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Tools of the Trade

A soup-to-nuts list of our favorite Kickstarter tools and services.

By Peak Design

We've done a few installments of our Kickstarter 101 Field Notes series. Most of our articles have focused on the strategic side of running a crowdfunding campaign. Now it's time to get down to brass tacks.

Kickstarter itself is a tool. It's a fundraising tool, a storytelling tool, a buzz-building tool, and a communication tool. But it's not the only crayon in the box, and as your grandpappy used to say, it takes a full box of crayons to draw a unicorn. Wait, your grandpappy never said that? Not even once?

As your grandpappy used to say, "it takes a full box of crayons to draw a unicorn."

Anywho, here is an exhaustive list of the tools and services that get us through our Kickstarter campaigns.

Chief Design Art Viger sketches out concepts for the Everyday Tote.

product development Tools

paper & pencil

Regardless of what level you're at, sketching is still a critical part of nearly every aspect of design. The pencil and paper...along with a decent eraser...are still used extensively in these parts.

iPad Pro

Electronic sketching devices let us iterate our sketches more quickly and create higher fidelity mockups. We've used Wacom tablets, but prefer the iPad Pro. We like to use the Procreate and Sketchbook Pro apps.

3D modeling software

If you're designing a physical thing with the intent to manufacture a lot of them, you're going to need to create precise 3D models of it. Here's what we have used:

SketchUp is a free, fun to use 3D modeling software. The first Capture Clip was designed entirely in SketchUp.

Solidworks is what we now design the majority of our hardware in. It is one of the industry standards in the world of 3D modeling. It's a beast of a program, both in terms of capabilities and price, and may not be suitable for folks who are just starting out in the world of 3D design.

Autodesk Fusion 360 is a great option for those who are starting out and looking to work on a budget. It's cloud based, fast, and cheap. In fact, they make it free so long as your company makes less than $100,000 per year. And once you eclipse that, they charge a very reasonable monthly subscription. And a big bonus is that it works on macs. Solidworks, to our great displeasure, does not.

2D Drawing Software

Both hardware and soft goods ought to come with 2D drawings. This is where you place the explanatory information of your products. Things like what it is made out of, what process is used to make it, how is it assembled, what color is it, and so forth.

For soft goods, we typically use Adobe Illustrator to create PDF design documents, which often include dimensioned 2D drawings that we've exported from our modeling software.

3D Printer

3D printing, along with the availability of CNC rapid prototyping services, have created a sea change in the way parts are prototyped. We have a machine shop with a basic lathe, mill, drill press, band saw, welder, and tools for grinding and polishing and the like. But in reality, most of these things can be done with a 3D printer these days.

We've been very big fans of the FormLabs Form 2 printer. It's relatively affordable and easy to use. But if you're not ready to drop $3.5K on a printer, you can always contract 3D printing work out. Most cities have local shops, but we've used Proto Labs quite a bit and are very happy with the turnaround.

Below: Scenes from a 2016 trip to our soft goods suppliers in Vietnam. We spend as much time as we can with our factories. It allows us to do rapid design iteration and prototyping in unison, which in turn tremendously speeds up our design process.

video & content production tools

Wipster

When it comes to your Kickstarter video, you want as much feedback from as many people as possible. But collaborating around video editing is mind-numbingly difficult. Wipster makes it super freaking easy. Just upload your latest cut, and then you can email a link out to your team members, friends, and confidants. They can view your video and place their comments with little sticky notes directly within the context of the film. And, you can respond to each other's comments. The end result is that everyone's feedback is in one super-contextual place.

Zoom H1

We've recorded Kickstarter video voice-overs on iPhones before. We ain't scared. But if you're looking to up your audio game, get the $99 Zoom H1 mic. If you've ever been wowed by the creamy, swooning baritone of Peak Design's video narrator, now you know why.

