“No one ever talks about their bad experiences on Kickstarter,” says Joanna Montgomery, the 28-year- old boss of consumer technology start-up Little Riot. “It’s seen as the Holy Grail and you never hearthe other side.”

Kickstarter, arguably the world’s most famous crowdfunding platform, has helped fund more than 100,000 different campaigns throughout its lifetime, raising $2bn for projects and products since it was launched in 2009.

It has been the springboard for many start-up success stories, from the Pebble smartwatch, which raised $10.3m in 2012 – it was seeking to raise just $100,000 – to the MaKey MaKey, an inventor kit that lets people hook up non-tech materials like Play-Doh to a computer, which raised $570,000 and is now shipping all over the world.