I'm helping out with a Kickstarter project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studentrnd/plasma-speaker http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studentrnd/plasma-

I'm helping out with a Kickstarter project (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studentrnd/plasma-speaker http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studentrnd/plasma-speake...) which is already 2 months behind the delivery date, and I just wanted to offer a view from the other side. Shipping a product is hard. Our initial prototype used some components we had in our parts organizer, and a $100k variable DC power supply Boeing donated. It was pretty cool, so we put it online, and it picked up $20k in donations. As soon as we put it online, we started working on improvements to the design, and when it was to a point we considered done, we made a board design and ordered parts. And of course, nothing worked. We've been working on it for as much time as possible since then (as mentioned in our Kickstarter, the lead designer is a high school student), and even with the help of some local EEs, it's taken forever to get it to even start. The flybacks and PSUs took forever to get to the US, customs held up the package, and FedEx refused to deliver them. Our laser cutter, which we ordered to make the enclosures, was a week late, and took a few days to set up. Now we're at the point where we're balancing sound quality and time. We can redesign the entire project so it sounds better, but that means another few weeks to get the new boards and parts, or we can just ship what we have. If we do any Kickstarters in the future, we're obviously going to have a totally more realistic timeframe. But it's apparent that anyone who hasn't shipped a product is going to have no idea of how involved trying to reproduce something in a mass scale is. That said, it looks like these people took an AWFUL approach to customer support. We've tried to keep people as up-to-date as we were, we've refunded anyone who asked for it and offered to ship laser cut cards to anyone who was planning on giving the plasma speakers as a Christmas gift. tl;dr: Kickstarter is hard. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.