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Congrats to Kickstarter!! This is the type of win-win startup I want to create/work at. Gives a simple example of pg's essay about wealth not being a fixed cake
by Jun8 15y ago
Congrats to Kickstarter!! This is the type of win-win startup I want to create/work at. Gives a simple example of pg's essay about wealth not being a fixed cake to share but that it can be created (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html).
Two things that piqued my interest:
1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No?
2) "After not having a single million dollar project in Kickstarter's first two-plus years, there are suddenly two within four hours of each other." Call it black swan, non-normality, heavy tail, whatever, this shows how common (and lumped) rare events are.
- Aqua_Geek 15y ago> 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No? I found that odd as well. Where's the websocket goodness?
- acgourley 15y agoThis just in: Web-socket powered dashboards not necessary for success.
- Aqua_Geek 15y agoYou're right - they're not. I'm not trying to argue that they are, though. I just assumed that a company that's dependent on projects succeeding to make their living would have something more than "keep hitting refresh" in place to track big projects like these.
- VikingCoder 15y agoWell, a web-socket dashboard could potentially lower their bandwidth costs, when people start refreshing the whole page every 10 seconds, just to watch one number change.
- untog 15y agoWell, given that this is the first time it's happened, I'd imagine the need for such a thing was small until now.
- Aqua_Geek 15y agoThe need to track up to a million dollars was small, sure. But if you're revenue is based on these projects, wouldn't you want some sort of real-time counter of $$ being pledged? Maybe I'm just being a statistics nut...
- untog 15y agoOh, don't get me wrong, I am too. But I don't know how stretched Kickstarter's team are- while I'd love to see a stats counter like that on my own project, I rarely have the time to put one together.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI would be more surprised if they did. For Kickstarter to succeed, they need the entire site doing well, not so mich individual projects, so tools to monitor individual projects are probably not the useful. On the other hand, stats about the whole site, eg donations per time period, new projects being created, total visitors, etc, would be much more relevant. Business like Kickstarter are about the long tail, not the mega-hits, and, if I were running it, I'd want my analytics to represent that.
- sp332 15y agoThey do have nice visualization tools, but they don't self-update. https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o.png https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o...
- InclinedPlane 15y agoConsider the time frame of funding for every single other project. On average, it takes a month or two just to raise a few thousand dollars of funding. Even the biggest projects only raise about a million dollars in that time frame, and those are rare. A project raising thousands of dollars per minute is exceptionally rare on kickstarter, why would they build a tool who's use case is specifically targeted to such an unusual and unprecedented event?