There's a much more insidious way that Kickstarter hides failure: by calling a project "successful" merely because it has reached the funding goal and raised money. For anyone making a contribution, that's hardly a definition of success.<p>Do they even have a word for projects actually completed that fulfill their promises? (ie, the definition of successful project for the entire world outside of Kickstarter). Can this information be found on the site without reading the discussions for each project one by one?<p>EDIT: I love Kickstarter. I'm thrilled by it's success. Which is all the more reason I'm disappointed that they have a misleading use of the word "success".
As a consumer of Kickstarter projects, I don't see why I care that they hide their unfunded (I wouldn't call them 'failed') projects. I can't contribute to them AND those projects don't hurt me anyway: if they don't get funding, I don't lose money.<p>I much rather wish there were a way to know what percentage of funded projects fail to deliver their product. Are some categories more risky than others? Would there be a class action if, say, the Pebble folks just walk away with their 10 million dollars?
As someone offering a product in the same competitive set, I have to be careful how I say this, but here goes.<p>The more I watch Kickstarter in action, the more I see them not as an innovator and entrepeneur aide, but as a middle man trying to profiteer on people that don't necessarily need their help.<p>The heavy hitters, celebrities, and true product engineers use Kickstarter not because they need to, but because it's hip...and that makes sense for both parties.<p>However, there are thousands of solopreneurs and dreamers trying to raise funding for really neat projects, but can't because Kickstarter isn't designed to help them. There are many that think they can post their project and watch the money roll in. It just doesn't work that way.<p>Additionally, Kickstarter never highlights projects that are near failure or underperforming. They only highlight those that make Kickstarter themselves look good. They do the same thing on their blog. Every time a project reaches a million dollars (or a new, similar milestone), the blog entry is more about the Kickstarter team than the project team.<p>I'm not saying all of this to bash Kickstarter, but I find it frustrating that so many people think Kickstarter is the only option. I find it more frustrating that people feel Kickstarter is out to help the little guy, which if you read the post, you'll see they aren't doing that at all.
The argument here seems to be that Kickstarter, by hiding failures, is doing a disservice to others who may want to start a similar business.<p>Kickstarter is a business. Showing failures would be a bad business move, as the author admits; they obviously don't want to do that. On the other hand, entrepreneurs starting a business have a ton of work to do to ensure their business is viable. Kickstarter is doing them a tremendous <i>favor</i> by keeping failed attempts on their site; they don't have to do that! Writing a post that calls them out for not doing more to showcase failures seems pretty misguided to me; the only person served is the budding entrepreneur, and it has potential to significantly harm Kickstarter, as it could induce fewer people to start projects.<p>I guess I completely disagree with the post's intention.
>>>56% of Kickstarter projects fail to meet their funding goal.<p>Intuitively, this seems like an incredibly <i>low</i> failure rate, doesn't it? I'm amazed it isn't something closer to 80%, considering the fairly relaxed guidelines for getting listed.
> <i>it doesn’t help to remind people that 56% of Kickstarter projects fail to meet their funding goal.</i><p>Is it just me, or is that actually an amazingly high percentage? If you'd asked me to guess, I would have expected it to be hovering between 5% to 10%.
I clicky the link he provides. I type [amplifier] in the box. I get a list of projects; the first few are still active, the next few are successful, and then there's a bunch of unsuccessful projects.<p>I didn't even have to click "See all results", so they're not that hidden.
>>> <i>First, failed projects aren’t actionable. No one can back a project that’s already missed its funding goal.</i><p>Right. This is common-sense UI design. Why would it be better to see a lot of information that no one can do anything with?<p>The successful projects also aren't actionable, those probably get displayed for purely marketing purposes. That seems like a pretty normal sales tactic (like testimonials on an infomercial).
I would do the exact same thing. As the author points out, unsuccessful projects can't have any action taken on them. All they serve to do is get people less enthused about the website.<p>As DanBC points out, it is definitely possible to find failed projects by performing a simple search. All this says to me is that Kickstarter doesn't want to broadcast them or use up valuable screen real estate for them.
