An Excel application that analyzing 4114 past Kickstarter projects to uncover trends that may reveal tricks to finding success.

💻 Technologies Used

📈 Findings

🚫 Limitations

👤 Developer

📧 Questions or Comments

• Excel

• Theatre (1393), music (700), and technology (600) had the largest number of campaigns, while journalism (24), food (200), games(220), and photography (220) had the least number of campaigns.

• Music had the most success of any category (approximately 75%), followed by theatre and film and video (each approximately 60%).

• Food had the worst success of any category (appoximately 15%), followed by publishing, technology, and games (each appoximately 30%).

• Games and photography had no cancelled campaigns, while all journalism campaigns were cancelled. Approximately 30% of technology campaigns were cancelled. All other campaigns were cancelled less than 15% of the time.

• Of the projects that reached completion (3715), almost 60% were successful (2185).

• Of a total of 4114 campaigns, the US had the most campaigns (3038).

• While music had the most success of any category, the majority of its subcategories either did extremely well or extremely poorly. Classical music, electronic music, metal, pop and jazz had 100% success rate, while faith, jazz and world music had 0% success rate. Indie rock has approximately 85% success rate.

• There were only eight subcategories with partial success. Those above 50% success were small batch (approximately 80%), photobooks, plays and space exploration (each approximately 65%). Those below 50% success rate include wearables (approximately 10%), makerspaces, musical, and spaces (approximately 45%).

• While approximately half of all campaigns were successful (2185), campaigns had more success on some months than others. Successful campaigns fluctuated between 180 campaigns and 202 campaigns from January to April. Then successful campaigns peaked in May (234) and steadily declined until September (147). The number of successful campaigns increased from September until November (183), then hit its lowest number of successful campaigns in December (111).

• The number of failed campaigns were greatest in the months of January (149), June (147), July (150) and October (149). Failed campaigns were lowest in February (106), March (108) and April (102).

• Cancellations fluctuated between 20 and 28 except for January (34), July (43), August (33), and November (37).

• Campaigns for less than $10,000 had the greatest success (71%), while campaigns for greater than $50,000 showed the least success (19%). Campaign success steadily decreased as the campaign amount rose from less than $10,000 (71%) to $34,999 (39%). However, campaign success increased for campaigns between $35,000 and $39,000 (47%) and for campaigns between $40,0000 and $44,999 (49%).

• Analysis by country is limited since many countries have very few campaigns in the dataset.
• Analysis by categories or subcategories is limited since many categories or subcategories have very few campaigns in the dataset.
• The end date of the current data is March 2017. Campaigns after this date may impact campaigns' success rate.
• It is unclear if this sample was a random sample or how this sample was selected.
• There have been over 400,000 Kickstarter campaigns thus far. Our Dataset includes only 4114 campaigns (approximately 1%). It has not been determined whether this is a sufficiently large enough sample to be statistically significant.

• Maria Wong

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to message me on LinkedIn.