[closetohome]

I agree completely about the difficulty of a hardware startup, but being "good" means knowing in advance what kind of challenges you'll face, or at least knowing who to consult about it, and when to listen to their advice. I guarantee that at several points in the development of their product, someone pointed out the high BOM cost and the math required to become profitable. At this point Kickstarter has been around for long enough that even people without direct experience in hardware development should have enough case studies to know what they're wading into.