Most Kickstarter Projects Fail To Deliver On Time

adeelarshad82 writes "A recently conducted analysis found that out of the top 50 most-funded Kickstarter projects, a whopping 84 percent missed their target delivery dates. As it turns out, only eight of them hit their deadline. Sixteen hadn't even shipped yet, while the remaining 26 projects left the warehouse months late. 'Why are so many crowdfunded projects blowing their deadlines? Over and over in our interviews, the same pattern emerged. A team of ambitious but inexperienced creators launched a project that they expected would attract a few hundred backers. It took off, raising vastly more money than they anticipated — and obliterating the original production plans and timeline.'"

Comments

What's the percentage

[Jmc23]

of non-kickstarter projects that miss deadlines?

Re:What's the percentage

[TheCarp]

Not just miss deadlines, but miss their initial deadline.

Deadlines are fine.... but when scope and resources change, the deadline slips. That is simple project management 101.

One of the things I think it goes back to is the word "Inexperienced". Projects always seem easier in the planning phases than execution.

as the old saying goes.... Fast, Good, Cheap... pick 2.

Re:What's the percentage

[Macrat]

Deadlines are fine.... but when scope and resources change, the deadline slips. That is simple project management 101.

I guess you've never worked at a real company where the management's bonuses are based on a shipping date they pulled out of thin air. So the project has to meet that date even if it means dropping features and shipping with bugs.

Re:What's the percentage

[Sir_Sri]

The issue with kickstarter becomes one of the relationship between the 'investor' (who isn't actually an investor) and the producer. When you invest in my company we have a business relationship, the scope of the project expands and you give me more money, well, the relationship has changed. With kickstarter... harder to say.

If you contract my company to do something, and I fail to deliver on time (or on budget or the like) there are legal contractual issues that can be fought over. With kickstarter... not so much. What if a project decides to change a reward tier after the fact. Sorry, but I know you gave 10 grand to our game and we promised to fly you out to meet us, but uh... we're not doing that.

It's not a shock to anyone that projects don't make deadlines. But it raises a lot of questions about the nature of kickstarter funding. What if the project gets half done and they need more money so they go to a bank and can no longer keep all of their past kickstarter reward commitments? Can they even do that? If they just shut down you're obviously not getting anything. That's a given. But the huge in between space from 'on budget and on time' to 'not on time and not on budget' is going to get tricky.

Re:What's the percentage

[Vintermann]

Dropping features isn't really an option for Kickstarter projects, it's going to be much more unpopular than a little late delivery.

Re:What's the percentage

[tlhIngan]

Kickstarter has a problem in that the funding sources are unlimited.

Lets say you did good and had everything planned for a production run of say, 250 units (probably a good crowdfunded estimate). Now you suddenly get people who order 1000 units total.

Problem is, production doesn't scale linearly - building 1000 takes a LOT more effort than building 250. First, your production method may work for 250, but fail for 1000 - if you planned on using a small contract manufacturer, they may not have the ability to deliver you 1000 units anymore - existing commitments may be the first 250 will be built as planned, but the excess depends on spare capacity. Depending on when you put it in, there may be none. So for example, if you have a Kickstarter that started in May and ends in June, get the money in July and start getting parts to build out August-September (assuming you can get the quantity required - again, your design may call for a special part available in small quantities, so 250 units, fine, 1000 units, well, Digikey has 700 in stock, the 300 have a 4 week lead time). Oh wait, your contract manufacturer can build in September, but October is fully booked for holiday production, so you can build 500 easily, but now you're stuck because your production line is at capacity.

So either you have to plan for it ahead of time by making sure you can line up the contract manufacturers if necessary (expensive), get the parts ahead of time (expensive), or let the schedule slip because well, building 1000 units is a lot harder than 250.

Perhaps it got popular and instead of building 250, suddenly you're saked to build 10,000. Now you've got a problem because at 250 units, Design for Manufacture isn't an issue. At 10,000, it really is because complex assemblies take time and cost more, and you may seriously have to consider making it in China, too.

Re:What's the percentage

[TheCarp]

Now, I said its project management 101. I didn't say that managers listen to project managers, or that project managers always understand/are good at their jobs. I was just suggesting that, a SMART analysis would have to take these things into account.

I have however worked at rather unreal "companies" that ignored reality and pulled dates out of their asses. And.... their projects were never even close to on time. One of my own projects got delayed over 6 months because I raised the flag that production needed SSL certs on the authentication servers.

