Robert Woodhead ran a Kickstarter campaign for his project, Bubblegum Crisis Ultimate Edition Blu-Ray Set that ended in December 2013. The project was to release the classic anime with French and English subtitles (also dubbed in English). It raised over $154K and the order fulfillment part of the campaign is just wrapping up. Woodhead ran into some issues and inefficiencies throughout his campaign. When existing apps didn’t suit his needs, he decided to design his own.
Made for creators by a creator, BackerSupport is meant to solve issues that are common to most Kickstarter campaigns. On December 28 Woodhead announced that the app is now available for Windows, Mac, and as a standalone FileMaker application. One of the cool things about it? The app is free – give it a try, see if you find it useful, and pay the creator what you feel it deserves. Describing his experience on Kickstarter Forum, Woodhead shares:
“The project has gone through its lifecycle, finishing up by shipping 3000 packages in 3 main variants and a couple of dozen combinations to backers around the world. At each point along the way, whenever I ran into a pain point, I took the time to automate it away … The result is that BackerSupport is now a ridiculously configurable project management solution for Crowdfunders, handling everything from the initial import of your data to shipping cost optimization.”
A few things the app allows you to do are flexibly track and communicate with all your backers, let them vote on things, list products and what rewards need to be delivered for each, plus generate custom exports and reports. You can, “Easily import all your data from KickStarter & Indiegogo (and other sites too), and automatically translate from the various backer rewards to their associated products and rewards.” It also lets you take more orders using PayPal and other payment methods.
The main point was to make things easy and automatic. That means you can update things backer information by simply pasting an email into the app and letting it update for you, and automatically validate US addresses using USPS. Product fulfilment can be sorted into batches, “to minimize shipping cost and optimize your workflow. Filter by products, destination, backer id tags, USPS shipping zones — you name it.” This gives creators access to a lot of different options in one place. You can also:
“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!), Stamps.com (what I ended up using) … or any other app you care to use. If you use the Click-N-Ship or Stamps.com app, you can get the commercial discounts automatically!”
His solution helped him get through his mid-sized campaign, and now he is sharing his open-source capable app with the crowdfunding world to see how they will make use of it and whether or not different campaigns will find it helpful. One thing is for sure, it has a long list of capabilities.
