6 ms·

Georgia Tech Researchers Reveal Phrases that Pay on Kickstarter

130 points by nkvl 13y ago

nkvl 13y ago
The paper: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mitra.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mit...
- thirdtruck 13y ago
  Thanks! This will be the first technical paper that I've read in too long.
taeric 13y ago
Just glancing, I'm not sure anything new was learned here. Seems to just confirm what sales types have known for a while.
- thirdtruck 13y ago
  I'm not one of those sales-types (at least not yet), so I'm glad to have this info now, even if I missed the window to use it with my last Kickstarter. :) That leaves me wondering: how well do sales tactics work on selling yourself on things like regular exercise, better food habits, and the like?
  - taeric 13y ago
    My understanding is that psychology works well. Pretty much period. You just have to remember that it is all a statistics thing, though. Usually where none of the interesting results are 0% or 100%.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    You could do worse than start with Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, the Physchology of Persuasion. See also https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d8c54975-bd0a-410b-b266-d73c1f45c641 https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d8c54975-bd0a-410....
    - vonnik 13y ago
      We ran this piece last year. The Georgia Tech piece seems to confirm what people in friendfunding were doing already, which is reassuring: http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/68183891411/what-crowdfunders-can-learn-from-friendfunding-and http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/68183891411/what-crowdfunde...
    - dclara 13y ago
      Thank you for your reference. It tells the real tactics about how to win the trust from people and how to put influence on others. But the same tactics may generate different results from person to person. The same for every Kickstarter project. We all like to be positive, consistent and with integrity. We show our expertise and authority, be friendly. Unfortunately, things turn out to be not working that well. Maybe you guys can help me a little bit on how to improve my Kickstarter project: http://kck.st/JNqv8z http://kck.st/JNqv8z
      - thirdtruck 13y ago
        I just launched a successful Kickstarter campaign back in November, so I'll share what feedback that I can: * The copy focuses too much on the product features, rather than on how you, the backer, will improve as a person for using it. * The video sounds and feels too corporate. Many Kickstarter backers seem to seek out interesting people as much if not more so than interesting projects. I only watched more than 10 seconds of it for the sake of offering feedback. * This particular input will hurt to read: the example website's just plain ugly as sin. All those buttons and fields contradict the "one place" promise central to the whole offering, too. * The service tries to do too do much, straining my imagination rather than exciting it. * Online services seem to have hard a hard time of it on Kickstarter. Services as a deliverable are also hard to picture (in contrast to the concrete images of books, gourmet chocolate, etc.). * Millions of dollars couldn't fix web portals for Yahoo and other corporate giants. The offering is a 1990s-style web portal, as far as I can tell. My actionable advice: * Start with something much smaller, ideally something you could complete or attempt out of your own pocket. A single-purpose, single-platform app, for example. * Tim Ferris blogged about running a Kickstarter campaign. Treat that as your bible (scaling your efforts accordingly). I'm including the advice to hire a virtual assistant in this. You will have no free time for mundane tasks while running the Kickstarter. * Shut down the current Kickstarter. Kicktraq will confirm that it has no chance of succeeding. Keeping the "sunk cost" fallacy in mind, better to devote your time and limited mental energy to starting again. * Keep trying. I might have succeeded on my own first Kickstarter, but with years of creative effort and outreach preceding that. Good luck!
themodelplumber 13y ago
Man, tough read, having been away from academia! I tried to write up what would be, according to the paper, pretty much the most effective Kickstarter pitch ever: "We are domain experts on Christina Aguilera, and we've teamed up with one of the top production teams to shoot a full documentary WITH her participation!!! We're so excited!!! Everyone who has pledged will get our incredible supporter rewards package. In addition, when you sign up at level 2, we'll mention your name in the credits and you'll receive two VIP tickets to our premiere. That's right--you'll be able to hang out with tons of top industry experts and performers! We have spared no expense and our friends in the industry are excited to see the result. This option won't last long (expires on February 1) so grab the chance to lock in these extra goodies while you have the opportunity. All that plus the good old-fashioned karma you'll receive by being a supporter. We've also learned that a wave of people from website X just pledged. This is so incredibly humbling and awesome! Your pledges will go a long way toward enhancing the creative potential of people everywhere. Thanks also for your support and encouragement on Twitter, Facebook, and every other social network where we have a presence. I'm off to feed my cat and tell him the good news. Thanks again everybody!"
