Really appreciate the in-depth dissection of actual case studies. Surprised to learn of the lack of CTA..."

cough..

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=HackerGarth

The interesting part is that all of those submissions received only one or two points while this one is at 35 and counting..

That's pretty typical pattern for submissions on all topics. Lots of luck involved.

Yeah seems like a bit of a misfit. Check out Celery (https://www.trycelery.com/) for taking HW pre-orders. They also came out of YC. I believe they power pre-orders for guys like Pebble, August, Lockitron, Meta and Coolest Cooler etc.