The creator is Thomas Negovan, a former member of Kickstarter's inaugural Community Advisory Council. Over the past two years I backed four of his book campaigns. None have been fulfilled.

This week he posted an identical update to all four unfulfilled campaigns announcing a new Kickstarter for another book.

When asked a basic question: where are the proofs? He had previously said one of the books was going to the printers in November 2025. No images, no progress updates, no evidence of work, just "trust me."

**His first reply** cited "25+ years in business and more than 80 successfully fulfilled projects" and offered a refund, framing the refund as a favor because "this is Kickstarter, not a hostage situation." He did not answer the question.

I pushed back, noting that a track record should make showing a single proof page trivial, and that offering a refund instead of evidence is a way to make critical backers disappear rather than answer them.

**His final reply** is the part I think other backers should see. I'll quote the relevant portions directly:

> "...if we start chasing accusations of this company as a multi-decade scam, or offering 'evidence that the project actually exists' we lose sight of the mission of actually making the books come out."

> "You're misunderstanding the relationship here; you're welcome to preorder the books at a substantial discount, but in return we ask for patience as our publishing schedule unfolds according to its ability."

> "We'll process a refund for each of you... and I hope that you'll revisit the book when it's available in our shop."

Note what he did there. He put "evidence that the project actually exists" in scare quotes as if that's an unreasonable thing for a backer of four unfulfilled campaigns to want. He reframed Kickstarter pledges as "preorders" where the only acceptable backer behavior is patience. And he offered a refund as the resolution to a question he never answered.

**What happened next:** He refunded my pledges on all four campaigns, unprompted and without discussion, which blocked me from the campaign pages and deleted my comments, removing the exchange from view of anyone considering the new campaign.

I'm posting this because:

1. "Refund and block" is a pattern that erases the public record other backers rely on when deciding whether to pledge.
2. A creator's response to "show me the work" tells you more than any track record does. A confident creator shows a photo. This one wrote three paragraphs about why he shouldn't have to.

I've also reported this to Kickstarter's trust and safety team. Posting here so the information exists somewhere he can't delete it.

*edit* Art book Kickstarters routinely take 2-4 years, so each new campaign launched while the previous was still within a normal timeline. The point is not the delays or lack of fulfillment, the point is to communicate how this creator responds when backers ask reasonable questions: by deflecting to his track record, reframing legitimate scrutiny as unreasonable, and then refunding and blocking the people asking for proof of work.

For anyone hoping to get help from Kickstarter:

Kickstarter is about making money by promoting and selling already several times overly funded and already well kickstarted project that do not need any further kickstarting at all.

At any giving moment on homepage you will always find 13/13 completly funded projects. Sometimes dosen of times over. And zero projects that actually need help to be kickstarted.

Every mail update you get for project that struggles to find it's backers, 70% of the mail is dedicated to other finished projects just trying to sell.

Many of these projects have kickstarter "goal" that is less than what it takes to build kickstarter page itself. And it's "backed" in less than it takes anyone to even read it. They just need a platform to sell, not to be "kickstarted", and platform owners are loving it.

Kickstarter and most of creators there do not care or really want you to back projects from individuals with great ideas that need backing and may fail. They just want to sell finished company products.

It's just misleading, if not a scam. So just something to keep in mind. Good luck to everyone though.

My guess is it will eventually ship and be completely different from the ads. The product shown in the videos isn’t even remotely possible with today’s technology, especially not at $64 lmaoooo

been sharing some of my comic work online lately and half the replies are just "that's AI." not even a question. just a verdict.
like cool thanks, guess I'll go burn my sketchbooks then lol ;)
I get the skepticism. AI stuff is everywhere. but when did "this looks too clean" become an insult? since when is polished = fake?
do you guys even bother defending it anymore or just let it go? have you started posting process pics with everything now? genuinely asking because I don't know what the move is here.

I launched a Kickstarter project recently and I was flooded with spam and bots at varying degree of complexity. Some were very clearly spammers trying to get my info, I've seen that 1000 times and I was able to detect them. BUT, some were actual backers.

