There's a lot to criticize here, but one suggestion I've not seen anyone make is some kind of commitment to backers to make them whole. This is an ongoing ente

There's a lot to criticize here, but one suggestion I've not seen anyone make is some kind of commitment to backers to make them whole. This is an ongoing enterprise, so there are any number of ways that might happen. One is just to say, "Look, we don't have the money to pay you back now but we are converting your contributions to loans at interest rate $X and will pay you back when we have the cash, which we expect to be $DATE." Or give people a discount on some future product. Free software updates for life. Something. Otherwise this reads as kind of narcissistic: "It's been so painful for us to spend all your money!" They also made any number of mistakes that are so large and well-known as to be nearly inexcusable. They were clearly learning on other people's dime, and that's kind of a problem when the product never materializes. Outsourcing design and development is a terrible mistake for a boutique product. While this was a product management failure, the lack of in-house resources was an even bigger error. For a $500K budget, zero money should be have been spent on design. Let the engineers decide how it looks. You can make it pretty on the second iteration. The first one will be charmingly ugly, and it will exist. Design people can suck down an astonishing amount of cash arguing about fonts, and that kind of thing makes a difference if you're selling to the mass-market, but for a niche/enthusiast/industrial product? No one cares. I once worked on an industrial product where a design company burned a huge amount of money on everything from UI layouts (mostly unusable) to icon design, to fonts. I re-did their UI so it could actually be implemented with the development and hardware resources available, added a few icons they had missed, and replaced their pricey commercial font with a free one. Number of complaints about the UI from the people who had approved the design dollars in the first place? Zero. No one could tell the difference (I'm sure a designer would have gone spare looking at what I produced, but our customers weren't designers... they almost never are.) Good design in a mass-market product can be a huge big deal, but hitting that perfect sweet spot the way Apple does so often is incredibly difficult and expensive. The odds of hitting it are so low for a project with limited resources that you're far better off not trying until you've got a shipping product.