I would say if nothing else, Kickstarter is going to be useful if you did put an extravagant start up cost, purely to gauge honest take up of the product, prior to putting your own time and money into R&D, rather than 200 forum posts saying they would buy one, and then when it comes to it, not coughing up the cash?
I dunno, but maybe the $20k target is deliberately high, maybe not aiming to actually be hit, or if it does its a nice surprise?
Does the project starter receive the pledgers details? If so, maybe when it doesn't hit the target, which at this stage it wont, pledgers may get an email to say it might still go ahead, who knows...
At this stage,even though I'm behind it 100% without it and have already pledged, I'm sure a demo of a prototype would have really have helped the project take off.