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 does

Gives you the real odds first. Not “anyone can do this.” The actual proportion of projects like yours that funded, broken down to your subcategory, with the sample size shown next to every number.

Scores how ready your own campaign is. Eleven questions — goal size, manufacturing costs, delivery dates, prototype, pre-launch audience, how the risks are written — and a score out of 100. Five of those factors are fitted against 57,982 recent campaigns; the other six are judgement, and the tool labels which is which rather than passing opinion off as measurement.

Then tells you what to do about it. A score on its own is just a verdict. The report ends with a ranked fix list: what to change, in what order, and how many points each fix is worth. Showing someone their odds and then wishing them luck isn’t help.

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

It cannot collect anything

The whole tool is one HTML file that makes zero network requests. No analytics, no fonts from a CDN, no form posts. Nothing you type leaves the machine you typed it on, and that isn’t a privacy promise you have to trust — it’s a property of the file, and the source is public so you can check it.

That matters because people put unlaunched product ideas into it.

Open LaunchPath · Download it (save the page — it works offline, forever, with no internet connection) · Read the source

⚠️ The thing this has to say on page one

Kickstarter requires project creators to be 18 or over. Younger makers 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 first-time creator under eighteen 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 on the team’s behalf. That infrastructure already exists and is worth knowing about before the idea, not after.

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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Source for the eligibility rules: Who is Eligible to Use Kickstarter?