I think this is a very good writeup on the current state of Kickstarter 3D printers (and actually many other kinds of Kickstaters as well).
http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/2bu7jk/more_rants_about_kickstarter_printers_this_time
cough, Makibox, cough
These KS fails aren’t just harming themselves, though, they are also establishing unreasonably low target prices for everyone else.
The race to the bottom is killing us and establishing a bad rep for the non-well known brands.
50% of startups fail within 5 years, probably worse for tech startups. Business incompetence is not limited to KS, but KS does provide a much easier way to raise funds without submitting to due diligence by conventional investors.
All companies trying to grow are affected by cash flow - costs are incurred in advance of sales receipts (the “pyramid” problem referred to), but the situation is worse for small companies. A startup trying to go from 0 units /month inevitably hits growth problems, but taking advance orders of 100’s or 1000’s units does not help, it commits them to grow fast, and makes the problem worse!
I explained to a friend of mine that you can’t budget for an expense you don’t know you will have.
So Kickstarter brings out the folks who are good at marketing but not so good at engineering. Twice I’ve met young engineers who were brought in by such folks, were too inexperienced or afraid to object to the impossible things being promised, and then tried really really hard to make it work.
That said, 3D printing reminds me strongly of the emergence of the PC businesses in the 70’s. It was pretty trivial to put a microprocessor, memory, eprom, on a board but building a system that people wanted was hard. Altair, KIM-1, Challenger, Imsai, all variations with different approaches and business teams of various strengths.
I don’t know if kickstarter is educating folks on the real price or not, one would hope so.
I’m selling my Makiboxes because I’ve moved on to a printer costing 10x much.