u/emiliobay

What it does:

• ±3 buttons, wireless + wired modes available
• Triggers any configurable hotkey on macOS / Windows / Linux
• Built-in mic to be able to dictate while near computer / record
• Works with whatever speech-to-text you already use OR install (local transcription options available)
• Additional software possible to re-map key functions from core text-related ones.

Posted about it for devs and a surgeon told me he wants this more than any developer. That floored me. Trying to figure out if it's one excited person or a real pattern before I do something stupid like build a medical SKU.

Three honest questions:

1. Mobility — does it need to work across the room, or is "at a workstation" the realistic / more common scenario?
2. Local vs cloud speech-to-text — does HIPAA pressure make cloud (Wispr, Whisper API) a non-starter, or is that already solved at most hospitals?
3. What you use now — Dragon Medical, dictaphone + scribe, raw EMR typing? Roughly how much do you write per shift, and what's the worst part?

Just trying to understand the medical signal.

Will reply to every comment. Happy to share specs / photos in replies.

Solo founder, first KS, hardware product (small BLE accessory). Launching 10 days from now. £5K listed goal, real internal target ~£40-60K. Currently building up my pre-launch list thru pre-launch teaser page.

I've been studying past hardware campaigns for the last 6 weeks. I think I have a reasonable plan for the strategic side — pre-launch list warming, post-launch communications cadence, video, page copy, all the obvious stuff.

What I don't have direct intuition for is the first 48 hours after the campaign goes live. That's where most of the campaigns I've studied either compounded or stalled. The variance between "well-run launch that hit goal in 30 min" and "launched, raised £8K in week 1, plateaued" feels mostly mechanical — small executional things that you either do or don't do — and I want to make sure I'm not missing the boring ones.

So I'm asking the people in this sub who've actually launched (whether yours funded or not) — what's the avoidable first-48h stuff?

Specific places I'm worried about:

1. The 6-hour funded checkpoint. I've read that algorithms reward campaigns that hit 25%+ of goal in the first 6 hours. Is this still true on KS in 2026, or is that 2019 advice that's no longer load-bearing? If it's still true — what's the right way to engineer that spike without it feeling forced (pre-warmed reservations from list? founder network blast? press embargo lift?)
2. Update cadence in first 48h. I see campaigns post 4-5 updates in 48h ("we're funded!", "stretch goal unlocked!", "thank you to day 1 backers"). Is this pattern actually correlated with continued pledge velocity, or is it just survivorship bias from campaigns that were going to do well anyway?
3. Stretch goal sequencing. My current plan is: don't announce stretch goals before launch. Reveal them only after main goal hits (which I expect Day 1 or 2). Counter-perspective?
4. First-day refunds. I keep seeing "X% of day-1 backers refund within the first week" cited at 5-15% range. Is this actually a thing to plan around, or noise? Does it bite you on the algorithm if your funded total visibly drops?
5. Comments triage. I'm a solo founder, no community manager. I plan to reply to every backer comment for first 72h. Realistic, or a death spiral? Should I be aggressive about deleting troll/spam comments or leave them so engagement stays high?
6. What did you wish someone had warned you about specifically in the 0-48h window of your launch?
7. Referral campaign tracking. Any specific suggestions on how to launch with influencers and track their referral fees would be super appreciated.

I'm not asking for a "how to launch on KS" megapost — there are ahundred of those. I'm asking the narrower tactical question because the next 10 days I can mostly only adjust execution, not strategy.

Will report back the week after launch with what I learned in case useful for the next person asking.

Looking for honest experience from anyone who's built a physical product without a hardware background. Not asking for "just hire people" advice. Asking for the meta-level question: how do you know when "good enough understanding" of a domain you don't own becomes "dangerously delusional understanding"?

Context: I'm a business/product person. I've been shipping a small BLE device — 3-button remote/clicker with a mic to be able to dictate with push-to-talk, toggle modes while not being stuck to your PC.

All done with Claude Code. DIY: firmware on Nordic chip, companion app, mechanical prototype desig. The trap I keep falling into:

• Claude does good work but it answers the questions I know to ask
• The questions I don't know to ask are exactly the ones that blow up later
• Last week's example: I had no idea that PDM mic placement relative to the button cavity would matter for acoustic isolation during a button press. The firmware consultant flagged it casually. I would have shipped a product where every button press got recorded as a thump in the mic.

So my question to anyone who's done a similar leap (software → hardware, software → physical product, or any domain where you needed to operate one level above your own competence):

1. How did you build the "what don't I know that I don't know" sense? Mine right now is mostly luck and asking dumb questions to Claude or in expensive 1:1s with consultants.
2. Did you do a "shadow rebuild" — try to understand the work well enough to redo it, even though you'd never actually redo it? I've been doing this with firmware (writing little Zephyr samples on a dev board to feel the SDK) and it's slow but useful. But I can't do it for PCB layout or mech design.
3. At what point did you stop second-guessing your specialists / Claude Code? I keep wanting to verify their work and don't know if that's reasonable due diligence or annoying junior-founder behaviour.
4. What blew up that you could have caught? What was the cheap signal you missed?

I'm aware the "right answer" might be "you can't, you'll just lose money on a category of mistakes you don't know exists yet." I'd rather hear that than the LinkedIn-style "trust your team" platitude.

Side context, in case it changes the framing: KS launching in a few weeks. Decisions getting locked in fast. Mistakes get expensive soon. Not asking how to spot specific firmware bugs — asking the meta question of how non-experts navigate expert-dependent decisions without becoming insufferable to their experts.

What are your thoughts on this - if you tried all of them or some of them - how does Gemini compare to the rest?

Am a bit worried to switch from Claude Code / opus- or 3.1gemini-based agents built into Antigravity, as I more or less know what to expect from them.

Is it going to be same experience mostly or is Gemini drastically different in some way?