Crowdfunding Campaign Research

Crowdfunding campaign research

Compare campaigns with their currencies, lifecycle stages, and evidence limits intact. Funding success, creator statements, and fulfilled rewards are distinct.

Setup

Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY to your key from crawlora.net. Run the bundled scripts/crawlora.sh from this skill directory or by absolute path. It sends x-api-key to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1; keep the key in the environment. Read reference/endpoints.md for the four Kickstarter tools and optional public page research.

Discover and inspect campaigns

1. Define the product category, comparison purpose, campaign stage, and collection bound. Search /kickstarter/discover with term, 1-based page, and sort: magic, popularity, newest, end_date, or most_funded.
2. Set state explicitly for a lifecycle comparison. Repeat the key for multiple values: upcoming, live, late_pledge, canceled, failed, successful. Omitted state uses the upstream live/late-pledge default, which cannot establish historical success rates. staff_pick_only introduces editorial selection. Use returned category.id for a narrower query; there is no dedicated category discovery endpoint in this selection, so do not invent category IDs.
3. Resolve the canonical project URL. Extract BOTH its creator path segment and project slug for /kickstarter/project, /kickstarter/updates, and /kickstarter/comments. Creator display names and numeric IDs are not substitutes.
4. Compare goal, pledged amount, backer count, lifecycle state, launch/deadline, and collection time. Match currency or use an explicitly labeled comparable conversion. Funding percent is not a comparable scale of absolute demand; different goals and elapsed campaign durations matter.
5. Inspect story, risks, and available reward tiers. Preserve amounts, currencies, shipping conditions, estimated delivery, and availability. Missing reward_tiers can mean capture failure or no tiers. Project goal/percent/date fields may be zero when a supplemental lookup misses; cross-check discovery before calculating ratios or interpreting a zero as a genuine campaign value.
6. Read creator updates in chronological context, distinguishing promises, reported production/shipping milestones, and independently supported outcomes. The updates endpoint has no page parameter; preserve the returned coverage.
7. Sample comments with explicit limits: the comments endpoint exposes only the initial batch, without further pagination. total_count is the feed's total, not the number collected. Exclude is_creator=true replies from backer-comment denominators. Attribute concerns as reports, not established defects or fraud.

scripts/crawlora.sh /kickstarter/discover \
  term="board game" state=live state=successful sort=newest page=1
# Read creator and slug from a returned /projects/CREATOR/SLUG URL.

Deliverable and interpretation

Return campaign links, cohort rules, dated funding/reward comparisons, update milestones, sampled comment themes with counts, disagreements, and open questions. For a single snapshot, describe status; do not invent funding velocity or earlier daily totals. State how many comments were collected versus the reported total.

• Successful funding is not proof of reward delivery or profitable production. See Kickstarter's project basics.
• A self-selected set of highly funded projects cannot estimate platform success rates. Average pledge size is not necessarily a unit price or units sold.
• Keep update date strings when parsing is ambiguous and cite short excerpts. Research does not pledge, message creators, or create recurring monitoring.
• Bound discovery pages and detail calls. Stop on empty/repeated pages. Back off on 429, retry transient 5xx once, stop on 401/403, and check application code; missing sources should remain visible in the resulting brief.