Final Cut Pro

For in-house video editing we haven't found a more capable, easy-to-learn tool than Final Cut Pro X. That said, if you don't want to pony up $300, we've also done Kickstarter videos in Microsoft Movie Maker and iMovie.

Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, & Illustrator

As much energy as we put into our Kickstarter videos, we probably spend even more time building and tweaking the "Story" section of our Kickstarter page. Backers, much more so than your average online shopper, love to go deep into the features and details of your product. To put our best foot forward here, we religiously use the Adobe Creative Cloud to edit the photos, build the graphics, and organize the layout of our Kickstarter page.

Kickstarter Page Preview

Before you publish your Kickstarter page to the world, Kickstarter gives you the ability to send a preview link to your friends. Do this. And don't wait until you're totally finished to do it. Start sharing and gathering feedback early in the game, when you still have time to rework your video, messaging, graphics, and other stuff. Most importantly, seek feedback from people who are well-versed in the art of telling it like it is.

DJI Osmo

The Osmo is a pint-sized handheld 4k videocamera on a genius motorized gimbal. It lets you take uber-smooth cinema-like video without a bunch of big heavy gear and without much training/practice. Your Kickstarter video definitely does not need to be of cinematic quality to have a blockbuster campaign. But if you're hell-bent on a highly polished video, the Osmo is a great tool for it.

DJI Phantom/Mavic

Not sure if you knew this, but drones are fun.

Victor, our friend and filmmaker, shooting head designer Art as he walks through the features of the Everyday Tote.

Communication tools

Kickstarter Live & Google Hangouts

During Kickstarter campaigns we make it a priority that we do a hangout with our backers at least once every 2 weeks. We gather the team at the office, turn the webcam on, and then we just start yammering. We'll talk about product updates, share obstacles we're working to overcome, or go deep on certain aspects of product development that backers may not otherwise ever know about. We'll also answer questions submitted by viewers during the broadcast. For years we used Google On-Air Hangouts (now YouTube Live) to do this, but now Kickstarter has it's own tool.

Zendesk

Whether you're running an active campaign or embarking on your fulfillment, people are going to want to get in touch with you. Kickstarter's messaging capabilities are rudimentary and tend to break down if you're getting hundreds of messages a day. We use Zendesk to manage our customer and backer communication. Kickstarter recently launched a Zendesk integration for their platform that allows you to manage your Kickstarter messages in Zendesk too.

Typeform

Typeform is a drag-and-drop online survey creator that produces beautiful responsive surveys that are a delight to fill out. Before and during your campaigns, surveys can be a great way to bring your backers further into your development process. We've surveyed backers about color preferences, lifestyle habits, the kind of cameras they carry, and all sorts of other stuff. Typeform also makes it easy to share survey results with your backers.

Dave and Peter on the PD team working remotely from one of our secret San Francisco camp spots.

marketing tools

Kickstarter Page

The most important part of your Kickstarter marketing mix is your Kickstarter page itself. It's your sales platform. It's the hub of all of your messaging. It's the one thing you're directing every single person to. Make your Kickstarter page informative, interesting, and complete. It should be dialed when you launch, but you should also constantly update and optimize your page as you go.

Kickstarter Updates

Every time you post a Kickstarter update, every single backer gets an email about it. Updates are the most powerful tool you've got to keep your backers engaged, and when they're engaged they're going to be way more likely to tell their friends about your campaign. Post an update once a week if you can.

Google Analytics

Make sure that your Kickstarter page is connected to Google Analytics when you launch. Google Analytics tells you how many people are visiting your campaign, where they are coming from, how long they're staying, and a bunch of other interesting things that can help you market your project more effectively. For example, if you find out that a specific blogger has been sending a lot of traffic your way, perhaps you should consider sending them a sample unit to review or doing a promotion with them.

Facebook Ads

If you're going to run digital ad campaigns driving traffic to your Kickstarter page, start on Facebook. To run an effective Kickstarter ad campaign, the most important thing to do is target people who are familiar with Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or other crowdfunding websites. Kickstarter is not a normal e-commerce site, and hence the average person clicking on an ad will be way more likely to arrive at your Kickstarter page and bounce because they're unfamiliar with it. We dig Facebook advertising because it's super easy to target people with specific interests and behaviors.

