Backer Experience Consulting

Your campaign won the backers. We make sure you keep them.

The pitch

Most crowdfunding losses do not happen during the campaign. They happen after it, quietly.

Surveys never completed. Addresses that went stale during a long fulfillment window. Tariff balances nobody explained. Pledge managers with no way back in once they close. Every lost backer is a refund, a reship, a support spiral, or a customer who never backs you again.

We are Joe and Crystal Westrich, Lucky Frog Gaming. Kickstarter Superbacker since 2013, with 380+ campaigns backed across Kickstarter and Gamefound. In fall 2026 we audited our own backing portfolio line by line, every pledge, every pledge manager, and found the same failure patterns in system after system. Now we audit yours, from the backer's side of the screen, because that is where we live.

222Projects in our audit
$51,178Pledged across them
$199Median pledge
93 of 222Managed on Gamefound

Services

Four ways to work with us, from a scored one-time audit to an embedded partner through fulfillment.

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The Backer Experience Audit

$750

A real test pledge walked through your entire flow, a scored report across nine areas, every finding ranked Critical, High, or Polish with the fix written out, and a 60 minute walkthrough call. Includes the template bundle: survey nudge sequence, address verification drive, backer FAQ skeleton. Delivered in about two weeks.

Founder pricing: the first three audits are $500, in exchange for a testimonial and a named case study.

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Launch Ready

$2,500

The audit applied to your draft campaign before it goes live, plus tier and add-on structure review, shipping and tariff communication written in backer plain language, pledge manager selection and setup review, and a late pledge strategy. Ends with a signed off pre-launch checklist.

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Campaign Through Fulfillment Partner

$4,500 per campaign, or $1,500/mo

Embedded through the danger zone, capped at two campaigns at a time. Weekly backer updates drafted, community presence, pledge manager opening, the survey completion drive with completion tracked weekly, the pre-lock address verification push, and an exceptions playbook for lost, moved, and silent backers.

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Fulfillment Rescue

From $1,250

Already in trouble: stalled survey completion, a closed pledge manager with unrecovered backers, messy address data. Recovery communication sequence, a reopen plan, and a deadline campaign to get backers completed before fulfillment.

How it works

1. Free 15 minute mini audit. We look at your live campaign or pledge manager and give you three real findings on the spot. Request one with the form below.

2. The full audit. If the findings earn it, we run the test pledge and deliver the scored report, framed in recovered pledges and dollars, not opinions.

3. Fix it, with or without us. Plenty of creators take the report and fix it themselves. Some keep us through launch and fulfillment. Either way the findings are yours.

The evidence

From our own portfolio audit. Full report and methodology available on request; denominators stated, nothing extrapolated.

Outcomes of a 12 project pledge manager deep audit: 8 of 12 projects had an address issue, 2 were clean, 1 had an incomplete survey that was fixed, 1 pledge was lost
One backer moved house. In a 12 project deep audit of a single pledge manager, 8 projects carried a stale or wrong address for that one mover, 1 survey was incomplete with no address on file weeks before shipping (caught and fixed), and 1 pledge was closed and lost outright over an unexplained $1.65 tariff balance. Scale that to a few thousand backers and a long fulfillment window.
Projects by post-campaign management channel across 222 backed projects: Gamefound native 74, BackerKit 44, unknown 73, Gamefound as pledge manager 19, Hive 11, Allplay 1
Where the backer record lives. Gamefound holds the record for 93 of 222 projects (74 native campaigns plus 19 Kickstarter campaigns managed there). 73 projects could not be classified from any record the backer receives, which is its own finding: backers often cannot tell who holds their data or who ships their game.
Gamefound fulfillment status across 94 orders: most still placed, pledged, or preparing at the time of the account pull
Fulfillment is a long tail. In a live pull of 94 Gamefound orders, only 10 had shipped or arrived. The rest were still in placed, pledged, or preparing states, which is why backer operations stay live for months after a campaign ends.

Two more findings from the same audit, because they shape how we work: the company actually shipping the box could be identified for only about 2 percent of the projects, and every documented rescue of a lost or stranded pledge happened outside the system of record, by email, ticket, or a publisher's own store. Systems lose backers. The audit builds the safety net before it is needed.

Request a free mini audit

Tell us where your campaign stands. We reply from a human inbox, usually within two business days, with two time slots and any questions we need answered first.

This goes to the Lucky Frog Gaming inbox. No newsletter, no list, no resale of your details. Just a reply about your campaign.

The fine print, up front

This is backer experience and communications consulting. It is not freight, customs, tax, or legal advice, and it does not replace your support inbox. That boundary is deliberate: it keeps the work senior, fast, and honest.