- The 3 most successful Kickstarter campaign categories who received funding were in theatre, film & audio and technology. I think that the industry where you can find people who are highly creative is in the industries of entertainment and technology. They possess extensive knowledge on how to create all sorts of events and platforms where they can maximize their visibility and attract supporters of their creative projects. Given the fact that they can launch a good advertising event, this can be a good sign to their prospective backers that they are capable of fulfilling a good project outcome. In addition, in entertainment industry alone, there are so many A-list celebrities and producers/directors who support their own circle to launch their projects. The tech industry is also a very collaborative environment to begin with where every person build on each other’s creativity. Therefore, I think these characteristics adds to the reason why the success rates are so high in these categories of a Kickstarter campaign.
- It is difficult to find backers for restaurant projects. The restaurant industry is very unpredictable most of the time. It’s one of those startups where you can only see the real outcome when it is up and running. The people launching this project must prove to their supporters that there is a market for the type of food they are launching to sell in their prospective area. A well formulated business plan to find supporters for this project is a must. As expected in most restaurant ventures, the initial investment is high and the return of investment is very low in the first 2 years of operation at least. This is probably one of the biggest downside and the reason why most Kickstarter campaign in this category cancel.
- The timing of your launch date matters. Based on this data, May is the best month for launching a successful Kickstarter campaign. The season in May is relatively suitable for a day out to watch movies, concerts and plays, which had the most successful outcome compared to the other sub-categories.
- Since backers are the main source of funding the projects in a Kickstarter campaign, it is important to know what kind of incentives they get after a successful launching of a project. This is a limitation of the dataset because we can also perhaps analyze what kind of “rewards program” do these creators offer that motivates the backers the most.
- The dataset doesn’t also show how much the projects have earned for the 1st year to be able to assess the potential return it could have and to re-assure future backers that a certain category is worth funding/supporting.
- A graph of the total pledged amount per category that will illustrate the most supported category. This graph shows how popular technology is and given that it has the highest sum of pledged amount, it shows that backers see projects in technology as the most stable and progressive ones.
- It is also interesting to analyze how much backers do each category have. The data showed that technology and games are the categories with the highest average number of backers. It would make sense that games would have substantial number of backers because game projects do not take long to launch and there is a big population out there (such as toddlers, young adults or even adults) who love games.
- The mean and median do not summarize the data because the dataset is not normalized. For the successful group, it showed that one of the outliers, which was the maximum number of backers is 31 standard deviations away from the mean. In the unsuccessful group, the outlier was 21 standard deviations away from the mean. With this significant amount of spread, the mean and median are not very meaningful enough to summarize the data.
- Both datasets with successful numbers of backers and unsuccessful number of backers do not have a normalized dataset. They both have outliers that drive their significant distance from the mean. For example, in the successful campaign groups, there were 2 projects in publishing with 20,242 backers and another in technology with 26,457 backers. In the unsuccessful group, there was a project in film & video with 1,293 backers. These were the major outliers that are skewing the data.