Now, for my own purposes (and other people who I know have enjoyed using this style of framework) … there’s an open source version that you can just grab and start using.

To be fair, this kind of tool can be hard to pitch. Its value is difficult to appreciate until you experience first-hand what it’s like to get a daunting list sorted for you.

However, there’s a “lesson learned” that I didn’t include in this writeup, because it wasn’t a “lesson learned about Kickstarter”, but lessons learned, during the kickstarter, about these two products.

First of all, we found, in general, when out talking to people at events, and contacting people directly. That the majority of people were extremely interested in the idea. In fact, I had something like a 90% success rate when contacting people directly, to get funding from them. We actually got a LOT of great great feedback about these products, some specific features suggestions, some monetization concepts, and some negative feedback that we can incorporate as well. All to allow us to make something cool. I could write up an entire other blog post about “Great directions and ideas we got about the *sorter products”

Even as a good point, were the people like yourself. In your own words above, it was a “useful tool” but “hard to monetize”. That itself is a very good piece of information that we have taken away. It still means that building the tool is a useful thing, even for those people like yourself who we won’t be able to monetize off of. But that just means we need to change the direction we go. Building much more features into a free product, perhaps using advertising, perhaps still having pro accounts (as many people were very excited about them), but just pushing a little more functionality at the free accounts so that they are still very useful.

It’s all great information and we have folders full of it stored aside to keep referring back to.

Most failed ks projects that publish lessons learned blame anything but the pitch itself, where in reality 80% of the ideas on kickstarter just aren’t the great ideas their inventors think they are.