These are the slides I gave for a presentation at 1 Million Cups Peoria regarding the journey of developing a product to support project creators after their crowdfunding campaigns end, and the lessons learned along the way.

1. Climbing Everest
Developing a tool to support the crowdfunding journey.

2. Maxwell Salzberg

5. Realities of fulfilling a Kickstarter Campaign
● Fulfillment can be difficult for big projects
● Project creators have to handle fulfillment alongside managing their
business and developing their product.
● The process involves a large amount of communication and adjusting data
● Backers want to update all kinds of information about their orders

6. Problems backers have
● Change of shipping address
● Pledging extra money for extra items
● Splitting one big order for multiple people
● Failed pledge payments
● Refunds
● Someone missed the campaign
● Non-Responders
● Hard to track who has shipped and who hasn’t.

7. The biggest catch of all
All a project creator gets is a big spreadsheet to work
from.

8. Uncomfortable Truths
1. Raising money is the easy first half
of crowdfunding. Fulfillment itself is
much harder.
2. Fulfillment can rob a project creator
of both time and money that could
be spent on making their product.

9. Three Years Pass...

10. Diaspora* - 2013
● Two sources of development - core team
and community developers.
● Core team was focused on providing a major
overhaul to user interface.
● Pivoted from startup model into a volunteer-
run community project.
● Project adopted self-governance model
through establishing consensus on issues.
● Core development team stepped away.

12. We wanted to make a
product that could help a
group of people in a useful
way.

13. We’ve always wanted to
build products that
empowered people.

14. What if we could make the
fulfillment process for
crowdfunding easier?

15. The Old, Slow Way
Don’t spend your time manually managing
your backers’ info, while time ticks away.

16. The BackerKit Way
Have everything on autopilot so you can focus on
making.

17. Pivoting into BackerKit

18. Initial Offering
● Free beta period - early customer feedback helped
establish first pain points.
● Basic features - pledge management, add-on
purchases, shipping addresses, a way to represent
whether an order is fulfilled, can export all order data.
● Niche support - can synchronize data from Kickstarter
to use project data in a useful way.
● Flexible - if there isn’t a feature for it, we can implement
a workaround
● Free Backer Support - we help project creators take
care of their backers.

20. Challenge of UX Design
● BackerKit is designed to assist with every
step of the fulfillment process
● Just because something makes sense to
you doesn’t mean it makes sense to the
customer.
● Self-service vs. full-service

22. First Refinements
● Segments - search queries that create groups of people that an app can
perform actions on.
● More Platforms - sync with campaigns from IndieGoGo, Tilt/OPEN
● Pre-Orders - project creators can get new orders after their campaign
ends to keep the momentum going.
● New Interface - focused on reward items in pledges belonging to backers.
● Counts - easy counts for manufacturing.
● Shipping - We integrated with the USPS to offer cheaper postage.

28. Backer pledge accounts
● 6 order states: Not Sent, Not Answered, Open, Locked Down, Ready to
Ship, Shipped
● Invite system: all backers are invited once a project is ready to go live.
Each backer gets a unique link that logs them into their pledges
automatically.
● Pledge Switching: Backers may be allowed to change pledge levels
● Linked Pledges: For pledging multiple times on platforms like IndieGoGo.

37. Fulfillment Integrations
● We launched a partner’s program
for fulfillment houses.
● Easily send orders out at the click
of a button.
● 2 partners at launch: FulfillRite and
ShipStation
● Orders get tracked between
BackerKit and fulfillment partner,
so data is always up to date.

38. New Fullfilment Integrations

40. ● Some of our customers: Soylent, Amplitude, Reading
Rainbow, ToeJam & Earl, What We Do in the
Shadows
● Over 700+ projects served
● Many revisions to features and designs
● Campaigns of all sizes and every niche
● Team of 6 people