Kickstarter makes it looks easy to get funded for a project. Just put together a good enough video and people are dying to give out money! While it’s easy to see all the successfully funded projects on Kickstarter, it’s harder to find the failed projects. It makes sense not to show them to consumers–there’s no point in looking at a project you can’t fund. But for developers looking to learn what makes a successful Kickstarter, it’s helpful to see the successes and failures. Dan Misener’s Kickback Machine makes it easy to learn from past Kickstarters, allowing viewers to sort by funding goal and success or failure of the project.

Kickstarter’s website does a good job of helping you find past successes. But it can be very difficult to find past projects that failed to meet their funding goal.

The KickBack Machine allows you to browse past successes and failures to help you better plan your own campaign.

Things like generic t-shirts, videogame projects with no pledge level to buy the game, and projects with really high goals seem doomed to failure. The unsuccessful projects remain on the Internet, like skeletons of dreams, or fossils of ideas.