Surely missing the target would demonstrate a lack of demand? It's pretty hard to spin "We couldn't even get 30,000 contributers" asz success. Especially given the strong existing brand, the news coverage, etc.

Again, I'm speculating but; hitting 16m at around 800 a phone equates to 20,000 phones. That's 20k potential sales of a phone that doesn't exist, using an OS that's still in development, to a tiny subset of individuals willing to engage in crowd sourcing. That's pretty impressive if you ask me. Imagine how well a carrier-subsidised version would do?

Not very easy to extrapolate from that, but Blackberry sold 2.7 million of their Z10 and that was considered a failure, so I don't think 20,000 phones will prove anything.

20k is nothing. Smartphone manufacturers will laugh at you for fewer than hundreds of thousands. To get a good deal they want to see millions.

Did you miss this part?

>"That's 20k potential sales of a phone that doesn't exist, using an OS that's still in development, to a tiny subset of individuals willing to engage in crowd sourcing."

I think it's pretty clear what the parent means to say there. That demonstrating that much demand after accounting for multiple, large limiting factors could extrapolate to much larger numbers with those factors removed.

Cards Against Humanity collected $15.5K from 750 people via Kickstarter and went on to make an estimated $12M with wide availability [0].

The card makers of the world likely would have laughed at a game with 750 sales, but today I'm sure they'd all love to hold down the top 4 best-seller spots on Amazon [1].

Yes, phones and card games aren't a direct comparison, but the parent had a good point and focusing on one number is awfully myopic.

0: http://www.chicagogrid.com/enterprise/cards-against-humanity...

1: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/toys-and-games/16623901...

20k is nothing ... for direct phone sales.

It's a lot of F-22 fighters, though. And a lot of Christmas hams for one family (but not a nation).

How many times do 20k customers pool millions of dollars to go towards the development of a phone?

20k people willing to pay $800 per phone is a tiny market.

20k people who care enough to pledge $800 towards development of something that doesn't exist is a huge group of passionate early adopters.

$800 for a product that isn't created, nor guaranteed, isn't a small sum of money for most. Mass consumers pay around $400 on average for a phone.

I imagine there is a very significant number of people who would be customers, but not backers. Suppose x% of customers would be willing to back rather than buy, and they reach $22MM in funding. If x is 10%, that would mean $220MM is up for grabs if the phone is brought to market. That might still be worth getting out of bed for.