Face reality: Most crowdfunding campaigns fail

There are a ton of really awesome, creative, and innovative ideas in crowdfunding campaigns. Things like Stupendous Splendiferous Butter Up, which reinvents the concept of the butter knife, are absolutely brilliant. I love to learn about interesting new crowdfunding projects, but I hate it when I receive PR pitches that act as if its a foregone conclusion that the campaign will succeed.

News flash! Most crowdfunding projects don’t reach their goal, and even many projects that are 100 percent funded eventually fail. I wrote about the disconnect between crowdfunding concept and reality in a blog post:

Crowdfunding is a phenomenal tool. I am a huge fan of sites like Kickstarter, and IndieGoGo that enable innovative ideas and creative projects that might otherwise never see the light of day to get the funding necessary to go from vision to reality. But, let’s be honest. Until or unless you actually start producing and shipping whatever it is you’re trying to create, it’s still just a pipedream.

Success stories like the Pebble watch are few and far between. According to Kickstarter, less than 42 percent of the campaigns actually achieve their funding goals. Kickstarter claims that 80 percent of the projects that achieve at least 20 percent of the initial goal eventually reach their funding target, but more than 80 percent of the projects that were unsuccessful never even reached the 20 percent watermark.

In other words, the odds are not in favor of the project ever actually being produced, so let’s stop pretending like it already exists. Even projects that achieve 100 percent of the requested funding goal often fail.

Click here to read the full post on Forbes: Stop Pretending Your Crowdfunding Pipedream Already Exists.