- taybin 13y ago
  TAKE MY MONEY!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- greendestiny 13y ago
  I know your comment was mostly a joke but thats actually a great distillation of the paper. Apart from not caring about a Christina Aguilera documentary, it does seem like a powerful pitch to me. I guess it reads somewhat more like an request to help make something happen that otherwise wouldn't rather than a presales channel.
nathancahill 13y ago
Markov chain seeded with the positive phrases: Fall locations it goes well striving to the builds. If you want one thing: her new crown. Realize the card quarterly, make sure your host will likely school. Free access completing the offer of this new room and achieve their win. Showing the hard work, serious about playing with the builds. And negative phrases: For kids, know you mission is meeting pearl. You select a panels way of life at the eyes of the ancient and seem like digging. Make up akin to a thousand dollar professional. To get great, expand and extremely this option a broaden to feeling that stands. Needs a crowd and makes a broaden to come see explored ears. Items that college students and write using some much closer.
danso 13y ago
OK, so I'm betraying my ignorance of statistics here...but aren't there just too many other variables that far outweigh the one studied here, and despite attempts to control for them...aren't easily quantified? The actual product, for one thing. How do the researchers quantify the real world (or hyped) appeal of Pebble and Ninja Baseball? Do they look at the respective markets for such products? Such a factor seems to so far outweigh a textual description that it almost seem a low ROI to spend an inordinate time on exact phrasing. Edit: OK I read the paper. Seems to be no or very little mention of inherent product qualities...thus, this study seems very limited, and missing the forest for the trees
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  You are right, the emperor/empress really has no clothes on.
cordie 13y ago
So you're telling us that copywriting matters. Duh.
- catshirt 13y ago
  no, they're telling us what specific subset of copywriting is effective.
minimax 13y ago
The phrase at the top of the list for phrases signaling that the project won't be funded is "pledged" but the 3rd, 4th and 5th ranked phrases signaling that the project will be funded are "has pledged", "pledged will", and "pledged and". How are you supposed to interpret those seemingly conflicting results? Another fishy thing is that the top of the list for phrases signaling that the project will be funded is the phrase "project will be". It's fishy because whenever you meet your funding goal, Kickstarter puts a blurb on your page saying "This project will be funded on <deadline>"†. It makes me wonder whether their scraper accidentally picked up some text that was not part of the user created promotional text. † https://www.google.com/#q=%22This+project+will+be+funded%22+site%3Akickstarter.com https://www.google.com/#q=%22This+project+will+be+funded%22+... Edit: One more thing. I would be much more convinced of the model accuracy if they had tested it on provably out of sample data. I.e. Take their model as it stands today and use it to generate a prediction for the next 1000 campaigns posted to Kickstarter. Compare the prediction results to the actual outcomes and post the results.
wikwocket 13y ago
This seems like a really cool idea, but I'm not sure if the results are meaningful, and I'm very doubtful that any of the results are actionable. Reading the actual paper, all of the phrases are just 2-3 words, and most are extremely generic phrases. ("used in a", "all supporters", "pledged", "information at", etc) These phrases may have predictive power due to some broad trends in language, but I don't see how to extract meaning or intuition from the lists of top 100 positive and negative words. Perhaps I just lack an understanding of the statistics though.
mbesto 13y ago
So the research shows that good marketing works.
phodo 13y ago
If anyone is interested, the buckets mentioned are derived from a book by Cialdini (I didn't read the paper to see if properly attributed - probably was) that I read in grad school, and has had an impact on how I think about negotiation, business, marketing, product, etc. It's one of those great books whose lessons you carry with you many years later. Hope you find it useful. http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...
mathattack 13y ago
This seems very consistent with Cialdini's pioneering work on influence and persuasion. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~a0083545/cloud/Robert%20Caldini_Influence,%20Psychology%20of%20Persuasion.pdf http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~a0083545/cloud/Robert%20Caldini_...

