Hi, everyone.
When I completed my first KickStarter campaign, raising over $150k from several thousand backers, I quickly realized that none of the commercially-available campaign fulfillment tools had anywhere near the capabilities I needed. So I decided to build my own project management solution that I could tune to my own specific needs and that was easy to customize. After over 6 months of tweaking, the result was BackerSupport.
BackerSupport lets you:
- Track and communicate with all your backers.
Define your product(s) and the rewards each product needs to deliver.
Easily import all your data from KickStarter, and automatically translate from the various backer reward levels to their associated products and rewards.
Keep your campaign running after your campaign terminates and accept new signups / addons via PayPal and other funding sources -- all you have to do is copy/paste the email and click a button!
Update backer information, products, deliverables, etc., quickly and easily.
Validate US addresses with the USPS automatically.
“Batch” product fulfillment to minimize shipping cost and optimize your workflow. In my project I have to keep track of 6 different items that have been ordered in 19 distinct combinations; BackerSupport handles this automatically.
Print mailing labels and/or export addresses to USPS Click-N-Ship (particularly handy for international shipments as it'll print labels with the customs form filled out!), Postage $aver (great for bulk mailing), UPS.com batch file upload or any other app you care to use.
Let your backers vote on things, and run STV elections (a real nerd-feature)
Generate lots of useful reports.
Flexibly export your data to other applications.
Localize and customize the interface in all sorts of ways.
BackerSupport is built on top of FileMaker, a popular database construction system. You won't need to own a copy of FileMaker to run the final app, but if you do, you can quickly add a field or write a script to add a feature you need – though it's likely that I've already run into your problem and already implemented a solution.
I was planning to simply make it available for people to use on a "pay me what you think it's worth" basis, but one of my current backers had a crazy idea -- "Do a KickStarter for it!"
The idea of doing a KickStarter campaign to support an App that supports KickStarter campaigns struck me as so delightfully recursive that I simply couldn't resist. I'm not doing the campaign to raise money (though I'm not opposed!), but rather to generate awareness, get feedback, and recruit alpha and beta-testers.
I would greatly appreciate your comments and suggestions, and I hope that when it's released, you'll find it useful.
