Is Seed & Spark's high crowdfunding success rate for real?

May 22, 2017

In our industry, it's not uncommon to hear people making bold claims. They declare that their film is going to make a fortune, that they will soon collect an Oscar and that their new start-up is better than anything else on the market.

Normally I just ignore this hyperbole, but once in a while, I ask for proof. Few people reply and even fewer can back up their claims. Today's article is about one company that can and did defend their bold claim.

Seed & Spark is a crowdfunding platform aimed at the film industry which claims to have "the highest success rate in the crowdfunding business". As regular readers will know, I have studied the world of film crowdfunding for a while, including a complete study of all film projects on Kickstarter over a five year period, so I was keen to test out their claim.

I emailed Seed & Spark asking them for the data and, rather surprisingly, they gave me granular level of detail to all their projects. This is unusual. Few companies are this open and transparent.

I have been through the Seed & Spark data and this is what I found...

A quick introduction to Seed & Spark

Seed & Spark was founded in 2012 by CEO Emily Best and to date has raised just over $7 million for film projects.

To date, there have been 744 projects launched on the site, of which 46% were short films, 35% were feature films, 16% were series-based and the remaining few projects include film festivals, companies, platforms, parties and VR experiences.

Seed & Spark's success rate

Let's look at their claim that they have the "highest success rate in the crowdfunding business". Based on my research of all their projects to date, I can confirm that Seed & Spark have a success rate of 75%.

Let's compare this with the industry's biggest crowdfunding site, Kickstarter. My research into Kickstarter concluded that their overall success rate for film projects was 43%.

Note: The Kickstarter data only goes up the third quarter of 2015 as that was when I conducted my research.

I haven't performed deep analysis of other crowdfunding platforms but we can certainly look at what other sites are claiming.

Ulule say that their Film and Video projects have a 72% success rate.
Pozible say they have a 57% success rate, although that's for the whole site, not just for film projects.
According to Wired, Tubestart (a platform executively covering film and video projects) has a 32% success rate.
I spoke to IndieGoGo's Head of Creative, Marc Hofstatter. Although the company does not release figures publicly, he stated that their success rate for film projects is "around 30%".
The Wired study mentioned above found that 13% of RocketHub projects were successful.

So, on the face of this slightly patchy and disjointed data, it does seem that Seed & Spark are the most successful platform for filmmakers. I stand chastened for my initial cynicism!

The projects on Seed & Spark

Before we end this topic, I thought it would be useful to discuss a little more about the projects on Seed & Spark. First up, genre. Each project is assigned one or two genres (45% have one and 55% have two), the most common of which is drama, accounting for 42% of projects. Other popular genres include comedy (27%), documentary (18%) thriller (8%) and horror (6%).

The chart below shows the number of successful and unsuccessful projects of each genre, along with their overall success rate. Romantic comedy, experimental and mystery projects have the highest success rate, although the number of these projects is low so their average success rate could change significantly with just a few additional projects.

To date, the average pledge has been $113, although this shifts a lot each month, depending on the projects available on the site.

The five most successful film projects on Seed & Spark are:

Ordinary Women - Goal: $200,000, followers: 4,152, genre: Animation, History. This is an animated series about women in history who “defied history" and every short is animated in a style determined by that individual woman’s story.
Greatest Hits - Goal: $150,100, followers: 128, genre: Documentary. Documentary about music photographer Chris Cuffaro and the famous musicians he photographed.
Money & Violence Season 2 - Goal: $100,000, followers: 1,720, genre: Crime. Series about living in Flatbush, Brooklyn “where all they respect is ‘Money and Violence’.” A story about surviving on the streets, which follows an ensemble cast.
LUMPIA 2 - Goal: $75,000, followers: 316, genre: Action, Comedy. A sequel to a Filipino-American feature film starring former UFC fighter Mark Munoz.
Groupers - Goal: $75,000, followers: 1,580, genre: Comedy, Drama. A slightly weird story about a young woman who kidnaps two homophobic hate-mongers who believe sexuality is a choice, ties them up in the bottom of a pool, and refuses to release them until they can prove homosexuality is a choice.

One of the successful Seed & Spark projects was to provide funding for... Seed & Spark! Launched in May 2013 by S&S CEO Emily Best, the project was entitled "Seed&Spark's Seed&Spark!" and successfully raised $31,966.

It brings to mind the (far less serious) projects over the years that aimed to use crowdfunding to buy crowdfunding platforms. My favourite is the 2015 IndieGoGo project entitled "I want to buy Kickstarter". The project was summarised thus:

It's always been my dream to own the most successful crowdfunding platform. With your help, that's possible by way of this less successful crowdfunding platform.

It confidently offered just three levels of rewards - $5 got you a drawing of Guy Fieri, $10 got you a nude drawing of Guy Fieri and for $200 million you could become CEO of Kickstarter. Sadly the campaign only raised $148 towards its $2,000,000,000 goal.

Notes

Personally, I'm such a cynic that when I read an article so glowingly positive it sounds like an advertorial, I expect cast iron statements of independence. Therefore, here is my Shermanesque statement:

I was not paid, rewarded, induced or coerced into writing this article. Some of the raw data came from Seed & Spark, but I did my best to independently verify everything I could and never found anything amiss. The S&S team had sight of an advance copy of the article in order to point out errors but did not edit any of the findings or opinions.

All the data and stats were correct at the time of writing. I am not going to update them (other than to correct errors), so by the time you're reading this the success rates could have changed.

Epilogue

I'm extremely grateful to the Seed & Spark team for their help in the researching of this article, especially Emily and Max. They opened up their data and answered questions in a very generous and open way. It's always heartening to see companies who are not afraid to provide evidence of their claims and I'm happy to support those that do.