Despite what the text on the page implies, these are essentially pre-orders for the Pebble and not "funding" in the VC sense. They didn't raise $5.5MM, they sol

Despite what the text on the page implies, these are essentially pre-orders for the Pebble and not "funding" in the VC sense. They didn't raise $5.5MM, they sold that roughly that many of their products. It's an impressive achievement, especially relative to most other Kickstarter campaigns. But if apple only sold $5.5MM in pre-orders for their new watch, they wouldn't be very happy and someone would probably get fired. As far as B2B bootstrapping goes, companies invest in other companies all the time. Mostly for the reasons that you've outlined, because they want to help potential partners to grow and often as a precursor to an acquisition. They generally don't do it at the very early seed stage because it's too speculative. That's what angel investors are for. Kickstarter has become a sales platform, whether that's what they wanted to be or not, and they should just embrace that. It started off as "fund great ideas and help them get off the ground" but as soon as they allowed products to be given away as rewards it became "buy stuff that doesn't exist yet, and you may or may not receive it". There's clearly a demand for it, and it doesn't seem like the failed products are enough to stop people with disposable income from parting with a few hundred dollars to be early adopters and feel like they're helping someone else. It's worth noting that under this system the amount raised almost always reflects revenue as opposed to funding/profit. A campaign that raises $100k on Kickstarter will usually only get to "keep" $40k-$60k of that as actual funding, because they have to pay for the cost of the products and swag that they give out as rewards. Sure beats starting from scratch though.