A year or so before that, I sat down in my managers office, looked at him and told him, flat out... my project was a year behind schedule when they hired me, its 6 months in, and I still can't get a single solid requirement out of anyone aside from vague statements about "people really want it".... he smiled, looked at me and said "I know, and we are all scared".

So basically, I worked for the people who pretended to be a real company, who picked deadlines out of their ass and then flogged people over them, but... who never actually let anyone go... so nobody really feared them....just disrespected them, were demoralized, and didn't want to work.... which didn't help the deadlines either.....

I have also worked with good project managers who pushed back on management, and really went to bat with management to make sure the plan and progress were understood and that we had real management buy-in.... smoothest and best projects I have EVER been on.... but she wasn't with me at that company.... that company had an entire group of dedicated project managers, all of whom would just roll their eyes if you suggested that a gantt chart was even worth making...well all except for the one who stayed for 6 months and left....

Re:What's the percentage

[Kergan]

The issue with kickstarter becomes one of the relationship between the 'investor' (who isn't actually an investor)

And therein lies the rub. They're not investors. At the very most they're sponsors or supporters.

It's not a shock to anyone that projects don't make deadlines.

If TFS and TFA are anything to go by, it evidently is. *Shocked* even. WOW, the project is late!!! Call the fucking cops! News at 11.

Re:What's the percentage

[cwebster]

Your first statement is untrue. You can limit the number of backers in each tier you set up. If you can only accommodate a production run of 250 units, you can set the pledge tier that includes the item as a reward to only allow 250 people to select it. Sure, that will limit your funding if you limit the tiers,but it fixes your hypothetical problem.

Re:What's the percentage

[rochrist]

So basically, I worked for the people who pretended to be a real company, who picked deadlines out of their ass and then flogged people over them, but... who never actually let anyone go... so nobody really feared them....just disrespected them, were demoralized, and didn't want to work.... which didn't help the deadlines either.....

In my experience, that IS a real company. Pretty much every tech company I've worked for behaved this way. It's way I tend to laugh at the whole 'the private sector can do it moah bettah!'

Re:What's the percentage

[timeOday]

There's also a natural tendency for entrepreneurs to be massively optimistic by nature.

Perhaps there is also a natural tendency for funding sources to favor those who over-promise. You notice this study was of "the top 50 most-funded Kickstarter projects," so this may be as much a reflection of what gets funded as anything else. Especially since the whole point of kickstarter is to allow naive people to invest.

Re:What's the percentage

[slick7]

of non-kickstarter projects that miss deadlines?

I worked in an industry that believed in "Faster, Cheaper, Better". It sounds too good to be true, however, if you add "Pick Two", it makes all the sense in the world.

Re:What's the percentage

[tlhIngan]

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. No production isn't generally linear: it is generally *sub*linear.

Making 1000 of something, generally costs LESS than 4 times the price of 250 of the thing, not *more* than 4 times.

It's true that making 10000 in an efficient will likely take longer than making 250 - because the more efficient production requires a longer and more complicated setup-phase, but there's no problem putting this in the kickstarter-description: "The first batch will be 250 items, if we get more backers, then we'll make additional batches as required ..... "

Yes, it's sub-linear. However, if the original plans were for 250, and you get 1000, you need to retool stuff a LOT. Once you get into mass production (250 can be considered a small run that's easily handmade), the jump in costs is huge and beyond most people's abilities

Look at the Occulus guys - they originally planned on having the prototype developer hardware to be assembled with hot glue and duct tape. Well, that's fine for 250 units hand-assembled. Not so much with all the support they got, so now they have to invest a lot more money into moulds (easily $30K each) so it can be assembled in China (the original plan I believe was hand assembly by the team).

The problem is, ramping up is way beyond most people's abilities - it's trivial to make one-offs of something, even small runs, but once you get to larger runs a lot of work needs to be done.

250 can be done by a small team of people in the kickstarter over two or three weeks. To do 1000 this way is untenable - do it in 4 batches and you'll find the team burnt out by the 3rd batch.

So now you have to investigate contract manufacturers, have to do trial runs, costs of shipping, customs, etc. What you planned to complete in a few months suddenly takes a few months before production can get started, period. More if there are production problems (like a small tricky assembly gets done wrong, so it doesn't work and you have yields below 90%) because you didn't design for manufacture (again, something most people don't need to do for small runs).

