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.
>"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.
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.
