Chris, I think you hit the nail on the head capturing much of what my/our experience has been with the platform and our ~400% over funded TarDisk.com campaign. The timelines that customers have come to expect are not realistic for companies that truly need the funds to engineer the product. However, it makes sense that Kickstarter & the community that makes up the place have evolved this way…

You pointed out Pebble [the original Pebble] in the article as a company who is a true child of kickstarter and I agree with this assessment. But take a read of some of pebble’s backer comments when they started to hit delays. Over-optomistic Backers have been burned in the past and as the kickstarter platform (and community) mature, they are no longer the naive group they once were. Backers can get nasty… There was almost a full-on mutiny from thousands of Pebble backers who were afraid of getting burned, felt that they had “purchased” a product and now were frustrated that the product had not materialize. And that is a PR nightmare that Pebble et. al recognize as being very damaging.

When we were out at CES with TarDisk I had a long conversation with a VP from an [un-named] crowd funding platform. He was trying to convince me to do our next product launch on his platform. He recognized that we did not need to raise money. When I argued that it would be too expensive to pay the 8% to the [unnamed] platform, his response was; “well you are going to pay 3–4% in credit card processing fees anywhere you sell, and 8% on Amazon.com so paying the premium to launch on our platform is the same price and gets you access to our network”. Any you know what — he was right…