I Analyzed 400,000 Crowdfunding Campaigns — Here’s What I Found

Diving into Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Crowdfunding is a modern, more accessible approach to raising capital, with the first campaign in 1997. Kickstarter was founded in 2009, and crowdfunding projects have exploded lately, as traditional funding is way down during the pandemic.

Here, I analyze a dataset of nearly 300,000 Kickstarter campaigns and another dataset of around 100,000 Indiegogo projects, to find what works and what doesn’t.

Kickstarter

The raw Kickstarter data is a bit messy, so basic data cleaning techniques are needed to prepare it for analysis. The final dataset, where we focus just on the US, looks like this:

I uploaded the data to Apteo for easy analysis.

Getting Started

First, let’s look at projects by status.