LaunchPath

Almost all crowdfunding advice is written by people selling crowdfunding advice. It is upbeat, unfalsifiable, and drawn from a handful of campaigns that succeeded — which is the definition of survivorship bias.

LaunchPath is built the other way round: from 590,000 real Kickstarter projects, successes and failures together. That’s enough to say what the base rate actually is for a first-time creator in a given category at a given funding goal, and — more usefully — which decisions measurably move it.

What it’s for

The real odds, stated up front. Not “anyone can do this.” The actual proportion of projects like yours that funded, and what separated them from the ones that didn’t.

The moves that change the number. Goal size relative to category. Launch timing. Whether an audience existed before day one. Which of these have real signal in the data and which are folklore.

Campaigns you can go and read. Real examples, including the ones that failed — because a failed campaign next to a successful one in the same category teaches more than ten success stories.

Built for Hack Club first

The first version is aimed at Hack Club — teenagers turning a project into something funded, and learning how a business actually works along the way. Doing it for a specific audience first means it can be concrete rather than generic. Other platforms, and eventually venture funding, come after.

⚠️ The thing this has to say on page one

Kickstarter requires project creators to be 18 or over. Minors can work on a project, but only under the supervision of an adult creator, and the account needs a government-issued ID and a bank account in that adult’s name.

For a toolkit whose entire premise is telling first-time creators the truth, this can’t be a footnote — it’s the first practical fact a fifteen-year-old needs. The useful version isn’t “you can’t”; it’s “here is how teams your age actually do this”: an adult creator, or a fiscal sponsor holding the legal entity and the bank account. Hack Club already runs exactly that infrastructure through HCB, which is why building for that audience first makes sense — the answer is already in the room.

The honest framing

This teaches how crowdfunding works and what the data says. It isn’t financial advice, it can’t promise an outcome, and a campaign that follows every data-supported move can still fail — that’s what a base rate means. Saying so is part of the product, not a disclaimer bolted to it.

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Sources for the eligibility rules: Who is Eligible to Use Kickstarter? · Hack Club fiscal sponsorship