130 points by nkvl 13y ago

nkvl 13y ago

The paper: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mitra.pdf http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw14.crowdfunding.mit...

thirdtruck 13y ago
Thanks! This will be the first technical paper that I've read in too long.

taeric 13y ago

Just glancing, I'm not sure anything new was learned here. Seems to just confirm what sales types have known for a while.

thirdtruck 13y ago
I'm not one of those sales-types (at least not yet), so I'm glad to have this info now, even if I missed the window to use it with my last Kickstarter. :) That leaves me wondering: how well do sales tactics work on selling yourself on things like regular exercise, better food habits, and the like?
- taeric 13y ago
  My understanding is that psychology works well. Pretty much period. You just have to remember that it is all a statistics thing, though. Usually where none of the interesting results are 0% or 100%.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  You could do worse than start with Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, the Physchology of Persuasion. See also https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d8c54975-bd0a-410b-b266-d73c1f45c641 https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d8c54975-bd0a-410....
  - vonnik 13y ago
    We ran this piece last year. The Georgia Tech piece seems to confirm what people in friendfunding were doing already, which is reassuring: http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/68183891411/what-crowdfunders-can-learn-from-friendfunding-and http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/68183891411/what-crowdfunde...
  - dclara 13y ago
    Thank you for your reference. It tells the real tactics about how to win the trust from people and how to put influence on others. But the same tactics may generate different results from person to person. The same for every Kickstarter project. We all like to be positive, consistent and with integrity. We show our expertise and authority, be friendly. Unfortunately, things turn out to be not working that well. Maybe you guys can help me a little bit on how to improve my Kickstarter project: http://kck.st/JNqv8z http://kck.st/JNqv8z
    - thirdtruck 13y ago
      I just launched a successful Kickstarter campaign back in November, so I'll share what feedback that I can: * The copy focuses too much on the product features, rather than on how you, the backer, will improve as a person for using it. * The video sounds and feels too corporate. Many Kickstarter backers seem to seek out interesting people as much if not more so than interesting projects. I only watched more than 10 seconds of it for the sake of offering feedback. * This particular input will hurt to read: the example website's just plain ugly as sin. All those buttons and fields contradict the "one place" promise central to the whole offering, too. * The service tries to do too do much, straining my imagination rather than exciting it. * Online services seem to have hard a hard time of it on Kickstarter. Services as a deliverable are also hard to picture (in contrast to the concrete images of books, gourmet chocolate, etc.). * Millions of dollars couldn't fix web portals for Yahoo and other corporate giants. The offering is a 1990s-style web portal, as far as I can tell. My actionable advice: * Start with something much smaller, ideally something you could complete or attempt out of your own pocket. A single-purpose, single-platform app, for example. * Tim Ferris blogged about running a Kickstarter campaign. Treat that as your bible (scaling your efforts accordingly). I'm including the advice to hire a virtual assistant in this. You will have no free time for mundane tasks while running the Kickstarter. * Shut down the current Kickstarter. Kicktraq will confirm that it has no chance of succeeding. Keeping the "sunk cost" fallacy in mind, better to devote your time and limited mental energy to starting again. * Keep trying. I might have succeeded on my own first Kickstarter, but with years of creative effort and outreach preceding that. Good luck!

themodelplumber 13y ago

Man, tough read, having been away from academia! I tried to write up what would be, according to the paper, pretty much the most effective Kickstarter pitch ever: "We are domain experts on Christina Aguilera, and we've teamed up with one of the top production teams to shoot a full documentary WITH her participation!!! We're so excited!!! Everyone who has pledged will get our incredible supporter rewards package. In addition, when you sign up at level 2, we'll mention your name in the credits and you'll receive two VIP tickets to our premiere. That's right--you'll be able to hang out with tons of top industry experts and performers! We have spared no expense and our friends in the industry are excited to see the result. This option won't last long (expires on February 1) so grab the chance to lock in these extra goodies while you have the opportunity. All that plus the good old-fashioned karma you'll receive by being a supporter. We've also learned that a wave of people from website X just pledged. This is so incredibly humbling and awesome! Your pledges will go a long way toward enhancing the creative potential of people everywhere. Thanks also for your support and encouragement on Twitter, Facebook, and every other social network where we have a presence. I'm off to feed my cat and tell him the good news. Thanks again everybody!"

