[avidanr]

I agree that its not a forgone conclusion that kickstarter traction == product market fit....but if your KS campaign is well executed, it could be. Essentially, i see KS as much more of a community builder and low cost testing grounds for market development. A really great KS campaign can tell a great story of audience discovery through advertising purchases. For example, when we launch Spark (now Particle), we thought it would be hardware hobbyists. After looking through the list of backers, we found out that it was actually professional engineers, looking for a good wifi solution for prototyping. Had we focused on shipping before talking with our audience, we would have put our energy into the wrong place. With Prynt for example, we found a specific demographic (young female) was the best click thru we had...this changed our collateral and retail conversations.

Then there is the question of what qualifies as a "successful campaign"? If you sell your product at a loss (I can point to some examples) and sell over a million, i dont know if i consider that a success. Whereas, Particle has done multiple 600k plus campaigns. For a consumer product that might be OK, but for a developer kit, that represents a massive amount of LTV.

All in all, i would say that I dont invest entirely based on a kickstarter campaign (and most often commit before the campaign happens) but the more data the better, and the more action the team has done, the better to learn their behaviors.