Personal Kickstarter Stats v2

Back in 2020, I took a look at my history in backing projects on Kickstarter. How many were successful, how many of those delivered on what they promised, and so on. I thought I might take some time to revisit the notion.

I backed my first Kickstarter project in 2011. Since then, I've backed a total of 337 projects; four are currently still running and all but 24 of the remainder ended successfully.

Of all the successful projects I've backed, thirty-seven have not yet been fulfilled. Fourteen of those, however, have an estimated delivery date sometime in the future anyway, so I wouldn't expect those to be done yet. And two of the projects were not fulfilled but the creator provided a refund. That leaves twenty-three projects that ended successfully, but have not been fulfilled despite passing the expected delivery date. That means 92% of the projects I've backed that have supposed to have been fulfilled by now have been.

Of those twenty-three that remain unfulfilled, five have provided updates within the past month. Another four have offered updates at least sometime in 2025. I get it; there are wrinkles that crop up in the best of circumstances and this year has seen some massive, unpredictable disruptions for everyone. I'm not at all upset that they passed their 'deadlines' provided they keep me informed and tell me what's going on.

Of the ones left, there is one confirmed case of intentional fraud. Seven of the projects provided at least some element of their reward, and in one of those cases, the "some" was due to the post office losing a unique/irreplacable piece of original art. That leaves six campaigns that have never been fulfilled and I just have no information about. With that one case of fraud, that makes seven campaigns that I feel I've been burned on. A shade over 2% of all the ones I've backed.

If you compare this against my 2020 numbers, they're definitely improved. I pointed out then that most of those projects I feel burned on were ones from 2017 or earlier, and that continues to hold true. Any more, I largely limit the projects I back to ones that don't require unique productions. You can take a comic book or graphic novel project to any of a huge number of printers and they can run it pretty easily, but if you're trying to build something that requires custom tooling, I'm going to be pretty skeptical and you're going to need a proven track record before I even consider backing a project like that.

I mentioned last week that I suspect we're going to see more KS campaigns fail as we fall into a recession. What I suspect that will also mean is that KS campaigns that are successful will also have a harder time hitting their deliveries, either running later than expected or not providing quite everything that was promised. Previously, I said any of the problems I experienced weren't on Kickstarter's shoulders, but on creators who basically got in over their heads. With everything going on in the world these days, I'm sure you've already found it's much harder to keep your own head above water, and the same will likely hold true for creators as well, so try to cut them as much slack as you can!

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