My plan was sheer elegance in its simplicity. Every day I would go
to Kickstarter's
list of recently launched projects, scan the ~50 new projects,
bookmark the interesting ones and then put money behind 1-3 of the
interesting ones. Then I wrote about the projects I'd backed on News
You Can Bruise. This was a) a birthday present to myself and b) a
great source of experimental data. Would it be fun? (Yes!) Could I could drive my readers to
contribute to Kickstarter projects? (Not really!) What would Kickstarter's official
stats look like if they only covered projects I, personally, cared
about? (Quite different!) Most importantly, what about the backer
rewards?
BTW, flakeouts are very rare, but I gotta name-and-shame Keith
Kritselis of the tesselated cookie cutter project because I did a whole detailed analysis of
his project and now he's flaked out and not delivered anything. Didn't see that coming! I hope he's just flaked out, and not dead or in prison.
Anyway, the actual question I've been thinking about: how about repeating Month of Kickstarter this July, to get a
new data set, a new bunch of rewards, and see how things have
changed?
I can tell you right off that I've changed. I am a lot pickier about Kickstarter rewards now than I was last year. I'll like a book/movie/album (preferably electronic), or some food, or a game, or a nice piece of art I can frame and hang up, but that's about it. I don't get any great satisfaction from having my name in the credits, and I'm tired of stickers and patches. I thought those would be great rewards because they're easy to mail and don't take up much space, but turns out I don't use 'em.
And one thing about Kickstarter has changed: usage has exploded. After last year's MoK I kept checking the new
projects page every day, but I stopped after a few months because it was
just too much stuff. I don't have time to read that firehose, so I backed a Kickstarter project to do it for me.
My estimate as of today is that there are
150 new projects posted to Kickstarter every day. I need to
double-check this number tomorrow and possibly update this post,
because it's a statistic Kickstarter doesn't provide. (Update: The actual total is more like 125.)
Kickstarter's
UI is very carefully designed, so after a year of seeing it not change
in ways I think are pretty obvious, I'm starting to think the
absence of certain features is deliberate.
Forget Month of Kickstarter for a minute. Imagine that you, like
me, are really into board games. You want to track all the new board
game projects added to Kickstarter. You can't. There's no way to do this except by going
through the global "new projects" page every day and picking out the
board games. You can see "staff
picks" and "popular
this week" and "recently
successful" and "most
funded" but not "new". (Feel free to prove me wrong--I'd rather
have this functionality than be right about its absence.) It's like a
bookstore that has all the sections you'd expect, biography and horror
and so on, except the "new releases" are all jumbled together and
ordered by release date.
I have a hypothesis: there's some basic incompatibility between
browsing, which is what I want to do, and Kickstarter's user model or
business model. Over the past year, instead of doing things that would
make Month of Kickstarter easier, Kickstarter created a site-internal
social network so that your pals' activity would filter
through to you and you'd find out about new projects that way. I think that's
their user model: money flows to a Kickstarter project through a social
network rooted at the project's creator. Social networks
driven by Facebook and Twitter and just plain advertising (the board
game podcasts I listen to have a ton of advertising for Kickstarter
projects), but also now possible through Kickstarter itself.
Apart from the "Recently Launched" page and a couple others that
aren't as useful ("Ending Soon" and "Small Projects"), every project
discovery mechanism on Kickstarter (and there are a ton) is
based on finding projects ratified by someone else: Kickstarter staff,
or people in your social network, or someone operating
under the name of a trusted brand, or (as with "most funded") just
an unusually large number of random backers.
And sure, this works. I back my friends' crowdfunding projects all
the time. But it means that your Kickstarter project is
guaranteed to to sink without a trace unless you can get someone
else's attention outside of the site. If I'm right, this is
the point of the whole design. We learned from the last Month of Kickstarter that your project will fail if you don't
hustle. Kickstarter makes it clear that hustling is your job by
effectively hiding all but the most-hustled projects. Most site
visitors aren't interested in backing sixty projects to see what
happens. They want to back one or two projects from a curated list. So the system
works for them.
The problem for Month of Kickstarter is that while hustle may or
may not bring success to your individual project, it will not show your project to me unless our social networks intersect. That's not good enough. I need to see a list. But the list needs to not have 150 items in it every single day. I've spent the last eight months doing a project (the Constellation Games author commentary) that forced me to do a big context switch every week. I'm not really feeling the need for a daily context switch, and I certainly don't want to look at 150 projects a day. Last year "Recently Launched" did the job, but this year it won't.
They must have these advanced mechanisms. Whoever puts
together the curated O'Reilly page doesn't trawl through 150 projects
a day seeing if there's one they want to add to the list. But without
access to those mechanisms I can't really do this.
Like I said, I'm gonna give it a shot anyway. But it may descend into me backing projects without writing about them, or I may give up altogether. I've got other stuff I need to work on, and the thrill of gathering another MoK dataset to compare against last year's is probably not worth the time. Fri Jun 29 2012 11:49 Month of Kickstarter?:
July, my birth month, approaches, and the question on everyone's lips
is, "Question on my lips? Who uses that kind of archaic
construction?" I do, and now that we've gotten that question out of
the way, let's talk about last July's project, Month
of Kickstarter.
The backer rewards are great. It's like being pen pals with the
Internet. I'm still getting rewards. Yesterday I went and picked up my
ice cream for July 17's Milk Not Jails
project. My laid-back, experimental attitude towards the whole thing
has saved me from nerdrage when the shipment schedule slips, or the project owner flakes out altogether, or the
reward arrives and is just disappointing or lousy.
And here we come to the problem. Kickstarter's UI has not changed. Not in any way that would make
Month of Kickstarter easier to do, and it wasn't that easy to
begin with. 50 projects/day was kinda doable, but I'm not going to look through three times that many, and there's no way of filtering out the ton of projects I almost certainly won't be interested in.