About

Hi, I’m Samuel Ronsin, the author of this blog and creator of a x plus b. You can learn more about me here, follow me on [Twitter, GitHub, AngelList].

The purpose of this blog is to engage in a conversation with crowdfunding campaigners, in order to crowdsource interesting questions that I can then ask the data.
You’re very welcome to comment on the posts or reach me to address problems you had with your own campaign, past, current or forthcoming – especially if you believe data analysis could be useful to solve it.

To power the analysis behind a x plus b, there are two main datasets which are designed to address two different kinds of questions.
The first set gathers the final data of about 200 000 campaigns. It comprises anything I could extract from their static webpage: the goal, whether it was successful or not, the description of the project.
The second dataset was made available by Vincent Etter from EPFL, following the article he co-authored on the dynamics of crowdfunding campaigns. It features longitudinal data (i.e. consecutive updates on the temporary state of a campaign while it was live) from 16 000 campaigns.