Hi, there's a lot of uh, confusion on Kickstarter campaigns for those who want to run a Kickstarter campaign and what it's like. sort of like behind the scenes to sort of manage the uh project, the campaign and things like that. So I've done a campaign on Kickstarter here. so I thought I'd give you a just a brief behind the scenes uh tour of what it looks like to do surveys.

In fact, I'm going to do one right here. Live uh to my backers of my project and show you some stats and things like that. So this is my project. The microcurrent uh gold I had uh I raised I smashed my target I raised $657 of my $9,900 goal with 12268 backers.

So it was a very successful project. and for those wondering, uh, the total fee, how much of that did I actually receive? Well, it was. uh, that figure 11657 minus just over 8% Uh, Kickstarter charge a fixed 5% fee plus the credit card mergin took another 3.1% I forget the exact figure but it was around. it was just over 8% so you really have to take that into account.

That is a significant amount, especially you know when you're trying to put a hardware product like this into production. So just be careful now. I've previously done a campaign on the Australian uh website possible and the advantage of that apart from accepting that PayPal as well which is a major complaint I got from Uh Kickstarter not accepting PayPal is that once you reached your Target in this case 99,900 the money went immediately into my account. so I could start buying parts and things like that.

but on Kickstarter that wasn't the case. I had to wait until the project ended on December 31st and then wait another 2 weeks precisely and Kickstarter true to their word, they said it would uh, they would pay me two weeks after and they did so on January 15th. You know something, $1,000 just appeared in my account in one big lump sum. But by the way, it does work differently for Australians like me.

uh, because Australians and some other countries who uh, have Kickstarter available don't use the Amazon payment system so it could be very well different for uh, us, uh, backers because they use the Amazon payment system whereas uh, the Australian version of Kickstarter like I used they, uh, use a third party credit card uh Merchant and collect all the money themselves and then put it in one lumpsum payment over to your bank account. Anyway, let's go in here and take a look at the dashboard. These are the stats that you get uh behind the scenes here and uh, there's nothing, uh, proprietary in here or anything like that and you can see my uh funding goal. I think it was a two we uh campaign or something.

I ran there yes, December 16, December 31st and you can see it really kicked up at the start. That's where you get most of your sales at the start. or at least if you have an established audience like me. Then it drops off, flattens out and then at the end and everyone realized oh, I better get one before I miss out.

So they jumped in and sales ramped up a bit at the end there. So uh, here's some um, stats if you're wondering the popularity of putting your project on. Kickstarter Well here's the actual figure it tells you via: Kickstarter Uh, 22% of my sales were directly via Kickstarter the rest come from came from external sites which you can see down here. but I have a big established audience.

That's where most of my sales come from now. I can't guarantee that that 22% slice of the pie. there was just random people who didn't know about me or my projects and were just searching Kickstarter it could have been uh, people who knew about me knew about the project and just didn't click through a link. they just went to Kickstarter and figure that and just uh, bought it through there.

but they already knew about me so they didn't just stumble across it. so I'd you know B Park figure I'd probably have that figure so maybe 10 or 12% maybe 15% % extra sales I got for going through Kickstarter as opposed to another website perhaps. but your mileage may vary greatly because I have a large established audience. So uh, don't take my stat there as anything to go by, but you can see direct traffic.

and then two 279 pledges there. 262 pledges came from my website, 211 came from my YouTube channel there. uh, searching Kickstarter 87% Hardware discover but once again I don't know uh so there's 12% just there between searching uh and U just general searching on Kickstarter But as I said I don't know if those people uh, already knew me or not and went in there. then uh, kick track that's a statistics website 62% so they claim but I but I was publishing kick track stats so possibly uh, some people jumped in and bought it through there Twitter 3% I've got a large uh I've got 10,000 Twitter followers so you know 3% of my sales came through there and then at my amp hour radio show here.