taybin 13y ago
TAKE MY MONEY!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
greendestiny 13y ago
I know your comment was mostly a joke but thats actually a great distillation of the paper. Apart from not caring about a Christina Aguilera documentary, it does seem like a powerful pitch to me. I guess it reads somewhat more like an request to help make something happen that otherwise wouldn't rather than a presales channel.

nathancahill 13y ago

Markov chain seeded with the positive phrases: Fall locations it goes well striving to the builds. If you want one thing: her new crown. Realize the card quarterly, make sure your host will likely school. Free access completing the offer of this new room and achieve their win. Showing the hard work, serious about playing with the builds. And negative phrases: For kids, know you mission is meeting pearl. You select a panels way of life at the eyes of the ancient and seem like digging. Make up akin to a thousand dollar professional. To get great, expand and extremely this option a broaden to feeling that stands. Needs a crowd and makes a broaden to come see explored ears. Items that college students and write using some much closer.

danso 13y ago

OK, so I'm betraying my ignorance of statistics here...but aren't there just too many other variables that far outweigh the one studied here, and despite attempts to control for them...aren't easily quantified? The actual product, for one thing. How do the researchers quantify the real world (or hyped) appeal of Pebble and Ninja Baseball? Do they look at the respective markets for such products? Such a factor seems to so far outweigh a textual description that it almost seem a low ROI to spend an inordinate time on exact phrasing. Edit: OK I read the paper. Seems to be no or very little mention of inherent product qualities...thus, this study seems very limited, and missing the forest for the trees

yetanotherphd 13y ago
You are right, the emperor/empress really has no clothes on.

cordie 13y ago

So you're telling us that copywriting matters. Duh.

catshirt 13y ago
no, they're telling us what specific subset of copywriting is effective.

minimax 13y ago

The phrase at the top of the list for phrases signaling that the project won't be funded is "pledged" but the 3rd, 4th and 5th ranked phrases signaling that the project will be funded are "has pledged", "pledged will", and "pledged and". How are you supposed to interpret those seemingly conflicting results? Another fishy thing is that the top of the list for phrases signaling that the project will be funded is the phrase "project will be". It's fishy because whenever you meet your funding goal, Kickstarter puts a blurb on your page saying "This project will be funded on <deadline>"†. It makes me wonder whether their scraper accidentally picked up some text that was not part of the user created promotional text. † https://www.google.com/#q=%22This+project+will+be+funded%22+site%3Akickstarter.com https://www.google.com/#q=%22This+project+will+be+funded%22+... Edit: One more thing. I would be much more convinced of the model accuracy if they had tested it on provably out of sample data. I.e. Take their model as it stands today and use it to generate a prediction for the next 1000 campaigns posted to Kickstarter. Compare the prediction results to the actual outcomes and post the results.

wikwocket 13y ago

This seems like a really cool idea, but I'm not sure if the results are meaningful, and I'm very doubtful that any of the results are actionable. Reading the actual paper, all of the phrases are just 2-3 words, and most are extremely generic phrases. ("used in a", "all supporters", "pledged", "information at", etc) These phrases may have predictive power due to some broad trends in language, but I don't see how to extract meaning or intuition from the lists of top 100 positive and negative words. Perhaps I just lack an understanding of the statistics though.

mbesto 13y ago

So the research shows that good marketing works.

phodo 13y ago

If anyone is interested, the buckets mentioned are derived from a book by Cialdini (I didn't read the paper to see if properly attributed - probably was) that I read in grad school, and has had an impact on how I think about negotiation, business, marketing, product, etc. It's one of those great books whose lessons you carry with you many years later. Hope you find it useful. http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...

mathattack 13y ago

This seems very consistent with Cialdini's pioneering work on influence and persuasion. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~a0083545/cloud/Robert%20Caldini_Influence,%20Psychology%20of%20Persuasion.pdf http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~a0083545/cloud/Robert%20Caldini_...