[mrandish]

As a startup entrepreneur myself, I've bought into a few Kickstarter projects and I haven't gotten hosed yet. However, I think this is because I'm pretty cautious. I look into the track records of the people, assess the viability/difficulty of completing the project based on my experience and I tend to buy in quite late in the process.

There have been a lot I've passed on due to the fundamental uncertainty of manufacturing offshore hardware. I just bookmark them and buy it from Amazon when it's actually shipping for real. Often it's not much more than the Kickstarter price (and sometimes it's less).