9 reasons Kickstarter projects ship late

Creators have the option of halting their campaigns once they've hit their funding goal, but almost no one pulls the plug early due to too much success.

"I'm sure it's happened, but I can't think of a particular one offhand," Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler said.

When projects get massively oversubscribed, though, complicated problems pop up.

Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, planned to make a few hundred units by hand. He ended up on the hook for 7,500. That meant completely re-imagining the manufacturing process.

Kickstarter's all-time record-holder, the Pebble watch, raised more than $10 million -- committing the company to ship 85,000 watches.

Sometimes sourcing enough materials becomes literally impossible.

Twine depleted the entire world of a certain type of chip. Seriously. "We had to call up the factory and have them make more flash memory chips -- just for you guys," Twine wrote in an update to backers. "That's crazy."

The makers of the Remee dream mask had to switch to a new production facility to handle their much-larger-than-expected order. That slowed things down -- but also led to a higher-quality product. -Julianne Pepitone

NEXT: Apple's Lightning bolt