I’m a big fan of Kickstarter and was wondering what the pie chart means in someone’s profile? It looks like a game piece from Trivial Pursuit!
Trivial or not (yeah, I had to work that into my response) the pie chart that you’re talking about on people’s Kickstarter profile is actually quite informative and interesting to examine: Kickstarter is broken down into about a dozen different categories of crowdfunding campaigns and it shows at a glance how many different categories someone has supported through their efforts on the site.
Kickstarter itself, of course, is built around the idea of artists and creators coming up with a cool idea for a performance piece, a product, a service, or just something wry or funny, and then garnering support and a financial commitment from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people so that they have the funds to execute their plan. Personally, I love Kickstarter and find that browsing is a great way to tap into the zeitgeist of our culture, to see what people are inspired to create or support. Good fun, for sure. At this very moment Kickstarter has had over 136,000 projects meet their funding goals with a total of 14 million backers. There are over 4,000 projects active right now too. Crazy impressive.
In fact, you can check out my profile on Kickstarter: Dave Taylor on Kickstarter.
Let’s start there, actually. Here’s my profile:
You can see my “pie chart” on the lower right. Let’s zoom in – and while you’re at it, move your cursor over a segment too:
As you can see, I’ve backed about half of the different categories, and the one that the cursor’s over, technology, I’ve backed 7 projects. Pretty neat, really.
Someone who has backed in all categories gets this sweet little pie chart:
And, yes, if you find someone with a Kickstarter pie chart that looks like the below, they’re just exploring and haven’t back anything at all yet:
That’s it. The mystery of the great Kickstarter pie chart revealed at least. And now that you mention it, it does look exactly like a Trivial Pursuit game token, just with more than the six categories of that popular trivia game!