I just attended a meet-up this evening with Slava Rubin, Indiegogo's CEO, and that was one of the topics he covered during his talk. The psychology of crowdsourced projects is fascinating.
Basically the analogy is that if you want to raise 100, you set your goal to 50, and will probably end up with 120. Now if you set your goal to 100, you may end up with 20 and a failed campaign. Same project, same pitch, same perks.
Of course this is not exact science, but you got the idea. The special advice is to figure out the number that you need (versus what you want), and make sure you can cross the 1/3 of the funding early on.
Lots of things come into play: initial inertia, exposure, acceleration as you get closer to your goal, resistance around 1/3, etc.
"People only back winners." If people think that there's no way they'll ever reach that ambitious goal, they won't contribute, so there will be no way they'll ever reach that ambitious goal.
The irony is that Kickstarter's design ensures you won't lose any money backing a loser. In theory, backing a loser should be a risk-free proposition, but folks clearly don't see it that way.
I think part of the problem is that deciding to be a backer has a mental cost (decisions are painful). If a project has a very low chance of success, perhaps the cost of the process of decision making outweighs the small chance of a potential gain.
If you define a loser as a kickstarter that doesn't reach 100% funding, you're right
The OP you're responding to though defined a loser as someone who has unattainable goals in the eyes of the people. In which case you can certainly lose your money.
I'm trying to figure out how to hack this psychology. I'm starting at 1/10 what I NEED, and running it into a phase II. That way we can declare an initial victory to capture the 'people like to back a winner' and then leverage the donor network to go the whole way.
Keep in mind the psychology cuts both ways. While people don't want to back a loser, I can imagine some people (particularly geeks and alpha types) would avoid backing what they feel that has "jumped the shark".
Using my initial analogy, if you need 100, setting your goal to 5 may not be the wisest move, as you may face resistance when you get to multiple times your goal. After you get to, say, 55, you'll be already 1000% over your target, but still largely behind your real need.
It's like the sharing psychology - what matters is if it will make you look good. You don't share with your friends on FB that YouTube video with 50 million views. You'll feel like the last person on earth to discover it.
I'd bet the same happens on crowdfunding projects.
Basically the analogy is that if you want to raise 100, you set your goal to 50, and will probably end up with 120. Now if you set your goal to 100, you may end up with 20 and a failed campaign. Same project, same pitch, same perks.
Of course this is not exact science, but you got the idea. The special advice is to figure out the number that you need (versus what you want), and make sure you can cross the 1/3 of the funding early on.
Lots of things come into play: initial inertia, exposure, acceleration as you get closer to your goal, resistance around 1/3, etc.