I've got I had an extra 10 sales through the link on that hack. Gadgets got mentioned on there and various stats so you can see that down there and you can see that only 38. 26% of people actually finished playing my video I can't remember how long my video it was I think it was 5 minutes or something like that. so obviously a lot of people started watching it, the majority started watching it and didn't actually finish.

and then the popularity of my rewards and then the activities down the bottom. Now if we go into the backer report over here. This is really quite nice. You can uh, list and sort And categorize all of your pledges.

So for example, here is just the just a random list of rewards actually sent. So I've already sent these ones here I've actually ticked them off down here I've manually ticked them off each one that I actually sent. So I can actually go into, uh, just the new ones. For example, here's the new one which I'm about to do my uh campaign for.

and then I can sort them based on uh, backa here for example, Wh? Yep, there we go. I can sort them based on that so I can give you know. So these people up here at the top who uh, contributed first I can make sure that they get those ones first uh, for example. So that's really quite neat.

and then once you've um, sorted all this, you know you can select your rewards, sort them various things, then you can just go up here and you can m message all of your backers as well. But you can go in here and Export it and here it is. export backer report production run and you can choose which one you want to do. There we go.

That's really quite nice. So I want it? Let's say I wanted to get all of my mailing address labels for example, even though I haven't sent out my survey yet, I'll explain that in a minute, but I can export even now all that stuff it's ready to download. There it is and you can do this. Good thing about this is that you can generate this as many times as you like.

So Kickstarter backer report there it is. It puts it in a standard CSV format and you can just load that directly into um, any spreadsheet program and it works perfectly. Then I was able to import that data directly into my Doo label printer and print out my addresses. Very very easy.

I Love this feature of Kickstarter It worked much better than I was expecting. Now here we go. I'm actually going to do a real survey here I haven't done it before because you here's one of the disadvantages as a Kickstarter you only get one shot at doing a what they call a survey which is basically sending out and asking people for their information. This is one aspect of Kickstarter I don't like as opposed to uh, Posible which I've used before the Australian site.

Uh, because you had to create an account on Posible and give your address details so you always got people's address details from the start. So yeah, I didn't really like that aspect of uh Kickstarter I wanted to know up front. you know how many countries my uh things were going to that I had to ship to for example. But anyway, here we go where let's go into manage surveys and I had heard horror stories about these surveys and there's all these third- party companies out there that have sprung up and when you put a project on Kickstarter they will email you and ask you hey, you know Kickstarter is a nightmare.

Do you want to give us 1% of your money and we will? you know hand, We'll give you this magic tool that handles all your surveys and everything else well I Found that would have been a waste of money for my uh purposes because I found the exports the Survey System easily easy as we'll see and also uh, the act of exporting the Uh CSV address data really easy. So here we go anyway. We have our 199 backers. so I want to create a survey Here we go.

So I will create a survey like this and this is exactly what it looks like and I have to concentrate. Make sure I get it right now. This is a new feature. Let backers change their address.

This was not here the other month when I did my other survey. If we hover over there, if you are not shipping for a while, you can let backers change their address in case they move. You can close this later when you're ready to ship. Awesome! This was one of the big disadvantages of Kickstarter in that if you send out your survey early you know, a couple of months early and people changed their addresses, you were screwed.

Then you had to manually fix those up. So really, there's not much Advantage for these third party programs anymore. they let you do that. But anyway, I'm going to ship pretty quick so I'm probably going to leave that off and any change of address I'll just handle manually.

I Don't expect much, but here we go. It's the preview they've already put in. Uh, by default is shipping details so name, address, one, address, two so two lines for the address that's adequate city state Province zip code and country so people will see this form exactly like this. or you can add questions in like this.

You can add a specific question and you can get an answer like that. but I want to? Oh, I don't I probably shouldn't have done that. I might go back out and uh uh, disable that cuz I don't really want to add or you can add multiple choice questions like this. but I don't really want to add any questions I just want people's names and addresses so I'll go back out and fix that.