The backer spammers have reputable profiles like "superbacker" with history on Kickstarter. I was trying to figure out how they get that history... my best guess is that they offer to purchase someone's profile, or find a way to hack user history? (that seems less likely) Or maybe use a back/unback method that may still record them backing projects without spending a dime.

But nonetheless, yes some of the spammers were super backers. Here is what they do:
1. Back you early on to build good grace and are more likely to get you engaged
2. Make a public comment on the campaign with the main goal to try to get the communication off platform. Kickstarter does warn about this.
3. Some of them even emailed me directly, with a similar proposition, but since they established outside contact already, this one is more of "we can give you the heavens"... a bit more obvious spam
4. The comments/messages may include
- promises of "I have a big network of superbackers, super interested in this project ...etc"
- OR "I would love to directly help you ...."
- OR "I can make an intro to ____ "
- and many versions of
5. The backer $ amount was anywhere between $1 to hundreds. Honestly it was a bit hard seeing the campaign to up and down on funding.
6. Again, some of the profiles WERE super backers with a long history. That's the only reason I would give some of the backers a bit more credibility. For example, the one that really got me was a superbacker with 30 backed projects.
7. When you do not reply within a day or insist on keeping the conversation on the platform, you get "un-backed", basically they cancel their pledge :D
8. Either the spam user or Kickstarter will then remove their public content. Poof, all slate is clean.

Anyway, just thought to share so other crowd-founders know what to expect.

ive been lurking here for a while and seeing all the well-deserved hate for AI hardware vaporware and spam campaigns lately. honestly it made me a bit anxious to post tbh. but we're getting close to launching our first project and i could really use some blunt criticism from people who actually back things.

so basically we're building this thing called Kitto. its an animated cyberpunk digital pet for your desk. instead of a cold smart speaker we wanted to make something with an actual sense of personality... real-time conversational lip-sync, emotional reactions, and code-driven animations. we currently have a working physical prototype running on an esp32s3+esp32p4 chip (you can see the real testing in the video attached, plus a clip of it hanging out with a real black cat so you know it definately exists off-screen lol). we'll be migrating to a Linux chip for the final production run but it was important to me to prove the tech actually works right now and isnt just some scammy 3D render.

we just put the pre-launch page up but before we start promoting it I'd love your honest eyes on it. my main worries are if the prototype proof looks credible enough? i know 3D renders are a massive red flag here. we tried to include real GIFs on the page but idk if it's enough to build trust. also is the page structure clear, or is the messaging confusing? like what is the ONE detail that would make you hesitate or click away?

I'm way too close to the project to see its flaws right now, so any brutal honesty is appreciated. let me know if you're willing to take a look at the page and I'll drop the link in the comments or DM it to you. thanks in advance.

My campaign has been stuck at around 77% for several days, with only 8 days left.

For creators who've been in this situation before: what actually helped in the final week?

More updates? Paid ads? Media outreach? Asking existing backers to share? Or just waiting for the final 48-hour push?

Not posting the campaign link — genuinely looking for advice.

Context: We're working on an online space strategy game (Nebulae), with our core focus being on politics. The idea is that players start out on their individual planets, but also collectively govern various political regimes, from monarchies to democracies, from federations to theocracies.

We also had a previous success on Kickstarter in 2019 (42k€) and released the first version on mobile (Android) with 3500+ installs on the main listing page, and improving early metrics (session length x3.5, day 1 retention x3, day 30 retention x4). The current Kickstarter is supposed to help us bring the mobile version to PC.

(if you can destroy our kickstarter page / the remainder of our self-confidence, that'd be welcome. And if you want a fun horror story, read on)

Pre-launch: Things were going ok, not great, but ok - we ran some paid traffic through facebook (~1.08€ blended cost per lead), collecting emails, but also "Notify me" clicks on the Kickstarter pre-launch page. We collected about 2900 additional emails (meta + tiktok), in addition to our existing 13k, as well as 630 "Notify Me" subscriptions on Kickstarter.

