When Backerkit’s crowdfunding platform formally launched in mid-2023, the company quickly made strides in the tabletop space, primarily by courting disaffected Kickstarter users. Now co-founder and CEO Maxwell Salzberg tells Polygon that his company already has twice the number of tabletop campaigns committed to the platform in 2024 as it did for all of last year — which isn’t bad for what he calls a “bootstrapped” company. The goal for 2024? Keep the crowdfunding ball rolling while also managing its expansive pledge-management services.
Backerkit was founded in 2012, just as the surge in crowdfunding for both tabletop and video games kicked off in earnest. But while Kickstarter spent the last decade bringing people together for the now customary month-long push that helps get new games paid for, Backerkit is capable of handling pretty much everything else. Its pledge-management business begins where Kickstarter’s crowdfunding business leaves off, helping creators and their customers arrange for things like late pledges, add-ons, shipping, and customer service. Today, Salzberg tells Polygon that his organization manages projects that account for “40 to 60% of the dollars on Kickstarter [in] any given month.”
Tabletop creators and their customers are the largest part of that, which is why it made sense for Backerkit to begin offering its own crowdfunding solution — directly competing with Kickstarter.
“It’s not untrue to say tabletop is [home to] the innovators in the crowdfunding space, which is funny and awesome and wonderful,” Salzberg said. Part of that innovation, he said, has been in creating multiple crowdfunding campaigns, one right after another. So-called serial crowdfunding is here to stay, Salzberg said, and that’s created a need for a more intimate and sustainable relationship between backers and the creators they love.
“I don’t think the people that are launching a Backerkit think they’re just going to do a project and walk away from it,” Salzberg said. “They want to make whatever weird, freaky thing they’re making [into a career]. And to me, that’s the last cool thing on the internet. [Crowdfunding is] this amazing platform. You can make whatever, cool, weird, interesting, strange thing [you want to do]. And if you want to make it what you do, this is a way to do that.”
Backerkit’s biggest wins in 2023 all came from Kickstarter. Its top five tabletop campaigns included the Gloomhaven: Grand Festival, a new tabletop role-playing game from MCDM, and a series of projects by Monte Cook Publishing. But with only seven months since it launched out of beta, the San Francisco-based company says it’s too early to compare it with its closest competitor, Gamefound. The Poland-based crowdfunding company left beta well ahead of Backerkit, and that head start is already paying dividends — including a first-of-its-kind deal with CMON, whose nearly 60 successful campaigns account for more than $108 million in earnings since 2012 on Kickstarter.
Salzberg has his own high-profile partnerships to build on in 2024. First up is another convert, author Brandon Sanderson, whose nearly $42 million campaign for four secret novels remains the single largest campaign in Kickstarter history. His next crowdfunding campaign, currently billed as a series of collectible leather-bound books, kicks off March 5 on Backerkit.
