Nagging for subscribing to her private newsletter THREE TIMES (one in top of page, another in the middle, another at the bottom), flashing her new Android app and asking you to download it TWICE, 'Add me to your circles :)', about 10 sharing buttons, 'Tweet me' in every other paragraph, 'Click here to vote this up in HN' THREE TIMES, a disturbing lightbox (when you're halfway through the article)... Everything you hate about tech blogs is here.
I read http://daringfireball.net because John Gruber is an Apple and Kubrick fan (like I am), but more importantly because I think the design of his site respects me, the reader. I would never, ever visit this appsblogger.com ever again, no matter how many retweets its articles get.
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.
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.
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, even if you truly need the R&D investment to build the thing you're pre-selling.
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.
The easiest projects to fund are ones that have founders with experience building either a previous version or a functioning product close to the one they want to build, not just a partially working prototype. I would rather fund a project to get manufacturing cost down because everyone benefits from that. Funding to do R&D -- it's just a harder sell for me.
It helps immensely if the product is compelling or solves a problem but the founder(s)' ability to deliver is the main reason why I will invest in a kickstarter project.
If someone comes along and tells me they want to build X product or Y app but have never done such a thing before. The real question I have is, "How did you arrive at $500,000 being the perfect funding requirement?"
It doesn't even have to be a similar product they've built. If Elon Musk did a kickstarter and said he wanted to do deep sea drilling, I would think, "He has done big projects in industries that have entrenched players before."
This is also why I'm entirely unwilling to fund the enormous number of gaming projects led by first-time game developers, full of wild-eyed wonder and promises of the sun and stars. I want to help great people do great things, not pay so a completely green newbie developer/designer/artist/whatever can cut their teeth flailing about.
since Kickstarter is all or nothing model, it's obvious if the project is only let's say 20% off its funding goal, family members or even founders themselves quickly fund it out of their own pockets to ensure 100% goal.
Quoting Prof. Mollick's paper: "...the percentage funded of failed projects remain very similar for smaller projects (mean .149, SD .18 for projects under $1,000) and relative larger ones (mean .101, SD .14 for projects over $1,000). We would expect that, if self-funding was the reason that few projects were moderate failures, that cheaper projects would be more easily self-funded, and therefore would have a lower, not higher, mean percentage funded for failed projects, since relatively larger funding gaps would still be cheap to self-fund."
Suspecting wrongly that the mapmaker had goofed, I checked: the amount of funding is indeed proportional to the area, as it should be.
