Kickstarter + Shopify

Summary

Action Items

Timeline

Shopify

Kickstarter Data

Marketing

Expenses

Explore

After a Kickstarter What's Next....

A template for before, during, and after a Kickstarter goes live.

Nicole Stoltenberg

After my husband and I became parents, we struggled to find bedtime books for our two young boys that introduced sports at a young age. As lifelong athletes, reading books solely about farm animals night after night was not making the cut. This is where the vision for a baby and toddler touch-and-feel sports book began. We joined forces with illustrator Brandon Minch, a former college and French pro-league football player, to create

You Can Play Sports⁠

You Can Play Sports is a touch & feel book featuring eight popular sports -- each with a modern illustration, a diverse cast of characters, a fun rhyme that teaches key terminology, and an embedded ball that's made with materials and textures designed to feel like the real thing.

⁠

We decided to self-publish our book as a fun Covid hobby due to our unique backgrounds in Sales, Product Development, and Engineering. We launched our Kickstarter at the end of April 2021, exceeded our goal....then discovered a few hurdles.

Need for an integrated “hub”

From an operation standpoint, we quickly realized we didn’t have a “hub” for the various tasks a small publishing business faced. We used Slack to communicate between the 3 of us, had a Google Drive folder with 13+ different spreadsheets for marketing, expenses, outreach, and feedback, and when writing the book we used a Google Doc that somehow turned into 4 different docs that each one of us referenced. Yikes!

Once our Kickstarter completed, the Kickstarter funds and backer list lived in Kickstarter. But, we had created a Shopify store as a place where people could buy the book now and in the future. That sales data was stored in Shopify. We needed a way to:

Keep track of our collective to-do list for the book to be created, launched, marketed, and shipped to our customers without a hitch

Have a visual timeline we could back our way into book delivery

Keep track of expenses in real-time

Keep track of profit from static Kickstarter data combined with real-time dynamic Shopify data

Ensure delivery of all books and manage inventory

Create your own integrated Kickstarter + Shopify Tracker

Start by

Copying this template

⁠

. Then:

Copy in your Kickstarter Data by going to Kickstarter > Your Project > Menu > Backer Report > Export Backer Report. Copy the back report data (copy all cells) and paste it in the the 🚀

Kickstarter Data⁠

page.

Install the Shopify Pack and start syncing your

Shopify⁠

data, click the Explore in the top right of the toolbar, go to

⁠

Packs, and find the Shopify pack.

To create your API Key and Password:

From your Shopify Admin, go to

Apps⁠

on the left hand side.

Click Manage private apps at the bottom of the page.

Click Create new private app.

In the Description section, enter "Coda" for the name of the private app and add your email address as a contact email.

In the Permissions section, select "Read and Write" access for Customer, Orders, Products, and Inventory data, as well as "Read" access for Locations data. You may have to click the link that says "Review disabled Admin API permissions" in order to see some of these permissions, particularly those for Inventory and Locations, which are buried amid a long list of other permissions.

When you're done, click Save. The API key and password for your Pack connection are displayed on screen.

Setup your to do list in

Action Items⁠

. The timeline will auto populate based on the target dates you include in the tasks.

Setup your

Marketing⁠

pages.

Setup your

Expenses⁠

⁠

The

Summary⁠

page will populate in real-time.

Note: all data is fictional.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.