Great points!

Here's another interesting point I read in an article. He says the leveraged the backers from the first campaign to get early support for the second one. This makes a lot of sense. He raised $100K from 250 people in a month. If he could then get all of these people to sign up on the first few days of the new project, that can give the impression that this is a really hot project.

That, combined with the points you mentioned about the price (for the previous backers!), and the timing probably did it.