Starting a Kickstarter campaign is not as easy as it seems at first glance. You must decide your title, description, goal value, duration, and so on. Fortunately, data science can help you! We have analyzed 140,000 Kickstarter campaigns to be able to tell you the facts that predict success.

As always, we suggest you do not do anything without looking at the data. Data analysis is the key to good decisions. The success rate for Kickstarter campaigns is approximately 35%, states Kickstarter. Of course, this number is not always true. In fact, it is just an average, and the success rate decreases over time.

Kickstarter success rate over time

Project Category

The success rate mainly depends on the project’s category. Performance, Theater, Arts, and Tabletop Games are successful categories while Apps, Video Games, Software, and Web are not.

Success by Category (the larger the circle, the more campaigns)

Goal

It is obvious that the greater your goal, the fewer chancea you have of succeeding. Therefore, some good advice is that you should not set a goal greater than what is needed for your project.

Success by goal value

Most of the time, campaigns get no money at all or get exactly as much money as required.

Scatterplot of Goals and Pledges. Each dot represents a single Kickstarter campaign.

Funding Duration

When creating a campaign, Kickstarter states, “We recommend setting a funding duration of 30 days or less. Shorter durations tend to have higher success rates.” This statement is surprising. Kickstarter believes that correlation is causation, but it is not. Even if you notice that shorter campaigns are more successful, you cannot conclude that a shorter duration influences the success rate. Maybe smart people tend to use shorter durations for their campaigns and they are successful not because of the duration but because of the smart people creating the campaigns. Furthermore, it is highly likely that someone will create a shorter campaign if he needs less money, and lower goal values cause higher success rates. Therefore, the increase in the success rate is not because of the shorter duration.

Kickstarter success by duration

It is funny that most projects are set exactly to 30 days as suggested by Kickstarter but that those projects are the less successful ones. Almost any other duration is better than the 30 days.

Other Attributes

There are some statistically significant differences in the success rate of campaigns with different title or blurb length word counts.

Kickstarter words count

Kickstarter currencies

When to Start?

If you have a fantastic, world-saving super idea for your startup, then start immediately. In other cases, you should think a little bit about it.

Kickstarter starting hour and day

Campaigns started on Sundays are more successful than campaigns started on Tuesdays. Campaigns started at 12:00 are more successful than campaigns started at around 6:00p.m.

Looking at the global success rate trend and other charts, it might be a good idea to start your campaign when others are less likely to start theirs.