Campaign, Crowdfund My Art: Analysis of Kickstarter Campaign
The skills I demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
Overview
Kickstarter has become one of the most popular crowdfunding websites that has helped thousands of projects ranging from independent comic books to innovative e-ink smartwatch companies. This has became an avenue to help small start-ups and entrepreneurs not only promote their products, but learn of how the market will respond to the product.
This Shiny project was created to help Kickstarter not only find flaws in their current protocols but also to to be used as a marketing tool to attract more people who are thinking of getting their innovations crowdfunded.
How Far They've Come
One of the things I wanted to highlight as a marketing tool was the increase in response they have been getting since starting in 2009. 
This increase in pledges (USD) is a good indicator of how much people or the "crowd" are willing to spend to see a concept or project come to life. This is a good marketing tool to show people that their website attracts increasing traffic and also that people are open to fund things that don't necessarily have a brand name or a budget to spend on fancy marketing techniques.
Campaign Length
Another analysis I wanted to add was about the campaign length. In the Kickstart website, it states that
We recommend setting your campaign at 30 days or less. Campaigns with shorter durations have higher success rates, and create a helpful sense of urgency around your project.
Looking at these graphs, it can be seen that most of the successful projects have been in the 30-45 day range. This is in line with the recommendation of Kickstarter. But upon further analysis of all the projects.
Though majority of the successful projects can be found in Q2 (16-30 days), it also has the highest number of failed campaigns. Comparing Q2 and Q3, the success rate of Q3 (43.78%) is much higher than Q2 (38.84%). This tells us that it might be smarter to keep your campaign within the Q3 (31-45 days).
Recommendation
This analysis is not only for entrepreneurs who are thinking of setting up a campaigns but also for Kickstarter. If a campaign is successful, they get 5% of the pledged amount and all the gray bars are missed opportunities for them to earn money.
Without more analysis on their procedures and campaign details, I recommend that they rethink their policy of a "one-size-fits-all" kind of project launch. Kickstarter is a way to see how the crowd will receive their products and these differ in complexity and capital investment. They are catering to people with different buying powers and a campaign for a new comic book idea should not be the same for a new watch. Sometimes, people will need a proof of concept, a working prototype, all of which requires more than just 60 days. There should be different campaign lengths and requirements depending on categories of the project. This will help the crowd know more about their projects and eventually make a informed decision whether or not they want to support it.
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