23 Jan Why You Need Backerkit in Your Kickstarter | Game Design Lesson #20
When I first started designing my Kickstarter for Infected, I didn’t have much experience about Kickstarter. All I had to go off were the other Kickstarters that I’d seen, and Jamey Stegmaier’s blog, among others.
One of the first Kickstarters that I had noticed was Fragged Empire, by fellow Aussie Wade Dyer. He did a great job, both at designing the Kickstarter, raising funds, building a community, and fulfilling. I backed him on both of his projects.
One of the things I noticed on his Kickstarter was his use of Backerkit. I found out they are a fulfillment aid. They are a company dedicated to helping you to fulfill your Kickstarter more efficiently. I contacted them, liked what I saw, and decided to also go with them. Since n I’ve noticed that they’ve grown. A lot. And even Jamey Stegmaier liked their customer service and passion.
I recommend them highly. Here’s why.
So what is it, and why are they awesome?
Backerkit is essentially a website. It plugs in to your Kickstarter, downloads all your orders, and you send out surveys through them to all your backers. You get an instant count of who’s answered and who hasn’t. Interestingly, when they answer the survey you have the opportunity to upsell them to more items – go from a PDF up to a hardcopy, from a hardcopy to a premium, add on dice, screen, cards… you get the idea. It’s artistically presented too.
Then you can lock down any surveys you want, so that no changes can be made to them. And then you charge your backers, if they’ve ordered more items.
Some creators won’t use this feature, because they want the Kickstarter to be exclusive. Which makes sense. However, I had no problem with it. I figured that anyone pre-ordering or upsizing their order was doing me a favour – they were supporting my project, which was the whole idea of the campaign.
Pre-Orders
One of the features I liked the most about their platform is that they offer Pre-Orders. Actually, I just love this service. It allowed me to promote the game, give a link to the pre-order page, and people can buy the book and all the other bits and pieces!
I used this for about a year while I was preparing the game for delivery, and I had a lot of orders.
I treated all my Pre-Order backers the same as my Kickstarter backers, sending them out my stretch goals, and giving them the same discounted Kickstarter prices.
Complete Record
The best thing about Backerkit. The reason why I recommend it so highly, is actually that they give you a complete record of your Kickstarter orders. Every single order is in one place.
This becomes very important if you have a backer suddenly ask you whether their order has been sent. You can just look up their name.
Sure, you can do this on your spreadsheet too, but spreadsheets are a lot easier to make a mistake on. Also, you can end up like me, and have three different fulfillment operators. And what if you missed the backer? Forgot to put them on the spreadsheet? What then?! Backerkit will save you.
Having accurate records is about the most important thing you can have in a Kickstarter campaign. Without it, the whole project could end as a very expensive disaster. Backerkit’s fees are reasonable, and their customer service is great. They are dedicated to their business with the passion of an entrepreneur, which is something distinctly lacking in many companies these days.
~Oliver
For the record, I was not asked by Backerkit to make this review, and received no incentive for doing so.
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