All My Kickstarter dashboards - Part 2

A short update after my post last week in which I overlaid all my Kickstarter funding data onto one chart.

One of the key points of that was to show the typical S-shape curve of the funding progress you’ll often see for Kickstarter projects.

When I overlaid all my Kickstarter funding data onto one chart you could see that particular shape to differing degrees for each of my campaigns. There were some notable deviations from that shape though, and you can read all about them in my post from last week here.

Real data

This time I’ve plotted the same data but without normalising the x- and y-axes.

Below is the cumulative funding for each of my six ‘regular’ Kickstarter campaigns to date. Total funding in GBP is on the y-axis and project duration is on the x-axis.

Insights

The first thing I noticed was that, unsurprisingly, the big variation in total funding flattens the lines for the smaller projects. Still clearly visible though is the uptick in the funding gradient at the end of each campaign.

By seeing all the data on the same scales you can see that the duration of the projects also vary quite a lot. Only 21 days for my Cocktail Cards project and 36 days for my first two projects — Ockham Razor and Sticker Project. The reason the Cocktail Card project was so short is that I was trying to get it done before Christmas — showing that best-laid plans can change when confronted with the real world.

It’s a common rookie error to make a campaign as long as possible in the hope of raising more money. But in the data above there’s no correlation between funding length and total funding raised. The curve always flattens in the middle of a campaign anyway and by running the campaign for longer you just extend that slow middle and reduce the excitement and sense of urgency about the campaign in general.

For all my projects, however, there is a correlation between total funding raised and how recent the project is. I think the simple reason for that is that I’m getting better at it.

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I have another project due to go live in a month or so and it’ll be interesting to see how that data compares to all these previous campaigns. As I said last week, a key thing I’ve learnt over the years is to focus on the things that drive the funding data, rather than just waiting and hoping the chart will head in the right direction. When it goes well, it’s an incredible feeling to see my hard work come to fruition and see that funding tick up day after day.

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I hope you also found these visualisations interesting. You can find much more detail about the data behind each individual Kickstarter project in some of my earlier posts. You can find those, and more Kickstarter data-related articles here.

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