Personal Kickstarter Stats

I logged into Kickstarter, as I do from time to time to check on the status of undelivered projects, and happened to catch that I have so far back 178 successful projects since 2011! I was surprised the number was that high, so I thought I'd dig into my numbers a little deeper to see what's what.

In addition to those 178 successful projects, I've also backed 20 that were not successful (either they didn't meet their goal, or they were cancelled by the originator), and there's one project actively underway that I'm a backer of. The vast majority of all 199 of these projects were comics related. Mostly the production of actual comics, but a few went to comics documentaries and such. I think there have been two that weren't comics related at all, and one of those was for my father.

Of the 178 projects, 142 of them are what I would consider complete. They've delivered whatever they were supposed to have delivered. Or at least something very nearly. That's an 80% hit rate. However, 18 of the projects that haven't come through have an "estimated delivery" that hasn't passed yet. If you factor those out, that bumps the successfully delivered project rate up to 89%.

I also have two projects that were partially delivered (one partial due to a unique item being lost in the mail) and two projects that weren't completed at all but the creator refunded my money. And, unfortunately, there is one confirmed case of deliberate fraud.

So out of those 178 successful projects, there are currently 13 that have passed their expected delivery date with nothing to show for it. Five of them have at least posted status updates within the past couple months, but the rest of them have gone for a year or longer with no communications at all. I've pretty much given up any hope of seeing those.

All of that brings us to the real point of concern. Of the 199 projects I have backed so far, I feel like I've been totally burned (where I don't think I'm ever getting anything) on 5% of them and singed (where I've only gotten partial delivery or the project is recklessly late and I'm pretty skeptical about it) on another 4%. That's... not terrible, but not all that great either.

Obviously, Kickstarter is not at fault here; delivery is dependent on the individual project owners. I've definitely become more careful of which projects I back (most of the projects I feel burned on had delivery dates from 2017) and I tend to focus on ones that are people with a proven track record in their field. I'm not going to back video game or animation projects from comics folks and vice-versa. If you don't have a history of delivered Kickstarters, do you have a history of doing professional work over time? I don't think most of these people are intending fraud, but I don't want to back projects where I think the creator might be in over their head. I want to support comics creators, particularly the independent folks who aren't going through a major publisher. But I also don't want to just throw my money away either; I've done too much of that already.

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