My point was that over the last 5-10 years, we have seen ZERO hobbyists create the Next Big Thing(tm) out of a kickstarter-like.
And, I would argue, for two good reasons.
1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.
The combination of the two is death for the Next Big Thing(tm) coming out of a kickstarter.
Oculus and Pebble maybe aren't "Next Big Thing", but both were major hardware Kickstarter projects. Pebble was the first mainstream smartwatch, and the VR landscape would be significantly different if not for Oculus. It's probably fair to say that neither was iPhone level of industry revolutionary, but it's a mistake to discount them entirely.
My comment wasn't about Kickstarters, I think they're irrelevant in this discussion. I'm talking about making your stuff accessible to people outside of large corporations. The world isn't two perfectly non-intersecting groups labeled "hobbyists" and "professionals". There's enormous overlap. Hell, a very large portion of HN falls into both categories.
Let's say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it'd get bought. But since I can't use XYZ in my personal life, I've never even heard of it, and as a result when we're deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn't get bought.
Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I've met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It's hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you're sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you'll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.
So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it's only accessible to large corporations, then it's not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won't have familiarity with your thing and they'll just pick what they know.
Furthermore, it's not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you're done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It's not like you're personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.
Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.
And, I would argue, for two good reasons.
1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.
The combination of the two is death for the Next Big Thing(tm) coming out of a kickstarter.