So here we go: I'm back in and I've uh I just canceled I'm back in and I'm happy with all this default address information I Used it last time. it was certainly adequate I got no uh complaints. It imported into my uh Label program very nicely and everything was hunky dory. so that's a good set of options for international.

Uh International is important for Australian uh, shippers like me. who you know need to ship internationally and the Uh fields are ideal. So I'm happy with that. It works well.

So I'm just going to go send survey. It's done. So I'm going to send out to those 199 backers at that tier only. Okay, so cuz I've got these units.

they're here in my lab here tested ready to ship. So I need people's Uh addresses. So I'm going to send that survey here. we go send.

You can only send a survey once per reward tier, so make sure you ask for all the info you need. Well all I need is people's address. That's it. So send survey now Bingo it's done.

There's no going back and that is one of the huge disadvantages. So this is what here here's the screen. This is what people will see. They will have these fields, they will, uh, import.

they will, uh set that data in so they'll be sent an email asking them to uh with a link to go to the website to fill in This survey is being sent. Address change is not allowed but I can edit that later so that's really good. and then we can go back into to the backa report. And now if we have a look at the reward tier here first production run, there we go.

We have a look at that tier there. Now if I sit here and wait long enough. Um in you know within 10 minutes I'll have the first people start. there'll be a tick there.

The survey response bang just like I had for my other ones my early signature editions. here. It tells me that that person that person. so this will update live so you can see I'll over the next couple of hours next day.

I'll see people that have uh entered in their survey response and then I can message those who haven't done it so that works really well. I've got no complaints, almost no complaints at all apart from only being able to send it once of the Survey System uh in Kickstarter and I heard all these horror stories that I had to use these third party tools that I got absolutely spammed with. You have to use our tool cuz Kickstar is so awful. Hey, it's not I think it worked well, at least for my purposes.

Anyway, and there you go. I Literally, Just, uh, stop recording that segment and refresh the page and look. I've already had five people fill in their address details. Fantastic! So you can just sit well.

You have to refresh it. Of course it won't automatically refresh, but that's great. There we go. Got five addresses already for those I could ship those right now.

And here's a quick look inside my imported data into my spreadsheet from that exported CSV file which that CSV file as I said you can export as many times as you want over and over again as the uh as the people's addresses come in or right at the last minute just in case they've changed it. backer ID here um I've I've removed people's names and email addresses but the data would be there of course uh International and domestic uh, their pledge amount, the date, whether it was collected The Sur when the survey was answered, uh and then you all got all that uh format data which they entered in once again I've actually removed this and you know there could be hundreds of uh, these things or thousands of these things if you had enough backers in that particular category. So there you go. All the data is there shipping countri so you can sort by shipping country CU When I'm doing domestic and international I want to sort by the various countries and things like that so that's really handy.

and once you've got that data into your spreadsheet easy, you can do whatever you want and I can just import that easily into my uh label printer or give the Excel file to the mailing house. So there you go I Hope you enjoyed that little uh behind the scenes. look at uh the management of a Kickstarter project and it worked I had you know I was really fearful cuz I heard some real horror stories of people who had from people who had run it before and said oh the survey was such a nightmare and ah, you're just going to be you know, pulling your hair out but I wasn't it I got my add all I wanted cuz I want to ship these units as get my address, addess data into a Uh standard CSV format import into a spreadsheet, then I can play around with it, sort it, categorize it into different countries and things like that and then export to my label printer or give to my mail inhouse. That's all I wanted and it did exactly what I wanted.

So in the end, um yeah, Kickstarter had quite a few uh quirks and uh, other things in terms of formatting of the Uh project. For example, like there's no formatting ability over in these pledges. over here, it's just very archaic, it's you know. H I didn't really like that, but in the end, ultimately, the management, uh, stuff behind it worked pretty well.

So there you go I Had no problems really? essentially no problems with Kickstarter So if you want to discuss this, jump on over to the Eev blog Forum that's the place to do it. Catch you next time.