Jellop

Jellop specializes in running paid digital ads for crowdfunding projects. They're absolute masters of driving traffic from Facebook to your Kickstarter campaign. They are easy to work with and they provide transparent analytics on their cost/performance.

Kicktraq

The Kickstarter analytics dashboard has improved over the years, but if you're the type who likes to get down-n-dirty with your data, head on over to Kicktraq. They keep daily charts of a bunch of stuff related to your campaign. Note that Kicktraq's projections should be taken with a grain of salt, especially early in your campaign.

Webflow, Squarespace, or something like that

There are a million drag-and-drop website creators. We prefer Webflow or Squarespace, as they are both fairly sophisticated and cater to designers. Before your project, build a super-simple teaser landing page that collects emails (you can use Typeform for that part too). Start sharing it with friends early on. When your project launches, send a notification to your email list. During your project, use your site to direct traffic to your project. When your project ends, direct traffic from your Kickstarter page back to your site where you can take pre-orders or continue building your email list.

Thunderclap

Our friend Trey Ratcliff tipped us off to Thunderclap. It's a great way to enlist your friends and the world at large to help you have a big project launch day. Basically, Thunderclap lets you spread a message by having all of your friends (who sign up) post the same message to their individual social media accounts at the same time.

YouTube

Upload your Kickstarter videos to Youtube. Tag them. Annotate your videos with links to your Kickstarter page. Having your video on YouTube greatly ups its exposure potential.

Below: scenes from the 2014 Photokina tradeshow in Cologne, Germany. Photokina is the biggest industry event in the photography world, attracting imaging enthusiasts of all mustache sizes.

Fulfillment tools

BackerKit

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are great fundraising platforms, but they fall pretty flat when it comes to helping creators fulfill on the product that they just garnered hundreds, if not thousands of preorders for. Enter BackerKit, a service that we almost religiously recommend to other creators. BackerKit does a lot of things for us:

Lets us create much more in-depth backer surveys
Lets us give backers the ability to change their reward level and add-on items to their reward after the Kickstarter campaign is over
Dramatically reduces the complexity of fulfillment by making it easy to organize rewards shipments into batches based on a variety of factors
Further reduces fulfillment complexity by integrating with a variety of shipping carriers and software

In addition to all of that BackerKit provides support to your backers while they are filling out their surveys. For more details, check out this case study all about how Peak Design uses (and loves) BackerKit. Once, just to be nice folks, the BackerKit team came to the Peak office and helped us package and ship Kickstarter rewards (see photos below).

Shipwire

In the Kickstarter world we've never met a fellow creator who wasn't unpleasantly surprised by the amount of effort required to pack and ship their first project fulfillment. It's a mind-numbing slog, and you can only get so far by coaxing your friends to come lick envelopes in exchange for beer and pizza. Just getting the paperwork right for international shipping can be a nightmare. Shipwire takes your stock, warehouses it (globally if you want 'em to), and then does all the packing and shipping for you. Highly recommended if you have over 1000 shipments to send out, or if many of your backers are outside the US.

Shipstation

Shipstation is the glue that holds together our entire company-wide fulfillment system. Shipstation is online software that connects all the places we sell stuff (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, BackerKit, our website, Amazon, eBay) with Shipwire (or whatever shipping method/partner we wish to use).

Below: In 2014 the BackerKit team came to the PD office and helped us pick-and-pack Slide and Clutch camera straps for our Kickstarter fulfillment. The hoppers filled with manila mailers represent a day's work. The fulfillment took us almost 2 weeks.

whatcha got?

We're always keen to hear what tools others are using to run effective, smooth, hiccup-free (if that's even possible) Kickstarter campaigns. Please leave a comment and let us know the tools that work best for you.