acgourley 13 years ago |

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

DuoSRX 13 years ago | |

The success rate is actually 44%. You can find the stats directly on Kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

misener 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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.

Eduardo3rd 13 years ago | |

Same here. I'm wondering if this is maybe an incomplete list. There have to be more than three failed open source hardware projects out there.

danso 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

As requested: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...

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 13 years ago |

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

misener 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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

vegasbrianc 13 years ago | | |

I also would like to see search added. Love the concept and will keep an eye on it.

brador 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

Here's an ongoing dump of TKBM's data: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1ecu_DI...

dwwoelfel 13 years ago | | |

How do you get the pids?

zalew 13 years ago |

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

misener 13 years ago | |

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

unimpressive 13 years ago | | |

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

pfisch 13 years ago |

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

phreanix 13 years ago |

Hmm, is an "events" category possible?

misener 13 years ago | |

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

sritch 13 years ago |

You have a great radio voice.

misener 13 years ago | |

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

kleiba 13 years ago |

My advice: drop the "the".