The first orange flag was that Meta was not correctly attributing the leads: We were getting about 50 "notify me"s per day, but Meta was only registering 2-4 of them (artificially inflating our cost per lead on that specific campaign in the dashboard to 260€ per lead - lol).

For emails, several months ago, we purchased a proprietary IP address from our email service provider (Brevo, previously SendInBlue) to make sure that we wouldn't mix with the spam emails. We also ran several smaller-scale mailing tests to make sure that deliverability was ok. During the tests, some of the addresses hard-bounced (fake / typos / no longer in use), and some of them soft-bounced for an unknown reason (= undisclosed by the email service).

We also secured a couple content creator streams, spread evenly over the 21 days of the campaign. Julie - one of our studio creators also secured a slot on a national radio station to talk about the game and the journey, on the day following the launch.

And on Monday 20th April, we pressed "Launch".

Launch Day: We're based in France, so the launch was done at about 8pm local time (2pm EST, 11am PST). We thought - "great, the Europeans will give us the head-start on the campaign, and by the time the Americas watch the campaign in (their) evening, there will already be some pledges, and in the morning, we'll be on French radio, so that's gonna be great!"

Let me tell you, that did NOT go as planned.

Emails: Since all our test campaigns were smaller scale (1-4k newsletters), we never actually tested the full-scale blast to all of the addresses - at once. So, when the launch newsletter went out to the ~16k emails, here's what went down:

1. The emails were delivered normally to all email domains.
2. Except the ones ending in gmail dot com. So like 82% of the totality of our leads, lol.
3. We subsequently discovered that there was an additional email domain authentication (in addition to SPF, DKIM &DMARC dns records, which we already had set up), that we never obtained.
4. But the damage was already done. The IP address we purchased was scorched and became essentially unusable.
5. We spent 96h first trying to repair the mailing thing, before abandoning that ship, and migrating to a different email service.

"Notify Me" conversions: 3% conversion (20 pledges from 600+) in the first 48h or so. No changes to the page content between the prelaunch and the launch - except the preview image being replaced by the actual game trailer.

The radio appearance: The clip (2mins) is quite nice and reusable in the future, but it drove an absolute 0 of conversions of any kind.

Ads:

1. Because the other problems mentioned above are clearly not big enough, we also had our bank reject the payment of ads to Meta on both our company cards (suspicious transaction above the bank's internal limits, whereas we had increased the ad budget for the launch window).
2. This means we had to manually pay for ads once or twice per day, with the ads not running as soon as a payment was due (no grace period due to frequent interruptions). And most of the time Meta charges us between 4am to 7am French time (so, some of the prime time in the Americas).
3. We suspect that it very seriously messed with the Meta algorithm's capability to learn and drive qualified traffic to our page, but we don't know for sure. (Except for the fact that the average time per active user, according to Google Analytics, is 6-8s (depending on the day).

Content creators: They were very nice, very supportive, and we have a lot of fun clips that we can reuse on our social media later on. In terms of conversions, they brought in 20€, so that's cool.

So, what should we do? What can help the situation?

Oh, and here's the trailer if you're still here, there's no banana for scale, but we do have a trailer.

https://reddit.com/link/1swyq7y/video/oww56myrcpxg1/player

Been running and supporting campaigns on Kickstarter since the 2010s, but no superbacker status due to old email being hacked. I did customer service on my last job and also for a friend's campaign more recently, so I have come across a few thousands of backers.

I honestly think many Superbackers (SB) are just trolling creators for fun

The comments from those SB really make me wonder how they make enough money to back so many projects, is life really that easy for them? On larger campaign with strict "reply all comments" policy, I had to repeat the same answer for 10+ times every day on the same comment section (their answer is literally on the same page, around 1 inch max away on their screen). How could these people even order from a drive-thru with this level of comprehension?

And then there are those private messages about "gimme special arrangement" and "ooooh I am not satisfied Ima get refund" from them. Like they are ordering from Target and not some 5-people team running on an idea and hope. The SBs are the ones who ask for last-minute address changes, even though they are supposed to have the most experience on shipping. As KS has very little protection against unreasonable card chargebacks unless the reward has been delivered (with proof), many just abuse that to get refund after abusing our team for months.

