Design

Fine-Tune Your Kickstarter Campaign With These 12 Tools

Kickstarter is still the biggest thing in crowdfunding, but crowdfunding is much bigger than Kickstarter. These 12 tools will help your campaign succeed, and maybe even make big bucks.
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The Elevation Dock was one of Kickstarter's first million-dollar projects and is now one of the first products on new crowdfunding marketplace Outgrow.me. Y Combinator, the premier startup launchpad, held its latest demo day this week, with crowdfunding as one of the big themes with this batch of startups. New sites were launched for specific verticals: Microryza is crowdfunding scientific research grants, Teespring is creating a Threadless alternative, and Watsi is bringing the crowdfunding model to the developing world. Other demoing startups had no desire to compete with Kickstarter, but rather, complement it. BackerKit is trying to make the experience of running a project easier, while Swish makes searching for projects more fun. Kickstarter has recently announced some new tools to help make projects easier to manage, but a market is developing around them. Kickstarter is still the biggest thing in crowdfunding, but crowdfunding is much bigger than Kickstarter. These 12 tools will help your campaign succeed, and maybe even make big bucks. Screenshot of BackerKit Above:

BackerKit

What it Does: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for Kickstarter Founded by one of the founders of Diaspora, Kickstarter's breakout project, BackerKit aims to reduce stress and pad the pocketbooks of project creators. Using the service which starts at $99/month, creators can track the rewards owed to backers, perform some higher-level customer management like tracking domestic and international backers, but the service's killer app is the ability to help collect more money after the campaign is over. Imagine you wanted to back a project at a higher level and get a better reward. With Kickstarter, once the counter reaches zero, you're be out of luck, but with BackerKit, you could pay additional money and claim extra rewards, without having to cut Kickstarter or Amazon in on the transaction. It's a brilliant, if slightly shady, feature that could significantly increase the amount of money project creators can raise. Top photo: Elevation Lab; Lower image: BackerKit