I posted this as a reply to another thread but I think it bears repeating again. Most people, the vast majority of people, don't have a clue about what crowd funding is, what it's for, how it works or why it exists in the first place.
Do you wonder why craziest ideas get funded and sensible ones don't? Why your campaign for a perfectly reasonable product failed with next to no support while some other obvious nut job got millions? If you answered yes to either then you don't know jack and you would do yourself a huge favour to read on while I explain it to you. Hopefully, unless my words fail me, you will "get it" in a matter of a few paragraphs and know the right answer to the two questions previous and it will actually make sense. Here goes nothing.
BuyersIf you are "buying" things on Indiegogo then you are doing it wrong. Crowd-funding is just that: funding. Getting one or some of the things you are helping to fund the creation of is a "perk", they don't call it that by accident, it's not a purchase. When you give $125 to fund your local PBS affiliate you get a handy tote bag and a DVD of bird songs as a gift, a thank you. You aren't purchasing the merchandise, you are supporting a cause which is commercially insupportable. This IS the model crowd-funding and Indiegogo is based on.
If the project fails to produce the thing they asked for the money to do then that's the way it goes. You didn't back the project to receive goods and services, you backed the people behind the project to try their best to accomplish their goal. You decide which projects and more specifically which people are worthy of your support. You have to decide if it's something you care about. Is it something you think the people behind the project have a reasonable chance of being successful at? That right there is the essential point: when you back a project on Indiegogo or Kickstarter you are funding the un-fundable. Crowd0funding is not another way to fund a business opportunity. It is a way to fund something which no self respecting commercial interest would consider funding. It is a way to fund crazy ideas which but otherwise worthwhile ideas. If you are looking to "buy" a gadget then wait until they finish commercializing them and then purchase them on Amazon or Best Buy, ready to order. That isn't what crowd-funding is all about.
If you are crowd-funding something because you don't want to invest you own money or you don't want to borrow the money or you don't want to go find a venture capitalist to fund then you are going it wrong. The whole point, and if you read Indiegogo's mission statement you'll see, is to fund the otherwise un-fundable. Indiegogo is where you turn when the bankers laugh at you and when capitalists say "that's a cool idea but I'm not giving you the money to do it" That's why crowd-funding exists. Some things just can't attract commercial funding so they ask the general public "the market" or "audience" if they would help make it happen. There is a reason why there are perks which don't include getting the thing that is being funded. There is a reason for the $1 perk which gets you nothing but a thank you. If you didn't know why those things were there before, now you do.
The reasons sensible and viable projects fail to attract funding is they are trying to sell a product rather than achieve some higher purpose through the creation of the thing. Kickstarter is not a store where you shop. Many project can turn out to be very lucrative but only if they appeal to and excite a broad audience. When people give you money on Indiegogo they do so because they like what you are trying to do and they want to help you accomplish it. They might want the thing you are making but they many not. Successful projects always get a large percentage of their funding from non-product perks, the $1, $5, $10, $20 and so on. Rule number #1 at Indiegogo is always have a $1 perk. They aren't just making that up.
In addition to giving you some money, backers more importantly spread the word about your project and how cool they think it is to all their friends and followers. That's why they are successful!! Unless backers share their enthusiasm for your project on Facebook and twitter it will flop. They aren't going to do that unless they think others would be interested in your cool project too, it needs to be tweet-worthy. They become advocates for and reflectors of your message. That gets you more funding and that makes for successfully funded effort.
If you don't get why some crazy projects are way oversubscribed and other perfectly sensible ones have almost zero backers it's because you don't get crowd funding. You will be burned because you don't understand what you are getting into when you hand over your credit card info. The Indiegogo blog explains much of this in detail. I used to think about it like everyone else does until I had a conversation with one of the founders of Indiegogo at an event and she properly explained the concept to me. Now I get it and it makes perfect sense to me now.
If you and your high school science club want to build a satellite and launch it into space to search for alien life on distant planets then you do it on Indiegogo because nobody else is crazy enough to fund that shit. No prototype required. Yes, this was a real project I myself contributed $65 toward and as a perk I get a picture of a picture of me in space with the earth in the background. Will I ever get it? I dunno, it would be nice but I gave these kids the money for them to try, not necessarily succeed. Richard Branson gave them $100,000 for largely the same reason.
Don't dump on crowd funding, you just didn't understand it. Now that you do you can change the way you think about who you back and what you can reasonably expect in return. Read this
http://blog.indiegogo.com and know what it is you are paying for. It's probably not what you think.