This year, 2019,hopeful entrepreneurs will list thousands of projects — books, films, drones, watches, board games, smart toothbrushes — on the largest, most popular, and longest-standing CrowdFunding platform, Kickstarter.
What is the success rate on Kickstarter?
Which types of products are the most successful?
Which are the least successful? And how much money, on average, do creators raise? This is an analysis of publicly available Kickstarter data over the past decade.
Entrepreneurs can post their “project” (a tech product, book, film, etc.) to the platform, set a monetary goal, and raise money from the general public to pursue it. Kickstarter is an “all-or-nothing” platform, which means the entrepreneur only keeps the money if the goal is totally met. Since its inception, the site has listed 433,000 projects,273,000 failed. Here’s a look at how these projects break down by category:
The major Kickstarter projects (40%) are films (16%), music projects (13%), and books (11%), followed by Tech (9%), Art (8%), Design (8%) and Fashion (6%). All other categories trail far behind. Tech and design (which frequently overlap, as many tech projects are categorized under “product design”) make up 17%, and games clock in at 10%.
Among all projects, 37% succeed in meeting their goal, and 63% fail. But these rates vary widely by category. Four categories — theater (60%), comics (57%), music (50%), and art (42%) — far outpace the average success rate, with Games, Film and Design above 35%, while tech (20%) lags far behind it.
Overall, the average successful project has a goal nearly 50% lower than the average unsuccessful project. The average goal among successful projects is $6,100, compared to $13,700 for unsuccessful projects. In every category, successful projects have far lower average goals.
Thanks to the occasional viral product we read about, like the Pebble watch or Exploding Kittens, many believe Kickstarter routinely creates multi-million dollar mega-hits. In reality, the vast majority of successful projects — some 67% —raise less than $10,000.
Of unsuccessful projects (which typically have larger goals) 20% fail to raise a single dollar, and another 60% don’t raise 20% of their goal amount.
Percentages don’t tell the full story. The most popular categories on Kickstarter (film, music, books) are not the biggest money makers. The big-goal goliaths, Games (video games, gaming hardware, tabletop games), design (product design), and technology (wearables, gadgets, 3D printing) are the big money raisers. Collectively, all projects — successful, unsuccessful, and currently live --- have raised $4.1B. Of this, 63% 0f projects don’t meet their goals so receive nothing.
Across all categories, the average successful project on Kickstarter raises $23,000, while the average unsuccessful project attracts $1,500 — about 15 times less. The average successful tech project brings in in $92,000, compared to the $5,600 average theater success.
Of the 100 most-funded projects in history, 47 are games with a further 35 being Tech and Design. Art, books, comics, food, photography, and theater have none in the top 100.
The projects in Kickstarter history raising $10 million or more are the Pebble Smartwatch with $20.3 million, Coolest Cooler with $13.3 million, Pebble 2 $12.8 million, Kingdom death $12.4 million and Pebble E-Paper watch at $10.2 million.
The Coolest Cooler (ranked #2) raised $13.3m but 5 years later, it still hasn’t delivered units to some of its backers. Similarly, the ZANO drone (ranked #39) raised £2.3m from 12,000 backers and delivered only 600 “partially functional” products before filing for bankruptcy.
Tips:
Keep your copy short, sweet, and crisp: The average successful campaign has 465 words.
Projects with a video are 105% more likely to meet their goal.
Entrepreneurs who update their backers every 5 days see a 3x increase in contributions.
Credits: bob@bobpritchard.com
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