[tcas]

My experience (both pledging and running my own campaigns) has been Kickstarter is mostly an early adopter marketing tool. They could easily fund this themselves and start selling it on Amazon.

They don't need another $50k to get this product to market, especially considering to get to this point (prototypes, market research, marketing) they have easily spent more than that. I bet they are spending $15k+ in video production and marketing just for this campaign. Campaigns frequently choose low targets in order to appear like they are wildly successful as well.

They managed to get onto HN with this campaign -- I wouldn't have heard of it otherwise.