What Kickstarter agencies actually returned on my campaigns

I have paid Kickstarter marketing agencies a lot of money. Some of it came back many times over. Some of it did not come back at all.

Until recently I could not have told you which was which with any precision, and neither can most creators, because the people who know are the agencies themselves and they only publish the wins. So I went back through three campaigns — two of my own and one I ran with a client — pulled the referrers export for each, matched every tag to an invoice, and worked out what each agency actually returned.

Twenty-two agencies. Thirty placements. Here is what the numbers say.

The same agency returned 6.6x and then 0.76x

This is the finding that changed how I think about the question.

BackerCrew charged $549 for a top-position newsletter placement on my first campaign and brought in €3,337 from 33 pledges. That is a 6.6x return and one of the best single results in the whole dataset.

Two years later I paid them $549 again, for the same placement, on a similar product. It brought £330 from 10 pledges. 0.76x. The money did not come back.

Same agency, same placement, same category of product, same price. The only thing that changed was the campaign.

So the spread inside one agency turned out to be wider than the gap between agencies. That makes “is BackerCrew any good?” close to unanswerable, and it means any creator telling you an agency is brilliant because it worked for them is giving you one data point from a very wide distribution.

What moved between those two campaigns was not the agency. It was the product, the price, the time of year, and how warm my list was on day one. The agency is one input among several, and it is the one everybody argues about because it is the one with an invoice attached.

A commission-only return is arithmetic, not performance

This one cost me a day of being wrong, and I think it fools a lot of people.

Several agencies work purely on commission — they take a percentage of what they bring in. Jellop takes 22%. BackerKit takes 15%. The Kickbooster affiliate marketplace mostly runs at 20%.

Record that as your cost and the maths does something unhelpful. If an agency takes 20% of what it brings, then by definition it returns 5x. Every time. On every campaign. Whether it brought you £300 or £300,000.

When I first built this out, the commission agencies filled the top of the table and looked like the best performers on the page. They were not performing at all. I was dividing a number by a fixed fraction of itself.

So if an agency pitches you a “5x average return” and takes 20%, that is not a claim about their work. Ask what they actually brought in, in pounds, for campaigns the size of yours.

The money that never shows up on the invoice

Three kinds of spend are invisible in the obvious place.

Advertising on your budget. Jellop, BackerKit and BackerCamp all run paid ads for you, but the ad spend comes out of your account, not theirs. Their invoice shows a commission; the real cost is the commission plus whatever Meta took. On my first campaign BackerCamp’s 15% came to about €5,000 — the advertising behind it was thousands more, and it appears nowhere near their name.

Set-up fees hiding behind a commission. NewBacker’s invoice reads “$349 non-refundable set-up fee plus 35% commission on tracked sales”. Both halves are the cost, and the set-up fee is payable whether anything works or not. INNOSFOUND took $360 up front on one campaign and a pure commission on another. If you only record one of the two, the agency looks cheaper than it was.

Agencies that never use a tracking link. I paid one company $800. They used no tracking link, so nothing can be attributed to them, and they shared no campaign data when I asked. They later used my campaign on their own homepage as a success story without asking. I cannot prove they did nothing — that is the point. A seller who declines to use your link has made it impossible for you to ever know, and they have done that deliberately.

The expensive agencies are the ones the data cannot see at all

The referrers export only knows about traffic that arrived with a tag on it. That means it is blind to the entire pre-launch category, which is where the largest invoices live.

I paid $7,000 to a pre-launch agency. What I received was access to a course on building the perfect Facebook ads, when what I actually needed was for them to build the email list for me. The teaching was fine. I was paying agency money for a self-serve product, and I did not work out the difference until the money had gone.

No referrers export will ever show you that, because a pre-launch agency sends no tagged traffic. By the measure of that file, the most expensive thing I bought did not exist.

What I would actually ask before paying one

Not a checklist, just the four questions that would have saved me the most money.

“What tag will you use, and can I see it in my dashboard?” If they cannot answer this, you will never know what they did. That answer alone would have saved me $800.

“Does your fee include the advertising, or does that come out of my budget?” A 15% commission and a 15% commission plus £4,000 of ads are different propositions.

“What happens if it does not reach 1:1?” More agencies offer something here than you would think. BackerCrew re-promote for free until a campaign clears 1:1. INNOSFOUND repeat the promotion free below 1x ROI. BackerSpaces refunded me $304.68 when a placement missed. Almost nobody claims these, because almost nobody checks their own numbers afterwards.

“Can you put me in touch with a creator in my category?” Not a testimonial on their site. A creator you can email.

Why I have put the numbers somewhere

Everything above is three campaigns, which is not enough to be authoritative about anything. One creator’s experience is one creator’s luck, and I have just spent a section explaining that the variance is enormous.

So I have put what I have into a database of what creators actually paid Kickstarter agencies — what each one cost, what came back, and whether it was worth it, taken from referrers exports and invoices rather than anybody’s marketing page. It covers 22 agencies so far, and it gets more useful as more creators add theirs. If you have run a campaign, adding your own numbers takes about ten minutes and gets you access to the lot, free, permanently.

If you are weighing up a specific quote right now, the ROAS calculator will tell you what that agency needs to return before it has earned its fee, and the break-even calculator does the same for a retainer. If you are still deciding whether you need an agency at all, consultant versus agency is the more fundamental question and worth answering first.

The thing I would most like someone to have told me three campaigns ago: the agency you hire matters less than whether you can measure what it did. Set up the tracking, keep the invoices, and check the numbers while the campaign is still live and you can still change something.