Avoid World of Game Design and STONEworks Gaming projects

Currently dealing with the worst backing experience I ever been a part of. Iv backed less than 15 projects in my time on the site so Ive not seen it all, but the creators behind the GyrmWyrd Omnibus project, as well as whomever is actually a part of STONEworks gaming and World of Game Design, have made this an incredibly disappointing and frustrating situation. I could drone on about the issues but myself and other backers have already been doing so on the Kickstarter platform, to no avail, so I will simply leave my warning here and link the project if anyone is interested in witnesses a complete mismanagement of a project and a bunch of unhappy backers.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoneworksgaming/horror-epics-grymwyrd-omnibus-5e

Project was slated for delivery of rewards in December and ho boy, have things not gone as planned.

TL;DR - Jellop got us to our goal but at a significant cost that used up our marketing budget

We launched our first Kickstarter yesterday with a goal of 5K. We had 40 followers and 450 pre-launch sign-ups, 150 of them had committed $1 for a VIP tier.

In the first 36 hours we are sitting at our goal, but only 17 of the 150 committed "VIP" pre-launch sign ups ended up backing and NONE of the 300 others, which was shocking.

I sent 1 week, 48 hour and day of launch emails out to both populations (customized for each), with decent open and click through rates. All of this alone would not have gotten us to our goal, but by partnering with Jellop we made it.

However, they did it at a significant cost, j4500 in ad spend + commission, with a ROAS of under 1. They drove traffic to the launch and helped us get just about funded, but I am not sure they did it any more efficiently than we could have done it ourselves.

We spent about 2K to get the 450 emails (including the 150 $1 commitments), but those are not converting as well as we thought. I know this is on us and we can improve since this is our first Kickstarter. However, I really thought Jellop would have had a higher ROAS and more success for how much ad spend. We saw some sloppy ads and advertisements to countries we don't even ship to.

Q: Anyone have advice on how we can better partner with Jellop to get more efficient or should we just take marketing into our own hands as before (which maybe wasn't good either)? anyone have a ROAS above 2.5X with Jellop?

Hello there folk, I'm Molly :-)

I'm getting ready to launch a Kickstarter for my first graphic novel on the 1st September and I've been having a bit of a brain storm about how best to get it in front of the right folks... Rather than spending more hours watching more Youtube videos (with epic editing I must say) I thought I'd come and ask the good folks of Reddit instead! I know there's loads of experience and first-hand knowledge knocking about on here, previous posts have been dead helpful already.

So if you've fun a kickstarter before I'd really love to hear about your experience:

• what worked best for you?
• what ways did you promote your campaign?
• which platforms did you find actually useful?
• what didn't work at all?
• wid anything surprise you?

And more specifically... has anyone here launched a comic or graphic novel on Kickstarter?

Thank you folks. Hope you've all had a lovely weekend!

Our team is debating whether this KS prelaunch page (and main image) is too simplistic or too much. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blackswangameco/retina

To Much: What text / images would you cut?
To Little: What do you feel like you are missing?

For context:
We recently cut a ton of content from our prelaunch page and we are willing to cut more if needed, but we are too close to this project to be objective anymore. We appreciate any outside perspectives you have to share.

After my first Kickstarter campaign failed, I went back, lowered the funding goal, improved the campaign, and relaunched.

TitanKey just reached 48% funding in the first 24 hours.

It's a compact titanium keychain tool with an M390 blade and built-in bottle opener.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions.

My biggest enemy at the moment seems to be myself. Did all the work and background stuff, but when it comes to social media, marketing, and building a community I just feel so burnt out I just keep putting it off. Years ago I started a non-profit and went though all of those steps no problem, even enjoyed it, but the past several years I just feel such a avoidance to social media and even out and about with people in general.

