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Nearly 1 in 10 Kickstarter projects will fail, study reveals

potato salad kickstarter
Zach Brown wanted to raise $10 on Kickstarter to make potato salad. Instead he raised $55,000 and threw a party with the money. Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a great place to help get cool or innovative projects off the ground. But even if a Kickstarter project meets its funding goal, there’s still a chance it won’t work out.

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Kickstarter agreed to co-publish a study from Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor in management at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania.

Mollick surveyed 500,000 Kickstarter backers, asking them about project outcomes and how they felt about it.

A “failed project” was one that met its financial goal but didn’t provide backers with any of its rewards, or finish their own project. The study found that 9% of Kickstarter projects didn’t deliver on their rewards.

There are some other interesting findings here, including the finding that failed projects attracted 8% of the pledged money on Kickstarter, and the fact that failure rates were relatively consistent across categories.

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Kickstarter co-published the study despite saying it had “no influence over its findings.” Yet, Mollick’s conclusion should make Kickstarter very happy. He said “there does not seem to be a systematic problem associated with failure (or fraud) on Kickstarter, and the vast majority of projects do seem to deliver.”

But even if there isn’t any kind of “systematic problem” with Kickstarter, the fact that 1 in every 10 projects will fail is nothing to celebrate either.

Kickstarter has repeatedly said it’s “not a store” and that there is plenty of “risk and failure” associated with bringing creative projects to life. But only 73% of backers who backed a failed project said they would back another Kickstarter project. That means for every 10 projects, one will fail, and roughly 25% of those backers will leave the platform entirely. If Kickstarter wants to succeed, it should focus more on helping projects not only achieve their financial goals, but also to meet the deadlines associated with their unique projects and make a better effort to distribute rewards, even if the project fails. That should help people feel less burned when a backed project goes south, and encourage them to back more projects in the future.

Check out the full results from the Kickstarter study here.

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