The Secrets of Kickstarter Crowd-funding: Getting Your Dream Project Funded

Have you ever had a creative project in mind but lacked the funds to bring it to life?

Maybe you want to publish a cookbook, film a documentary, or release an album.  With the growing popularity of crowd-funding sites, that novel idea doesn’t have to be a daydream.  Kickstarter has grown into one of the most popular crowd-funding platforms on the web since its inception in 2009.  Over 140,000 projects have been funded thanks to the patronage of millions of Kickstarter backers.  From smart watches to card games about combustible felines, Kickstarter has actualized projects that have impacted technology, design, and pop culture.

So you have your idea, and you are ready to deploy your Kickstarter page…

Not to deter you, but only about 36% of projects get funded.  So what is the magic formula to get your project fully funded?  What factors effect whether a project succeeds or fails?  This dataset, provided by Kaggle, can give us insight into Kickstarter projects launched between 2009 and 2018…

(Follow along on my RShiny App here; see my code on GitHub here)

Before we begin lets clean up the dataset a little:

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View the code on Gist.

(click to expand a snippet of the dataset)

Around 77% of Kickstarter projects are launched in the US.

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In the data table, projects are broken down into main categories.  Which main categories are the most popular?  Which have the have the highest likelihood of getting funded?

Here we see “Film & Video” projects are the most popular projects on Kickstarter; however, they do not have the highest success rate.  If you are looking to bump up your chance of success, consider a dance, theater, comic, or music project.  If your planning a tech project take heed:  With a success rate of only 20%, technology projects are the most difficult to execute.  Why is it so hard to fund a tech project?

Well, on average, technology project have higher funding goals than other categories.  Good luck raising $150,000 to launch that smart watch!