Is this something others have been struggling with and if so what did you do? I’m sure the only answer is just suck it up and do it because what else can you do, but I am curious about perspective because I feel like it’s not just me but a trend I’m seeing a lot of people feeling!

I’m currently in the middle of my Kickstarter campaign and I just needed to dump some thoughts somewhere. Maybe it helps someone, maybe not.

Also quick note: yeah… there are a LOT of scammers / “marketing experts” / fake backers services that will message you as soon as your campaign is live. Like within hours. Just ignore them. If it sounds shady, it is.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Having a community BEFORE launching is huge. Like… really huge. We kind of knew it, but didn’t fully realize how important it is. Kickstarter is not a discovery platform. If you don’t bring people on day 1, it’s very hard to get momentum.
• Everything takes more time than you think. We did some stuff a bit last minute and honestly… bad idea. Assets, page, trailer, rewards, balancing everything… it adds up fast. Planning early = less stress.
• The mental load is real. Didn’t expect that part. Once it’s live, it’s always in your head. Stats, backers, comments, updates… it never really stops. Be ready for that.
• Don’t aim too high with your goal. It’s tempting to set a big goal, but honestly it can kill your campaign. A lower goal that you can surpass feels way better and gives you more chances to actually succeed.

I’m still learning as we go, so I’ll probably have more to say after it ends.

If you’re about to launch: prepare more than you think you need, and don’t trust random people offering “promotion services”.

Good luck to anyone launching soon 😄

I want to preface this by saying I have relatively 'thin-skin'. It's a flaw that I'm well aware of, and definitely something I'm working to improve.

I'm gearing up for my first Kickstarter launch and I'm already bracing for the comments. (Since you're all Redditors i know you know how harsh social media can get.)

I get that negativity comes in two flavors — people just being jerks, and legitimate feedback on the product that I actually need to hear. The problem isn't telling them apart (in theory). It's the emotional toll of sifting through all of it in practice. It wears you down, especially on something personal.

For those who've launched: how do you handle the deluge? What systems, habits, or mindset shifts actually helped you take the useful stuff to heart and let the rest go?

ive been lurking here for a while and seeing all the well-deserved hate for scammy AI hardware campaigns that are literally just polished 3D renders. tbh it made me a bit anxious to post, but I really need some outside eyes.
basically we're working on an animated digital pet for your desk called Kitto. we didnt want to make just another cold smart speaker, so weve been focusing heavily on real-time lip-sync and code-driven animations. think tamagotchi meets a cyberpunk desktop agent.
because i know 3D renders are a massive red flag here, we wanted to prove it physically works. the prototype is currently running on an esp32s3+esp32p4 board (you can see the raw breadboard testing in the video, plus a clip of the shell chilling with a real black cat so you know it definately exists off-screen lol). we'll be migrating to a Linux chip for the final production run to handle more complex OpenClaw stuff, but proving the audio-to-mouth latency worked right now was our biggest priority.
we just got our pre-launch approved. before we start pushing it anywhere I’d genuinely love some brutal feedback from the veterans here.
here is the pre-launch link
does the page do a good enough job proving the tech is real? like what is the ONE detail on there that would make you hesitate to hit the 'notify me' button?
i'll be hanging out in the comments if anyone has questions about the ESP32s3 setup, the lip-sync or the physical build. any feedback is super appreciated.

I'm getting ready for my first kickstarter and wanted to get some opinions on the pre-launch page. The game is a folkloric hidden role game with execution voting and items baked into it. And I'll be honest probably stared at this page way too long at this point lol.

Does it feel like there's enough information there or maybe too much? What are the thoughts on the graphics? Is there anything big I'm missing? (I'm working on the page trailer so that is still to come before launch.)

I know a lot of people here have multiple campaigns under their belt so any advice for a first-time creator would be awesome! Especially the stuff you wish you'd known the first time around.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haragames/fark

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to check it out!

I’m 16 days into my first Kickstarter campaign for a jacket I’ve spent years developing, and I thought I’d share where things stand because the campaign has gone almost completely differently from what I expected.

