Ask HN: What do you do after a successful Kickstarter?

1) 70-80% of your funding, unless you’re a rare breakout viral sensation, will be raised in the opening and closing 48-72hrs. The middle will be a slog. Be ready for that and just keep communication/promoting going.

2) It’s relatively easy to clear $2500-$5000. Not EASY, but relatively easy. It takes a lot to justify people to push you to $10,000+. You HAVE to get beyond your friends/family/immediate network and that is very, very difficult. You need to do a lot of prep, host events, and get people blasting this thing everywhere. You need to shamelessly shake EVERY tree you available no matter how distant they are.

3) People invest in you as much as, if not more than, your product. The video needs to feature not just the product/idea (having a functioning version helps a lot btw) but YOU. People need to like and trust you. This is no different from investors. Good luck!

Thinking ahead is great, but it's often too easy to overestimate how good an idea is and get lost in thinking about all the things that were never going to happen.

It appears that you are not going to spend any more time on validating your idea, so why not just focus on having a nice prototype, see how it goes on Kickstarter, and use that as an opportunity for idea validation? How quickly and/or how well your idea will be funded will likely give you an indication of whether or not you should be thinking about the next step.

Even in the case that it's underfunded, you still get an opportunity to interact with those who pledged, find out what works and what doesn't, and then decide on whether you can make things better or even eventually turn it into a business.

It should be noted that in the case that your idea is overwhelming overfunded, you will likely be forced to scale up and effectively doing many of the things (accounting, manufacturing, shipping, customer service, etc.) required to turn it into an actual business.

As I gathered, manufacturing depends entirely on what your product is and you may have to deal with overseas suppliers for cost reasons (there are horror stories, don't always go for the cheapest). I assume that most people only think about that after they see how successful their campaigns are (it's very frustrating that things keep getting delayed for the backers though, so please try your best not to over-promise). Some people take care of the the rest by themselves (if they have a team), or using third-party services. In any case, I don't think you will miss the signs when that happens.

Good luck!

Edit: removed random fullstop in the middle of a sentence. Typos.

For a super small hardware project it might be better to bootstrap and start by selling kits or one-offs.

so, you are planning to start with a fraud and go from there? :/