Statistics in My Life
Any time I hear someone brag,
“I’ve never used X in my life,”
I automatically assume that whatever it is, they haven’t learned it very well. Just about everything I’ve learned has come in useful, and the better I learned it, the more useful it is.
Take statistics, for example. There is nowhere in my life that knowledge of statistics isn’t helpful. Darling Daughter Number 3 competes in mixed martial arts and I’m the worrying type.
Whenever her next fight is announced, the very first thing I do is check the fight odds. For the one coming up in Brazil, she is a 15-1 favorite. Knowing that makes my stress level go down a little. I’ll still drop by her gym a time or two during camp just to reassure myself that all is going well. As I said, I’m a worrier.
The latest thing I’m worrying about is our Kickstarter campaign, but here again, statistics cheer me up. Two years ago, we did a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $20,000. I should have researched a bit better in advance because even though Kickstarter touted the 44% success rate that is an average (there’s that knowledge of statistics again). Things that were less likely to get funded were projects seeking over $10,000, game projects and projects not featured on Kickstarter. We fit all three. Pretty depressing. In fact, looking at the statistics after we had started our campaign last time I found that less than 5% of campaigns raised over $20,000.
Well, we made it. You’d think we have learned our lesson, but due to a couple of reasons, I’ll go into another day, we decided to do ANOTHER Kickstarter two years later. So, here we are today.
The bad news is that the success rate on Kickstarter has gone down. The overall success rate is now 39% . The semi-good news is that the success rate for games actually ticked up a bit – it was 33% two years ago and it is 34% now.
The really good news: success tends to be all or nothing – 79% of projects that raised 20% of their goal ended successfully funded. Of projects that raised 41% of their goal, 94% went on to be successfully funded. We’re at 42% and we still have two-thirds of our campaign to run, so I’m feeling somewhat less worried.