kickstarter planner for indie authors
Hello friends. I've been working on something and honestly I wasn’t about to share it yet but here we are…
It's called KickFlip. It's a desktop app I built for planning Kickstarter campaigns, specifically with indie authors in mind. It requires no account, and transfers nothing in the cloud, just lives right on your computer.
I built it using a ridiculous amount of time and Claude Opus 4.6 credits in order to plan my own campaign because I kept running into the same frustrating problem.
With Kickstarter, or any crowdfunding campaign, you have to set your goal before you know how many backers you'll get or units you will sell. You have to price your tiers before you know your true print costs. You have to price shipping before you know where your backers even are. Every single decision requires information you won't have until after you've already made the decision.
So I just started building a tool that tries to work backward from what you actually know instead of forward from what you're hoping for.
And…I think it works. Pretty well in fact. In concept at least, if not in final execution.
So I want to make it into a permanently free tool for authors themselves, instead of leaving them to the wolves of guesswork and confusion.
It's rough on the edges now, and early. And I'm literally using my own upcoming Kickstarter to find everything that's broken or missing in it. But it works, and I wanted to put it out there because this community has given me so much and I just want to give a tiny fraction back. Like a poorly polished mirror of the generosity that I have been shown in my own career from you lovely people.
Here are some screenshots of the different pages, and the current features:
screenshot of the dashboard
It's free. And shall always be free.
https://xavierschwindtwrites-ai.github.io/kickflip/
If you've run a campaign before or you're planning one I'd genuinely love to know what would actually be useful to you and what's missing. I respect you all too much to pretend this is finished, but it has finally reached the testable phase.Could I ask a favor?
I would love for as many authors as possible to use this tool as it is now and test its limits: tell me what sucks, tell me what shines, tell me what is useless, and tell me what is useful.
Thank you so much friends, you truly are the best.
Blessings!