Interesting data here on 599 projects. Which looked likely to hit goals, to go over, by how much, etc.<p><a href="http://creativepark.net/1381" rel="nofollow">http://creativepark.net/1381</a><p>One interesting point was that most that failed did so by an order of magnitude. There weren't a lot of near misses.
Kickstarter's frontend is targeted at consumers. As a consumer, why would I want to see failed projects?<p>Seeing failed projects would probably make me significantly less likely to back other projects, not to mention how much more difficult it would make it to find them.<p>Not to say they couldn't add some advanced search option or something. But in terms of features, that's probably pretty low, and I understand them not having implemented it.
Why exactly would Kickstarter make unsuccessful projects easily found? Nothing can be done with a project that has been unsuccessful, so Kickstarter is actually providing a better experience to it's users who are looking to fund projects that still can be successful.<p>The reason eBay might keep already sold, or not sold items indexable is because they just might not care if users find those items. eBay also deals with 'commerce' on a completely different scale than Kickstarter. They sell millions of items, daily I would think. One unsold copy of a book doesn't tarnish the service. As for Amazon, if an item is sold out it doesn't mean the item won't become available at a later point. The shopper can probably add the item to a wish list, find a used version or be notified when the item is available again. You can still perform an action on the item, unlike Kickstarter where there is nothing that can be done with the unsuccessful project.
"if you’re going to use a crowdfunding service like Kickstarter, it’s important to figure out what’s worked for others in the past, but also to figure out what hasn’t worked for others in the past."<p>This is exactly why it would work in Kickstarter's favor to make failed projects visible. Since they only make money on successful projects, they stand to make more money if users don't continuously remake the same failed ideas.
I'm surprised only 56% of projects fail to get funding. I expected it to be much higher.<p>EDIT: Reading all other comments after posting this... It seems other people are equally as surprised as me. I wonder if this is related to the sort've pre-sale / reward economy that kickstarter has created.
>Second, to clarify that I don’t think there’s anything nefarious or ill-intentioned going on here. Just that Kickstarter has made an interesting design decision when it comes to how it displays (or doesn’t display) “failed” projects.<p>Oh please. If you're going to do a writeup like this, fucking own it. I'm so tired of someone putting out something that bears down on what can only be described as "shady" behavior, but then doesn't have the balls to call a spade a spade.<p>If Kickstarter is darkening the portions of their site that would undermine their product, that's shady. Plain and simple.
"Successful" also only means "funding goal met" not "product shipped" or "project complete".<p>Kickstarter says that accountability is enforced by the community of backers, but Kickstarter really needs to be part of that process.
Thanks for the post. I disagree with Kickstarter approach - "You have to learn how to fail in order to succeed" - <a href="http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/famous_failures" rel="nofollow">http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/famous_failures</a>
In case anyone's interested, I was able to scrape Kickstarter's failed projects. I made it into an infographic here: <a href="http://www.appsblogger.com/kickstarter-infographic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.appsblogger.com/kickstarter-infographic/</a>.
A little off-topic, but does amazon charge a fee for the authorization that kickstarter does before the project is successful and they charge you? In other words, do unsuccessful projects cost Kickstarter something?
This seems like a pretty good list of failed Kickstarters:<p><a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/37-saddest-failed-kickstarters" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/37-saddest-failed-ki...</a>
Success tends to hide failure. The general problem here is that we, as hackers, scientists, friends, humans, prefer to read stories of success rather than stories of "quantitative results".
It's sort of like Facebook having a "Like" button but no button to signal caution. It's a distortion of reality.<p>If everything we ate smelled and tasted "good", we'd die. Because we would eat poisonous things. There is a reason why some things smell or taste "bad".<p>As another commenter points out, it's a shame because knowing what projects did not work, and when, would be helpful.<p>Trial and error is a proven way to reach success.<p>Kickstarter is hiding the errors.