While this technically covers all
KS, because of the prevalence of tabletop Kickstarters and the fact that the author is the creator of several
TT tagged
KS that I felt this was deserving of the dakka discussion board than the off topic (if it is not, then feel free to move it)
Anyways Erik goes over what he thinks
KS themselves should do to improve their site for creators as the
KS craze is getting huge. Though some are a bit of a non issue depending on how good you are such as the Survey. CMoN has shown to be apt at having their own little pledge manager. Still an interesting read
4 Improvements Kickstarter Needs for Project Creators
Posted on February 12, 2013 by Erik Dahlman
Dragon Whisperer is now our fifth successfully funded project on Kickstarter. I feel like we’re very lucky to have been able to fund five for five, but in the past year that we’ve been doing this I’ve found Kickstarter severely lacking in some areas when it comes to helping the project creator.
Shipping
There are a few aspects of shipping I think that Kickstarter falls down on. The first is including the shipping as part of the overall pledge amount towards your goal. This could be remedied by knowing what your shipping cost is and adding that to your goal, except that you never really know how many of your backers will be international or which pledge will be the most popular to do that.
Kickstarter allows pledges to choose a dollar value for international shipping, but it doesn’t allow this number to be set for different destinations. This is much less of an issue now that almost all international shipping is extraordinarily expensive, but when shipping to Canada and Mexico was less, it would have been nice to not force them to subsidize additional international shipping. On this point, I wish that US shipping was broken out as well. With Dragon Whisperer, the pledge level that nets you a single copy of the game is $25. Many backers may look at that and not realize that almost $6 goes to just the shipping alone; a fact that is easily forgotten given that everyone expects ‘free’ shipping domestically.
There are videos and articles on Kickstarter about many aspects of starting a project. The one I’ve never seen is about shipping. Which seems odd given that almost every project creator I’ve heard from states that shipping was the most under-estimated piece of their budget when creating pledge levels and goals. It would be good to have a chart showing domestic and international shipping costs for different weights to give project owners a comparison to their current offerings. Even better, why not have the approximate weight entered into the reward that would tie into the USPS API to give a ballpark estimate?
Email
Right now you can toggle between your Inbox and your Sent items and that’s it. That’s fine if you have less than fifty backers that never talk to you. But what about projects that have hundreds or even thousands of backers to communicate with? The messaging service is completely lacking in any search functionality. I currently keep all of the automatically generated emails Kickstarter sends me so that I can search on my own server, then click the link to tie back to the message on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, this only works for incoming since I don’t receive any notification for emails I’ve sent.
The system also kind of assumes that you will only ever run one project or that a backer will only ever back just one of your projects. When you have multiple projects and a backer sends you an email from one, you can’t see any correspondence you had from any previous projects. Many times I’ve had to ask backers to message me from the original project so that I could view the entire exchange. This is slow, inefficient, and makes the project creator look like they don’t know what they are doing.
Add-on system
Imagine this, you’ve come up with a very structured reward system but midway through your campaign, you have 2000 awesome dice become available that you’d like your backers to be able to add. The first problem you run into is trying to let everyone know that the dice exist. Not everyone reads the notifications (many even turn them off completely) and after they’ve looked at backing a project they probably don’t scroll up and down your main project page nearly as much as you do.
The second problem is that many people are backing a project for the first time. The entire process can already be overwhelming but to now have to know that you click “Manage Pledge”, change your dollar amount, and wait to be asked in a survey at the end of the project about what the extra funds are for isn’t very intuitive.
Now, let’s say this happened during…oh The Cthulhu Playing Cards project where you had over 2000 backers and not enough dice? How do you limit the number that are available? The answer is that you can’t. Most project owners have to ask backers to comment on an update in an effort to keep track of stock. This may work to a point but it is a very manual process and there is invariably the backer that does not follow directions and just adds funds only to be upset that they didn’t get the item they wanted to add.
I understand that Kickstarter doesn’t want to be labeled as a store, and it’s really not. But not allowing the ability to add a la carte items introduces a lot of inefficiencies in the process, especially given the sad state of surveys. Speaking of which…
Surveys
The scourge of any project as far as I’m concerned. I cringe at having to create multiple reward levels because these are so difficult to produce and track. As an example, assume that you have a project with 22 reward levels (like we did in Genegrafter, or the 26 in the Call of Cthulhu). For each survey, I had to manually copy and paste each question into the survey to cover all of the possible scenarios. This was even worse on the Cthulhu Playing Cards project that had about 24 questions per reward because of all the possible add-ons which meant I had to create a total of 624 questions. This could easily be remedied by allowing a survey from another reward tier to be duplicated.
And all of the entry fields are free text and mandatory. You know what happens when you give a backer the freedom to enter whatever they want and then make them do so? This…
responses
It also makes it more difficult to aggregate numbers on a spreadsheet when each of the following responses for a question are considered valid: one, 1, 1(one), I, I think I had one, just the one included, etc. The ability to choose an integer, string, or boolean type would be quite valuable.
And what if you manage to ask 624 questions and get a valid response on each of them? This is how it shows up on the backend:
responses_2
Well that makes perfect sense doesn’t it? I would say it would probably be better to either a) put the question next to the answers or b) just hyperlink to the full survey like they do when you are looking at a message from the backer. Which leads me to the final beef with surveys.
You can only look at the full survey report with the questions if you have sent or received a message from the backer. If not, there isn’t any way to bring up the full survey results. I really don’t want to have to spam everyone just so that I can get at the data that I need to.
Conclusion
In the past year I’ve been running projects, the main changes I’ve seen have been about font colors and sizes. A couple of weeks ago Kickstarter changed the text of “Sold out” to “All Gone!” Those seem like fine changes if any of these other issues had ever been addressed. Technically, the Inbox/Sent toggle is new as well but that’s a long way off from adding any real functionality when you have thousands of messages.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Kickstarter. Albino Dragon wouldn’t exist without it and it’s afforded us an amazing opportunity that we would have never had on our own. But as a programmer, there are a few glaring holes in the way the site works that I think could easily be remedied with a couple of good web developers. So maybe take some of the six million dollars that was made last year and help a guy out and hire some?
http://albinodragon.com/4-improvements-kickstarter-project-creators/
and 
WIP