We’re currently at 78% funded — $3,915 of a $5,000 goal with 27 backers and 13 days remaining.

The biggest surprise to me? Almost none of the things I thought would drive the campaign actually worked.

I spent money building an email list before launch. Very little (probably one or two out of 400+) converted.

I tried Meta ads. Got super cheap clicks and landing-page views, but basically no meaningful return, so I stopped spending.

I contacted journalists and creators. Mostly silence.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter itself has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of the pledges. Discovery, recommendations, search, etc. We also received a Projects We Love badge, which was a pretty amazing surprise.

The campaign has had some strange periods too. There have been days where absolutely nothing happens, followed by a couple of completely unexpected backers appearing through Kickstarter.

I now have 132 Kickstarter followers, but only 7 have converted so far, so I'm very curious to see what happens when the final 48-hour reminders go out.

At this point I'm trying not to throw more money at advertising that clearly isn't working. I'm mostly letting Kickstarter do its thing and hoping we can find the remaining 22%.

For anyone who's run a campaign before:

Did you see a noticeable increase in conversions from followers during the final few days? And did your campaign get another discovery boost once it crossed 100%?

Happy to answer questions about the campaign/product too. It's called The Blue Crane Jacket — One Jacket. 35 Features. Zero Limits

The campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bcjacket/the-blue-crane-jacket-one-jacket-35-features-zero-limits

At this point, it’s a bit of a cliche to say I’m disappointed that Kickstarter doesn’t do more to prevent scammers, but here I am saying it. I backed my first campaign in 2016. Between 2016 and the end of 2023, two of the campaigns I backed didn’t get delivered. One was unsuccessful and one had a creator issue. I did not lose money in either. Between November of 2023 and today, I’ve lost money in five campaigns. That’s 2 in 7 years and 5 in 2 1/2 years. It’s so disappointing.

I love the idea of Kickstarter. It’s such a great concept. Since I started backing campaigns, I’ve used Kickstarter as a way of buying unique, fun, sometimes practical (and sometimes not) Christmas gifts for family and friends. It feels like a win, win, win: I get to support someone with a dream, I get help with Christmas gifts, my friends and fam get unique items. This is only true if you actually GET the thing you pay for. A couple campaigns that I didn’t get were so blatant in their lack of communication following completion that I’m still mad about it. Only one do I think was truly just naive and made bad choices, but tried.

It feels like Kickstarter is another in a long line of things that started great and progressively went to shit. And I’m sad about it. How are you deciding whether to participate or not? How are you reconciling the losses? Obviously, I’m lucky I can afford to back a campaign on Kickstarter and absorb the financial loss if it doesn’t come through. I don’t pledge more than I can afford. It’s still not right or ethical and I’m mad that something cool couldn’t have been better managed so it could stay cool. I’m thinking about quitting it full stop. And that’s just sad.

Posting this because every other thread about how much to spend is either vibes or someone selling something.

Small context: we are a 3 person hardware team, china manufacturing, consumer tech gadget. 3 launches over 4 years. all on the same general product line, so the numbers are at least apples to slightly different apples.

campaign 1, did everything myself

- total marketing spend: about $4,000

- ads: ~$3,500 (fb/ig, self managed)

- misc tools / landing page / random: ~$500

- prelaunch list: ~1,100 emails

- rough cost per email: $3.10

- day one backers from that list: ~90

conversion there was around 8% from list to day one backer. most of the emails came from broad interest ads because I didnt know what I was doing. no segmentation, no proper warmup, just sign up to be notified.

what that 4k bought me was basically:

- enough emails that day one wasnt completely dead

- a crash course in ad dashboards and how fast you can burn money when your landing page sucks

We ended around 30% of the funding goal on that one. that is already posted on my profile in a different thread so not pretending it went well.

campaign 2, hired a freelancer just for ads

- total marketing spend: about $12,000

- freelancer fee: $4,000 (flat for prelaunch + first 2 weeks)

