That's a start, but I still think that allowing hardware projects to offer arbitrary, open-ended numbers of end-product rewards is a mistake. Suddenly being expected to produce 100 times as many units as you planned is not, as people so often say "a good problem to have". It's just "a problem".
Yes, the general tendency is for marginal cost to decrease as production quantity increases, but that does not mean that it's a smooth curve. Instead, the line is jagged, littered with points where large investments need to be made. For an open-ended product, you get investors, hire extra people, buy equipment, etc. You'll end up taking a short-term loss that will be earned back in the long term. For a close-ended project like Kickstarter allows, you'll have the short-term loss, but no long-term profit.
And that's if you have experience and connections to pull off manufacturing and courting investors. If you're hawking a project on Kickstarter, it's pretty likely that you have neither.
Yes, the general tendency is for marginal cost to decrease as production quantity increases, but that does not mean that it's a smooth curve. Instead, the line is jagged, littered with points where large investments need to be made. For an open-ended product, you get investors, hire extra people, buy equipment, etc. You'll end up taking a short-term loss that will be earned back in the long term. For a close-ended project like Kickstarter allows, you'll have the short-term loss, but no long-term profit.
And that's if you have experience and connections to pull off manufacturing and courting investors. If you're hawking a project on Kickstarter, it's pretty likely that you have neither.