But something interesting caught my eye this past week. It was actually two somethings. Individually, neither are especially noteworthy but that they happened within a few days of each other, it's got me thinking.
The first something was a Kickstarter campaign that failed. The campaign ran to its full conclusion and only wound up getting 13% of its relatively modest $12,000 goal. I'm a little disappointed, but not surprised. The two creators did -- as far as I could tell -- very little promotion of the campaign after it launched, and it heavily overlapped with San Diego Comic-Con. So a lot of the potential audience had their attention elsewhere to begin with, and they didn't do enough to re-capture it. Also, I don't think they were even targeting what should have been their audience in the first place.
The second something was a Kickstarter campaign that was canceled by the creator with a smidge over a week left in the campaign. It was about three-quarters of the way to a $10,000 goal. He'd been doing regular updates and outreach, so it's possible it could've been successful but it likely would've only squeaked by if that happened. He noted that there were a number of canceled pledges over the past couple weeks, which obviously hurt, and there would no doubt be some percentage of backers whose credit cards wouldn't process if the campaign were successful. (My understanding is that there is ALWAYS between 1% and 5% of backers whose payments don't process properly.) I expect this creator had factored that in when setting his initial goal, but depending on what his actual printing costs might be -- and the estimates are likely changing for that daily thanks to the jackass-in-chief throwing all the wrenches into the economy -- that might be the difference between making a profit and eating it.
And that's sort of what struck me: that in the space of a few days, I saw two different projects fail. The last project I backed that ultimately failed was in 2022. Prior to that, I was seeing, on average, one failed/canceled campaign per year. Now I've got two in one week. Now you could argue that, if the last one I saw was in 2022, that I was statistically overdue and that they both happened in close succession was simply coincidence.
Or you could look at the apparently-noteowrthy number of canceled pledges as regular people seeing the prices of everything skyrocket because of unnecessary tariffs and layoffs because companies are investing absurd amounts of money into AI so they don't have to pay as many workers and people's friends and neighbors being illegally kidnapped by federal agents because their skin was a little darker or they had a vaguely foreign-sounding name. People are justifiably terrified right now. They don't know what's going on because some jackass in the White House drops new, random fiats every day, so they're holding on to more of their cash because they can't plan for anything.
My guess is that these (and other) failed Kickstarter projects are the canaries in the coal mines. Not many economists have openly predicted a recession yet because they're seeing these bat-shit crazy pivots every day as well. "Will tariffs have an impact? Maybe. Depends on if they're in place tomorrow or not." But whether or not a recession formally kicks off later this year, the point is that no one knows what's going on with anything and so people are holding on to what they can as a way to hedge their bets.
And unfortunately that probably means more failed Kickstarters, and more creators not being able to make the work they want or -- more significantly -- be able to earn a living by doing so. Keep your eye on those KS campaigns; I think they'll be more broadly telling that you expect.
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