Learning to fail: experiencing public failure online through crowdfunding

Online crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter are gaining attention among novice creatives as an effective platform for funding their ventures and engaging in creative work with others. However, a focus on financial success of crowdfunding has obscured the fact that over 58% of crowdfunding projects fail to achieve their funding goals. This population of failed creatives however, gives us an audience to study public creative failure in an online environment. We draw inspiration from work in organizational behavior on failure, and work in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on online behavior, to study online public failure. Using a mixed-methods approach with data scraped from Kickstarter and interview data with failed crowdfunding project creators, we answer the following question: What do project creators on crowdfunding platforms learn and change through the process of failing? We find that creators who relaunch their projects succeed 43% of the time, and that most individuals find failure to be a positive experience. We conclude the paper with a series of design implications for future creative platforms where public failure is part of the creative process.

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