Kickstarter is the stock market for amateurs to buy into other people's dreams. You are always going to have a few bad apples who spoil the bunch. I have funded

Kickstarter is the stock market for amateurs to buy into other people's dreams. You are always going to have a few bad apples who spoil the bunch. I have funded tonnes of successful Kickstarter campaigns and I have learned to steer clear from the obviously risky startups, which at times can be difficult. Although I have never backed a failed campaign, every campaign I have backed that requires some kind of manufacturing and hardware has never delivered on time, except my Remix Mini Android PC. The problem is manufacturing starts out inherently expensive and the price drops the more you produce. If you're only doing a production run of 6000, you can guarantee you're not going to get a good price for something that requires plastics molding and assembly. I think Kickstarter needs to make it harder to start a hardware based campaign. There are a lot of empty promises, I think some accountability would go a long way. A milestone based system would be great where the owner of the campaign specifies milestones (design, plastic mold, hardware components, etc) and when they need a milestone released, Kickstarter evaluates on a request-by-request basis and then updates the campaign automatically.