Or, perhaps you planned on using a 3D printer to make parts, great for small runs, even contracted out. But this too can be problematic - Apple has seen this when they made an iPhone 4 part in a machine designed for prototyping, which resulted in Foxconn having to buy 20 of the machines to build enough parts. Probably more to accomodate breakdowns, since these machines aren't designed to run 24/7 continually.

And most people on KS do NOT have the skills, contacts, or ability to handle it when it blows up. It makes sense - some Joe comes up with something cool and gets a KS done to raise money to build it. But once it breaks beyond a "backyard hacking" style of manufacture to mass production, most folks are way beyond their league.

And the problem is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Timelines on crowd funding sites are just estimates.

If you fund a project expecting them to meet your deadlines you are a fool.

Don't fund it because you expect them to hit their deadlines, fund it because it is a cool product that you want when it is actually ready.

I have funded a number of cool projects and been very happy with the resulting hardware when I got it.

Re:And the problem is?

[neminem]

> Timelines are just estimates.
> If you fund a project expecting them to meet your deadlines you are a fool.

Fixed that for you.

Just Kickstarter???

[Omega Hacker]

*ALL* projects have a high rate of blowing deadlines, that's what happens with complex stuff. Show me numbers that Kickstarter projects have a worse rate of being late than any other comparable projects out there, and then we can talk.

Re:Just Kickstarter???

[amiga3D]

I don't notice normal projects doing more than giving lip service to keeping customers, or consumers as most call them nowadays, happy. It seems everyone slips deadlines and cuts projected implementations and covers it with excuses of all types. I think this is what the normal projects excel at, telling lies to make up for amended expectations. In fact I believe that is the number one function of upper management.

Re:Just Kickstarter???

[Samantha Wright]

Well, if it's a creative project, that means without a question more work into the design and execution process with some fraction of the number of workers that's inflexible. If it's a non-creative project and the number of people is variable, then there's still O(n^2) communication overhead. Sure, for some projects more money directly results in more product and the work is embarrassingly parallelizable (e.g. a production run of something that already exists), but any project that's predominantly product development will have to experience some manner of growth in consumption of time.

I'll look into it

[crazyjj]

If you guys will float me $20,000 in costs, I'll launch an investigation at some point in the future. $1,000 donation gets you first dibs on the report I'll produce!

Tech time lines

[EmperorOfCanada]

First I plead guilty to the worst time estimating ever. I would probably guess wrong as to how long it will take me to make this post. I have had personal 2 week projects drag on for 6 months no problem. So if anyone has some great rules of thumb I would love to know. Years ago I met a CFO who had just finished grilling his tech guy for over an hour getting the tech guy to come up with a worst case scenario for the project they were about to begin. In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.

I have taken a great PMI course and would recommend it to anyone in tech. Yet the PMI stuff was great if the project was fairly straightforward. But most tech projects, especially those found on kickstarter, are not really building projects so much as R&D which by its nature delves into the unknown. So scheduling the unknown is either going to be very fuzzy or lies. Since most people insist on a fixed date they are insisting on being lied to .

So I would be the last to cast stones and would doubt fraud until the fuzziness of R&D had been eliminated.

Re:Tech time lines

[godrik]

"I have had personal 2 week projects drag on for 6 months no problem. So if anyone has some great rules of thumb I would love to know."

You know what they say: times 2, round up.
2 weeks x 2 = 1 month. round up : 1 year.

Re:Tech time lines

[PantherSE]

Years ago I met a CFO who had just finished grilling his tech guy for over an hour getting the tech guy to come up with a worst case scenario for the project they were about to begin. In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.

I would say this is a good CFO. The CFO understood that he had a choice: get it done quickly, or get it done right the first time; and he chose the latter.

Re:Tech time lines

[cadience]

My 'Rule of Thumb': estimatedHours * 3.14

Manager: your time estimates are surprisingly accurate; what is your secret.
Me: Thanks, I multiply by PI to account for being ran around in circles.
Manger: *not amused*

Funny? Yes, but also a true story.

Re:Tech time lines

[Coeurderoy]

my wok is fine, but my frying pan needs to be replaced :-)

WAGS

[Grashnak]

'Why are so many crowdfunded projects blowing their deadlines? "

Because most tech timelines barely qualify as even Wild Ass Guesses?

