[andyidsinga]

you're especially right about the pre-existing audience. i went to a kickstarter boot camp ..and it was brought up a few times that a kickstarter campaign should be at the end of a project's marketing effort. A community or audience must be in place before day one of the campaign.

Also brought up : if a campaign fails, dont despair, put a link up before the project ends that can 3xx redirect to a new campaign ...then build momentum & audience from the failed campaign.

[Udo]

Sure, they could always try again. I can see how for some projects getting crowdfunding traction might be the only real prospect, so it makes sense if there are people who basically do nothing but hustle for weeks on end.

However, this doesn't strike me as that kind of project.

These guys could happily go on to make their thing and gradually show it to an incremental audience as they're building it. It's not at all clear that they actually need to be successful on Kickstarter. They're makers and they'll just make something that's fun for them. It could in fact be argued they'll have more fun and freedom doing it on their own instead of subjecting themselves to that sort of external pressure in exchange for a pittance.

[andyidsinga]

thats a great point - incremental build plus audience building is effectively boot strapping. probably the best approach as long as they can continue to avoid "needing" an injection of funds.