A free, private toolkit that tells first-time creators the truth about crowdfunding — your real odds, the moves that actually change them, and real campaigns like yours — built from 590,000 real Kickstarter projects.
Check your campaign readinessA young creator with a genuinely good idea usually has exactly one asset — the idea — and no map. The adult infrastructure (forming a company, patents, accounting) and the tactical know-how (what actually gets a campaign funded) are invisible walls. Meanwhile the most-hyped funding paths are the worst deal for a first-timer: venture capital funds ~1–2% of applicants and costs you majority ownership by Series A; TV pitch shows reach ~0.2% of applicants. Rewards crowdfunding funds ~40% of campaigns and costs 0% of your company — but only if you launch prepared. This toolkit is the map.
Not "Technology: hard." Your actual subcategory: DIY electronics funds at ~52%; apps at ~7%. Big crowded space or quiet corner — you'll know before you commit a year to the wrong shape.
Eleven plain questions across the eleven factors that separate prepared campaigns from unprepared ones — goal size, preparation time, campaign duration, pre-launch audience, prototype, manufacturing costing, and more. No sugarcoating: you get a ranked list of what to fix, weakest first.
A full written report compares you to the field and shows real matched campaigns — one that made it, one that came heartbreakingly close, one that didn't — from a database of 5,000 recent projects, each linked to its real page.
A ranked fix list turns your weak points into a to-do list. Work it, re-score, and launch when the data changes its mind — owning 100% of what you made.
Student makers and first-time hardware creators. School engineering programs, maker clubs, hackathon communities, and youth-entrepreneur organizations that want their members to test real ideas with real stakes — without handing over ownership to get started. It's free, it's open, and it works the same whether you found it through a club or on your own at 2am with an idea you can't stop thinking about.
Answer these before you hit publish. The score checks your Kickstarter against the things the data says actually move funding — and tells you what to fix first. Honest estimate, not a guarantee.
Scoring model updated 31 July 2026. We re-fitted the weights against 57,982 recent campaigns, comparing only campaigns within the same subcategory. Three things changed. Two new questions were added — how long you prepared before launching, and how many days your campaign runs — because together they carry more of the measurable signal than anything except goal size, and neither was being asked about. Video’s weight was halved, because its advantage has fallen from +21.6 points to +5.4 since 2019. And the reward-tier question no longer has campaign length bundled into it. The scale is still out of 100 and the verdict bands are unchanged, so scores stay comparable — but a campaign that was strong except for launching in a hurry will score lower than it did before, on purpose.
🔒 Nothing you type leaves your device. This page never talks to a server — open your browser's network tab if you want to verify.
This number only measures how ready you are — never whether your idea is good, and no score ever could tell you that. Don't let it talk you out of something real. Let this process be the push that makes it sharper. Funded or not, you'll walk away actually knowing how to run a business — that's the real win, with getting funded as the bonus.
This tab will hold interviews with real Kickstarter creators — solo makers up to established companies — talking about what worked on their campaigns and what they'd do differently, alongside images from their campaigns used with their written permission.
Nothing lives here yet. Interviews are being arranged, and nothing appears without the creator's signed consent. When it fills, every entry follows the same rules as the rest of this tool: links out, never embeds; no tracking; and a creator's appearance is not an endorsement of Launchpath — it's their story, told so the next first-timer learns from it.
A creator's own account of their campaign is testimony, not statistics — entries here will be labelled that way, exactly like the judgement factors in the score.
The things creators, parents, and program leads actually ask.
Where every number comes from, and the rules we follow so they stay honest.
Baseline: 378,662 campaigns (2009–2017). The classic public research dataset of Kickstarter projects. Used for the most reliable success-rate benchmarks — category and subcategory rates, the goal-size gradient, and outcome distributions.
Current snapshot: 210,806 campaigns (through June 2026). A monthly public crawl of Kickstarter. Used for current-era volumes, subcategory sizes and shares, trend direction, and the matched-example database.
The 5,000-campaign example database. A stratified sample from the current snapshot: 2,500 funded campaigns across the whole winning range, 1,500 near-misses (50–99% funded — deliberately over-sampled, since they're the rarest and most instructive outcome), and 1,000 clear failures — spread across all 15 categories and 160 subcategories, 84% launched 2024–2026, with extra density in Technology, Design, and Games (the maker/hardware audience), every record carrying its public numbers and a link to the real page.
Published research & platform rules. Kickstarter's own statistics and creator rules (working-prototype requirement, all-or-nothing funding, Risks & Challenges), academic work on delivery rates, and large-scale campaign analyses inform the scoring weights.
1. Estimates are labeled estimates. The odds figure guides decisions; it doesn't promise outcomes, and the tool says so wherever it appears.
2. Known bias is disclosed, not ignored. Monthly crawls over-sample successful projects, which inflates recent raw success rates. We therefore use the cleaner baseline for absolute rates and the snapshot only for rankings, shares, and volumes — where that bias can't mislead.
3. Failures are first-class data. Half the story lives in campaigns that didn't make it. The example database deliberately over-samples near-misses — the rarest and most instructive outcome band.
4. Everything checkable links to its source. Every matched example links to its live public page. No composites, no invented stories.
5. We collect nothing. No analytics, no storage, no accounts. The site cannot leak, sell, or lose what it never receives. This is verifiable in your browser's network tab.
6. Newer subcategories don't get invented numbers. Where a subcategory lacks enough history for a reliable rate (e.g. TTRPG, STL files, Toys), the tool says so and falls back to the category average, flagged in your report.
Bulk campaign data can't see everything. It doesn't know whether funded projects actually delivered (published research suggests ~9% of funded projects never do — our report warns about this, and deeper per-campaign research is ongoing). It can't measure idea quality, execution skill, or luck. And historical rates describe the past — categories shift, platforms change rules, and your campaign is not an average. Use the numbers the way a good pilot uses a weather report.
Free and open source (MIT) — read the code on GitHub. Zero network requests: nothing you type leaves this device.