Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures (opens in new tab)

I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I run a website in the tabletop RPG space, and there is an average of 1 new kickstarter per day for someone trying to fund their new game, new module, new idea, new iphone dice roller, new virtual tabletop, etc.

They all point to the massive successes, but very few seem to understand that failure is a definite possibility.

Thanks for putting this together and I'll definitely be talking about it on my podcast: http://hastepodcast.com We're always covering new kickstarter projects, and this is an invaluable tool for people who get all starry-eyed at crowdfunding.

"Success" should be more than just getting funded, it should be following through with the project.

I could "kickstart" a trip to the moon with no engineering knowledge, and a budget of $5000, and by this metric I would be "successful". Probably within an hour if I properly attached the ideas of unseating a major tech company, and using android to do it. Also video games.

That doesn't mean I went to the moon. It means I successfully got $5000 out of people.

This site answers a lot of questions for a lot of people. It's a really great site that closely mirrors the KS design. Nice work!

Things I'd like to see added:

Length of campaign, also search by launch/end date

Search funding goal with upper/lower constraints, not just a "close to $#"

Search success by % of goal reached or $ pledged (again, with upper/lower bounds).

# of backers

# of updates posted

An API for access to the data, so others can do analytics on it

Having scraping experience myself, I'd be happy to contribute code to accomplish some of these if you're interested in outside contributors.

As soon as I realized how difficult it was to find a comprehensive list of failed Kickstarter projects, I frantically began building a private database of them so that I have the data if I ever need it. Information on failed and cancelled projects is really quite valuable for anyone wanting to launch a successful one.

If I'd gotten around to it, I might have tried to build something like the KickBack Machine, but seeing as it has already been done, I'll leave the job to Dan Misener. (And he's done an excellent job.)

Edit: seems I was wrong about the launch date being hard to find.

I love how even simple adjustments can make a twitter-bootstrap site appear more personalized. Maybe it's the black bar, but I tend to groan a little bit whenever I see it on new sites I come across. This design, on the other hand, I really like. Nice work!

Right now the 'Successful' word is glaring at me for each project [0]. I'd like to see the project title instead of whether it was successful or not. Try swapping the word 'Successful' with the project title?

[0]http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/successful/

Woah.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/818526066/the-grassroots...

Hollywood Actor Jason Biggs (from American Pie) had his $5,000 goal kickstarter campaign FAIL. F.A.I.L. And he's in Hollywood. People know him. He knows people. Wow.

I guess this goes to show that success is never guarenteed. One cannot predict future success based on past success, or future failure based on past failure. It also makes me feel really good about my own kickstarter campaign failing.

Wow this made my day. Poor guy though, it must have been a huge "wtf" for him.

edit: Changed "oh my god" to "woah" to avoid getting any more downvotes. As an atheist I'm curious to know weather it came from offended christians or vengeful atheists.

This is a great tool! Along with Kicktraq (http://kicktraq.com/) and Kicksaver (http://www.kicksaver.net/ - I made this a while ago), there are now third party projects like this for every stage of a potential campaign, from the planning stages to last-minute rescues.

We're all lucky that Kickstarter's pages are so pleasant to scrape.

Seems like unsuccessful projects get burried. Cancelled ones are quietly swept away. Case in point is glospex. One day the project was there, the next day it was not. No word...maybe kickstarter is too tiny to have a customer service department...maybe they want the unsuccessful projects to remain unseen.

I like this. Simple and focussed, and invaluable to anyone willing to learn from what worked and didn't for others.

What would be incredibly useful to me is a 'follow-through' indicator for the funded projects. When I read the link I thought 'success' was going to be "funded and delivered on promises".

It would clearly take a lot more work to track, but I could see a Politifact promise-o-meter style 'Delivery Status' with simple indicators like 'In Progress', 'Failed', 'Partial', 'Late', and 'Delivered' or similar.

Also for the funding side, having simple counts on each category and % funded for a given filter would be very informative.

Excellent and clear presentation overall though, very useful as it stands!

Looking thru http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/all/ it appears the projects are overwhelmingly successful. In the first 163 project, just under 75% were successful. Am I interpreting this incorrectly, or are projects funded successfully an overwhelming majority of the time?

    jQuery('h2:contains("Successful")', 'div.caption').length; //successful
    jQuery('h2:contains("Unsuccessful")', 'div.caption').length; //unsuccessful

I had a friend who started something similar one night when he was drinking. But this is much cleaner looking. ;)

I find digging into stats and broad psychological trends relating to human behavior kind of exciting on one level and depressing on another. From one perspective you can really increase your likelihood of getting people to do what you want with small tricks and tweaks. But then you realize that we're all just a bunch of manipulate-able sheep. :/

For macro-level research, it would be useful if every category and filtered view featured accumulated stats (e.g., # of projects/successes/failures).

That is a shockingly high success rate. It seems like 75% when I would have guessed 20%

Very cool...what I would like to see is duration of fundraising, if you were able to collect this?

What I mean is to have that in the current view...seems more useful than how many days ago it ended?

Great resource. Would it be possible to have search functionality?

Any chance of kickstarter releasing a dump of this so we can all have a play? Even at just a month of data it'll stop us all scraping the hell out of the site.

is there a way to check which of the 'successful' were actually built, not only backed?

This is the best thing I have ever seen on hacker news.

Hmm, is an "events" category possible?

You have a great radio voice.

My advice: drop the "the".