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The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal
jfruh writes "In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an 'early release' version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed."
For another example look at the Pebble watch.
Originally wanted $100,000 in funding, wound up getting over $10 million. That changed the size of their problem from making 1000 watches, to making 100,000 watches. So now they had to scale their manufacturing by a factor of 100, which is a totally different set of problems to solve.
There has been a lot of angst (some anger) at the delivery delays, most of the "investors" have been reasonably patient, some have been downright ignorant. One of the most popular forum topics is something like "I funded it on [date], why haven't I got my watch", where [date] was only a small number of days after the kickstarter campaign began, but in reality was when they were at over $5 million going up.
Disclaimer: I'm still waiting (patiently) on my two watches. I should have just ordered black, or changed to black when they made the option available. sigh!