Looking at the stats is a very useful exercise, but it's limited in one crucial capacity: it tells us only about the performance of Kickstarter campaigns after they've launched. It tells us very little (inferences and guesses aside) about the work leading up to the campaign launches. Or the lack thereof, in some cases.<p>As much as I hate some of Seth Godin's cutesy/quirky buzzwords about "tribes," he's crucially right about one thing here. Kickstarter is, as he puts it, "the last step" in a successful Kickstarter campaign.<p>Kickstarter is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. You need to have the product reasonably well researched, if not prototyped, ahead of time. You need to have a compelling description and video. You need a realistic projection of your costs and revenue expectations, and you need to set your funding tiers carefully (and the rewards for those tiers even more carefully). You need to scout out your influencers, your bloggers, your best-connected connections, and so forth, well ahead of the project's debut. You have to have a plan for activating them.<p>The whole thing is basically a product launch, much more so than a call for R&D funding. It's a marketing push, much more so than an investment round. It's also a pre-sale. It's all of these things, <i>even if</i> you truly need the R&D investment to build the thing you're pre-selling.<p>This is not necessarily intuitive, because the site presents itself as a place to pitch the crowd on R&D investment. People who actually believe that will set themselves up for failure. Conversely, people who realize that Kickstarter is more of a marketing and sales tool will better position themselves for success.