After my experience with Lockitron, I have no desire to lock away my money for months while fretting over whether or not I'm going to get ripped off.
The same goes for the Heritage Chemistry set which I would buy for any of my kids (but to be honest, mainly for myself), but I just don't have any faith that I will see my $500-700.
Because it makes no sense to talk of getting ripped off if your intent is to support the idea and help out an inventor.
Kickstarter tries to make this clearer. I see from this project that they couch everything as 'buying' not as 'supporting'.
In the case of these stickers, the development is already done. Unlike typical crowdfunding campaigns, the creator is not expecting backers to fund development or absorb the risk of unexpected engineering challenges, which is why the funding threshold is set at $1.
Source: I have these on my desk, and they're awesome.
So if you define a project called "teach my kid titration" it would understand how to get phenolphthalein and other indicators in Belgium, how to get a beaker in Texas (good luck), etc, and for a modest 10% fee of which they keep half and the designer keeps half, they make one CC charge and magically anywhere in the world boxes start arriving.
This would be tremendously helpful with electronic projects, where I get a custom PCB from somebody, some obscure transistor from somewhere else, and COTS support parts from the "big 3" suppliers.
Something tells me the agony of being a purchasing agent can't be abstracted away for a mere 5% commission. And how to intermediate, if at all, shipping, customs, and return disputes. Still, whatever it costs, it would be an interesting and probably worth it to some people.
We ship both live and dead cell cultures (both extremely pathogenic and relatively benign) that can pose severe risk even when dead. The few times I've had to do international shipments have been a pain in the ass with all the paperwork, special packaging, customs bullshit and then there's the agony of waiting for the shipment to clear US customs, then destination customs, then destination culture screening -- and we have lawyers of who deal with the paperwork for us!
On the other hand amazon can probably ship blank unused new microscope slides anywhere in the world, so maybe they get to ship to .UK
This kind of coordination of which supplier can ship what, where, would be what the proposed startup would do.
So as a kit designer, my lab experiment which anyone in the world can buy from the startup for $100 or whatever (of which I get 5% and the startup keeps 5%), needs an arduino, a A/D and D/A shield from some specialty electronics supplier (adafruit?) and a spool of copper wire, clipleads and connectors and stuff from generic supplier (jameco?) and some sticks of different metals like aluminum, copper, steel (onlinemetals.com?) and some rather generic glassware (carolina? VWR? Fischer? or downscale to a ceramic mug or flower pot?) and something like lemon juice in a can or maybe a wide variety of mostly harmless electrolytes like diet coke soda (amazon food department?) Whoops forgot to add a decent printed lab manual (lulu.com?)
Ta da instant lets do introductory electrochemistry at home kit. Send the startup $100 in a single credit card charge, they keep $5, send $5 to me as designer/curator, and $90 goes to about 5 suppliers and boxes start arriving at the end users house.
Now the magical startup wouldn't only do this project or only those suppliers, but it would middleman ... hundreds of kits maybe thousands?
This is basically the drop ship retail model, but for small consumers and small orders instead of the more traditional use of drop shipping a 5 HP air compressor. Also I'd internationalize it, why not. So if you live in some weird country where shipping canned lemon juice is illegal, well, I guess its not available for purchase in that country.
I don't personally want to do this. It sounds like a huge PITA and probably will fail and it'll be hard. Someone else can go right ahead, and I'll probably end up a project curator for a couple projects and most likely a buyer. Unless they try to grab something ridiculous like 50% as middleman, in which case I'd drop them like a hot potato.