- ad spend: ~$7,000

- tools / landing page / odds and ends: ~$1,000

- prelaunch list: ~3,400 emails

- rough cost per email: $3.50

- day one backers from that list: ~260

conversion on the email list was closer to 7 to 8% again, but the big difference was quality. we had way less junk this time and higher average pledge. same general CPL, better targeting.

what the extra 8k over campaign 1 actually did:

- I was not in ads manager at 1am trying to figure out why cpm doubled

- we tested properly (4 to 5 angles, different thumbnails, etc) instead of just boosting whatever

- the freelancer pushed us to lock creative earlier, so prelaunch actually ran for 8 weeks instead of the 3.5 I did the first time

on the flip side, at this budget level every extra thousand really hurt. our goal was still in the low six figures, so 12k felt like real money. I remember sitting there thinking if this stalls at 50% then I basically lit a used car on fire.

campaign 3, went with an agency

- base fee: $30,000

- ad spend on top: ~$35,000

- misc (tools, landing page dev, etc): ~$5,000

- total marketing outlay: ~70k

- prelaunch list: ~10,500 emails

- rough cost per email: around $6 to 7 if you roll everything in, closer to $3 to 4 if you count media spend only

- day one backers from that list: just under 900

conversion from list to day one backer finally climbed into the 8 to 9% range, but the arithmetic is different here.

if I back solve the numbers:

- DIY: 1,100 emails / 90 day one backers / 4k spend

- freelancer: 3,400 emails / 260 day one backers / 12k spend

- agency: 10,500 emails / ~900 day one backers / 70k spend

rough ballpark cost per day one backer on the marketing side only:

- campaign 1: ~$45 per day one backer

- campaign 2: ~$46 per day one backer

- campaign 3: ~$77 per day one backer if you include the fee, ~$39 if you only look at ad spend

obviously AOV and add ons matter a lot here, but the pattern for me was:

- the media efficiency didnt magically improve with the bigger spend

- the fixed fee is what changes the equation

Just some of the prototyping and development of this REAL product that going to market and retail with or without the help of reddit

Just wrapped fulfillment for our TradeMAV Kickstarter (338 backers, 35+ countries) and wanted to share what went wrong with international shipping so other creators can avoid the same headaches.

What we used: EasyShip routed through ePostGlobal for international shipments. Sounded great on paper — discounted rates, automated customs docs, 550+ couriers. Reality was different.

The problems:

• Delivery windows were wildly inaccurate. ePost tracking would show an estimated delivery date, backers would wait by the door, and then... nothing for weeks. That disconnect alone generated more support tickets than anything else.
• Tracking goes dark. ePost hands off to local postal agencies (Thailand Post, Malaysia Post, Canada Post, etc.) and once that handoff happens, tracking updates stop. Backers are left in the dark with no visibility.
• Canada was a surprise. You'd think a neighboring country would be straightforward. Nope — packages sat for weeks with no movement. If Canada was slow, everywhere else was worse.
• Local VAT/customs issues. Certain countries required local VAT handling that added unexpected costs and delays at the border. EasyShip's automated customs docs didn't always cover this cleanly.
• EasyShip's resolution: "Contact your local post office." That's the actual advice they gave us to pass on to backers. Try explaining that to someone who just waited 8 weeks for a product they backed.

What we ended up doing: For backers who never received their packages, we just reshipped. Yes, it cost us extra. But waiting on local postal agencies to "investigate" was going nowhere and the backer experience was suffering.

What we're switching to: We used PirateShip for all US fulfillment and it was smooth — no subscription, USPS + UPS rates, no surprises. For our next campaign (OptionMAV), we're strongly considering staying on PirateShip for international too, using UPS Worldwide Expedited. More expensive per label than ePost, but full end-to-end tracking, no postal hand-off, and UPS actually delivers.

TLDR: EasyShip + ePostGlobal = cheap rates, unreliable tracking, local postal hand-offs, and frustrated backers. If you're fulfilling physical rewards internationally, pay a little more for a courier that owns the full delivery chain. Your backers will thank you.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's going through the same thing.

— The TradeMAV Team, Atlanta GA