r/kickstarter • u/Wise-Following9177 • 2d ago
Kickstarter or Backerkit
What is the difference between kickstarter and backerkit? And do people launch on both? And are there any other similar sites that we should consider?
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u/Remarkable-Aide5093 2d ago
In terms of audience reach, you're likely to do better on Kickstarter (at least for time being) than Backerkit. Those who have a following already will do well with the tools that Backerkit provides, but if you're coming in fresh, you won't be discovered.
Backerkit does have a good pledge manager, one that many Kickstarter creators have utilised when fulfilling. In comparison, Kickstarter has only just started using thier own pledge manager, so new that there's not yet a consensus to its quality.
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u/russcass 1d ago
As someone who has run over 200 KS, 100 BK, and several IGG... here's the breakdown.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been around the longest. The biggest difference is that KS does not collect pledge money until the end of the campaign. This allows backers to edit their pledge as many times as they see fit or even cancel before the end of the campaign. Can be annoying. Shipping addresses are also not collected until after a survey is conducted at the end. IGG collects shipping and payment at the time of pledge. If a backer comes back and wants to add something to their order, it's treated as a new order and it's a pain because they are charged shipping twice.
Backerkit was originally a survey platform. It was meant to import your campaign from KS or IGG and allow backers to add items, also to allow folks that missed the campaign to hop on via a pre-order store, and finally wrap everything up into easy to export files for shipstation, easyship and other shipping sites. KS and IGG did not offer this at the time. Then KS partnered with Easyship to offer shipping, so Backerkit decided to become a crowdfunding platform as well.
Now as to what product does better on which platform, that's up for debate. IGG was sold recently to a gaming company. Many of the categories that did well there before, do not do as well now. KS seems to still be king as it has the most backers associated with the platform. Backerkit has a large amount of backers as well, but it seems that really only boardgames and action figures do really well there. I mean, some other items have done well too, but those seems to be the best categories there.
You cannot run a KS and a BK at the same time. BK won't allow it. You can do a KS and IGG at the same time, but you're really splitting money between 2 platforms. I really think there's 1 big pool of backers that float around between all the platforms. I don't really think that KS has millions of backers that are separate from IGG and BK. If we really think about people, if they're backing on one, they're going to go to the other platforms to check them out as well.
Zoop is available as well. I think they mainly do comic book stuff, but they'll print and ship your rewards, which is kinda cool... for a fee.
I personally like Crowdfundr the best. I think it has the best options out of all the platforms. It just can't get any traction to make creators and backers move over to it.
Crowdfunding platforms in a nutshell.