Kickstarter is not just a way to raise funds for a project, but also a way to get a lot of feedback in a very small space of time around what your product should do.
To do that, Rothman and his team had to build a search engine, a payment system, a pricing engine, afeedback system, and even fussed around with the envelopes customers received.
Traditional businesses mostly do not have instrumentation around their operations, except for a few mission critical pieces, because the computing power to drive the feedback loops was not available.