As Pebble’s latest project nears $20 million in pledges, on top of $10 million the first time, it still might seem odd that the company decided to return to Kickstarter. But the truth is that creators come back to Kickstarter every day. In fact, creators who have run more than one project have received over $511 million in pledges — nearly a third of all money pledged on Kickstarter.

Already in 2015, Pebble, Max Temkin, 3Doodler, Spark, and many others have returned to gather funding and a community around new projects.

By now that’s not so unusual: 22,000 Kickstarter creators — 12% of all of them — have launched more than one project. It’s easy to see why. The funding success rate for creators who come back after a successfully funded project is nearly double that of the overall site average — and their next projects do even better.

Previous successfully

funded projects Success rate for

next project 1 73% 2 80% 3 87% 4 87% 5 91%

Kickstarter is a tool that creators can use again and again, pulling in new fans along the way. Here’s a look at how the average number of backers grows as creators fund multiple projects.

Creators tell us that this ability to build community is one of the best things about using Kickstarter — and that it can turn out to be more important than the money they raise.

One of these creators is Elly Blue, a creator in Portland who’s run 20 publishing projects, all of them focused on bikes, women, and women on bikes, raising between $500 and $10,000 each time.

Elly wanted to print a zine back in 2010, and a friend told her about Kickstarter, describing it as "the world pays you to do what you want." After her first success, Elly says, the financial and community benefits kept her coming back: “People sometimes seem to be as or more excited about the Kickstarter campaign as they are about the books themselves. It turns the project into something more participatory, an event.”

Projects from returning creators are more common in some categories than others. This chart shows the fraction of projects in each category that are from creators using Kickstarter for the second, third, or even fiftieth time.

(Note that the Journalism category is less than a year old.)

Let’s look at how the success rate of creators’ first projects compares to that of subsequent ones broken down by category. The first column here is the success rate for first projects from all creators, whether or not they launched another one. The second column is the success rate for second-and-later projects, including those from creators who didn’t reach their goal the first time.

Category First projects Second or

later projects Increase in

success rate Games 26% 56% 116% Technology 21% 36% 75% Crafts 23% 40% 73% Design 31% 50% 60% Publishing 29% 41% 41% Comics 45% 62% 39% Fashion 24% 33% 35% Food 28% 35% 26% Photography 30% 36% 21% Journalism 25% 30% 20% Art 42% 50% 18% Dance 64% 75% 16% Theater 61% 67% 9% Music 53% 57% 9% Film & Video 39% 41% 6%

Repeat creators get more of a bump in some categories than others, but the success rate improves across the board.

These statistics really show the power of community, and of this platform as a way to grow and sustain it. We’re so glad to be a home to creators who love this new way of making and sharing things with loyal fans. If you’ve run a project before and are working on something new, come back! We’ve missed you.

For more on repeat creators, see this article in The Guardian today.