Better late than never

[Hatta]

Doesn't bother me one bit as long as they end up delivering.

No, that's not the problem

[Animats]

Volume production isn't the problem. Looking at the list of Kickstarter projects labelled "Where the *** is it?", many of them are games, or even just videos. Game and video "manufacturing" is trivial. There's no excuse for "BronyCon, the documentary" or the "Leisure Suit Larry" remake being far behind schedule. Not when each raised over half a million dollars.

Doesn't have anything to do with Kickstarter

[ddd0004]

You can remove the word Kickstarter from that headline and it is just as true.

Re:I know the answer...

[gweihir]

And that breaks the model completely, as they will be back into the clutches of other sources of financing. Like publishers that have messed up so many basically good products.

Yes, but...

[roc97007]

Most of anything fails to deliver on time. Precisely meeting delivery dates is overrated, if what you deliver is junk.

I strongly suspect that most product development doesn't deliver at all. It seems like Kickstart is doing much better than average in that respect.

Re:What incentive?

[zhrike]

Many times, I've considered creating a project that is an Open Source, Apple product related, DIY bullshit thing and just taking the money. Heck, I still might.

Congratulations. You're a dick.

Kickstarter is set up in a way that there's no incentive, at all, for anybody to do anything once they get the money.

Except integrity.

Re:who would have thunk it

[dkleinsc]

You're assuming that in order to be a business owner, you need to be good at business.

That's demonstrably untrue. For instance, many business owners got there because their dad (or granddad or great-granddad) were good at business, even if Junior is a complete idiot. Other business owners are people that got a big pile of wealth by other means and invested it in an existing business and were thus put in charge by virtue of their voting shares. Still others owe their position to successfully "failing upwards" i.e. getting promoted despite failing left and right.

Common Sense 101 MIA

[epine]

Where have all the smart people gone? I've read several dozen posts and not one has pointed out that the problem of promising a scalar delivery date before determining subscription level can't possibly optimize over a metric of on-time delivery.

Kickstarter projects should be providing an estimated delivery date as a function of subscription level, where x1 (or less) is the number most projects now promote, but you also have numbers for x3, x10, x30, and x100. Out my ass, I'd guess you could fit a curve to existing Kickstarter data that would add six weeks to the deadline for each multiple of 3 in oversubscription level.

The Pebble project actually hit x100, so a realistic ship date in my mind might be 4x6=24 weeks later than the originally promised early fall delivery date.

The positive influence of having substantially greater funds to deploy (Pebble hired more people than originally planned) is wiped out and then some by the hugely increased risk level. If Pebble manufactures 85,000 watches, ships most of them out immediately, then discovers that 20% of the devices fail in under three months due to faulty moisture control or creeping solder whiskers, they might as well just blow the hole thing up.

Who is going to show up with $2,000,000 to bail them out of a huge PR fiasco?

One could say that the Pebble originally promised is late. Or one could say that the originally promised Pebble will never ship because it no longer exists. I tend to take the second view. The Pebble that ships 6 months downstream of the delivery date promoted during the funding cycle is not the same device. The manufacturing standards are higher, the QA standards are higher, additional features have been added (higher level BT standard, additional waterproofing), and the development environment should be further along (though I haven't seen any tangible evidence of this as yet).

The whole problem here begins with the phrase "The Pebble". "The Pebble" people thought they were buying/endorsing ceased to exist as the subscription level climbed toward the first $1,000,000 (the x10 subscription level). Pebble went deep into the regime of "a Pebble" from a spectrum of possible Pebble delivery scenarios.

The Pebble promoted was supposed to be manufactured in the S.F. region. The Pebble delivered will have been manufactured off shore in China. Until the subscription level was determined, we were truthfully talking about a Pebble modulo volume and risk. There's not even any point in totting up on-time delivery statistics without confronting the central fiction of the Kickstarter model.

When I signed up mid-snowball I viewed it as a quantum superposition of two entrepreneurial stories: A) a relatively low volume run with mid grade QA, immature tools, and a small target market; B) a high volume run with high volume QA standards, somewhat mature tools, and a moderately large target market for app developers.

The story was acceptable to me, either way. One watch, two stories. Kickstarter is not a single story engagement, even if the convention holds that only one of these stories is mentioned during project promotion.

A person has to be in some profound eigenstate of stupid, uniformed, myopic, deluded, distracted, self-serving, or litigious to fail to figure this out.