People use the term disruption pretty loosely, I think crowd-funding is really doing it. Goodbye middlemen, sayonara to the massive traditional barriers to entry. Hello bootstrapped projects like this that would otherwise never see the light of day.
Consider this, when a company goes to get funding, it is the company and the investors together who are postulating what consumers might want. In this model, the consumers fund what they actually want, not what some guys who got lucky once or twice (VCs) assume people want.
Add that to the fact that VCs like to fund things that are going to be like winning the lottery, whereas consumers want to fund things that seem useful to them right now. Huge difference.
That's not only a huge efficiency and effectiveness difference (how do you tell what someone really wants when there are N levels of bullshit between the creator and the consumer?) but it also makes for a much stronger emotional connection.
First off - Congratulations!
I have a burning question. Have you figured out how you're going to do shipping and handling? Are you using a 3rd party to do all of the distribution, or do you have the workforce yourself to do it? Kickstarter and Amazon don't do it for you, do they?
Amazon Fulfillment would have cut my profit in half. Yes it saves you time but depending on where you live and where the fulfillment warehouse is, the size of the products you're making, and the cost of shipping them. For my specific case it wasn't worth it. Hiring a few neighbors and working out of the garage for a few days would be far more feasible.
The middleman is there(kickstarter gets 5%) but is way more reasonable than old middleman.
(1) What is disrupted? Existing means of accessing capital (banks, individual investors, corporations).
(2) It's coming at it from the low end of the market. Small little projects getting funding, nothing that hits the bigger players' radar. But slowly, it starts to grow in terms of volume, and funding project size.
(3) It's addressing an end of the market that was really underserved by mature sources of funding.
Based on all this, I would say crowdfunding is disruptive, with Kickstarter leading the way.
Other than having a great product, are there any marketing things you feel added to your success? Particularly things that could be applied to other projects.
I would say polishing your video and articulating your widget well are the most important things you can do - you don't want to waste anyone's time. I did a million revisions to our video over the course of a year to get to where I thought it was launch worthy. Double Fine's is exceptional. I also found I am horrible in front of a camera unless I am the only one in the room.
We did no PR or anything before hand. A friend sent a link to Gruber a half hour after launch, he wrote one nice sentence about it, then it exploded around the web.
It also helped that Apple makes crappy docks and few people challenge Apple on anything. And that's a testament to Apple because they do usually kill at design. Marco Arment says it concisely here - http://www.marco.org/2012/02/09/elevation-dock