Reply To: Large Kickstarters should be more open about shipping costs

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Not every kickstarter is done by a fully fledged business …
And to be fair … a lot of businesses within this industry (tabletop games) are often little more than 2 guys in a shed who got lucky that their hobbyist product sold.

If you’ve ever watched one of those ‘reality tv shows’ where an ‘expert’ helps a failing business then you’ll notice a pattern that holds true for a lot of them : not knowing why or how their business stayed afloat during the good days so they’re not prepped when disaster strikes or business dries up …

Things tend to go wrong really fast when those teams need to scale up production when an outside factor causes demand to explode (like getting mentioned on the Weekender as ‘indie of the week’).

Part of this could be prevented if kickstarters limited the amount of backers per tier … especially the ‘complicated’ variants.
Heck, the math should be pretty easy … 50$ tier and a 50,000$ target means you only ever need 1,000 backers.
A few more won’t be a problem, but a run away success has the potential to be lethal if you can’t handle the volume …

I also suspect that a lot of them underestimate the realities of shipping world wide to hundreds of individual backers.
It is one of my reasons why I tend to look for the ‘EU friendly’ markings in a kickstarter. It’s not guarantee, but it tends to limit unpleasant surprises as they at least have done some research into the logistics aspect.

I’ve also noticed that there are plenty of companies out there that have specialized in doing the logistics for kickstarters.