b1acknight

General public is easy to mislead to backup the project - general public aka kick-starter community is dumb as hell. It's all about marketing. SBC's are still hot stuff and hardware development become ridiculous cheap so it's a great way to make money.
 
As I see you already made it to persuade investors. Why bother developers community, where you don't intent to invest more then few free boards here and there and use our channels for free marketing? BTW: You can run your marketing campaign on your own website or wherever but here you need to ask for permission. I hate ads.
 
Even before your boards become stable (to be used by professionals which is stated in your first line of your marketing appeal) you will probably restart the whole thing with a "new and better" board and hope to catch as many backers as possible. All board manufacturers are using community's current and future contribution in their business models and everyone want's to become next RPi in numbers. This is the only way you don't need to pledge anyone. Until then, we control the game.
 
Free sample? I have a bunch of boards and so do other people who develop and contribute. I don't even think to support your boards without paradigm change toward community. You collected the money for our work and you kept it. What the f*?
 
You are an engineer. It's is not your fault nor responsibility to think about this in such way. Don't take it personally either.

Running Android you are able to use GPU/VPU with HW acceleration and the ARM cores aren't used that much. Unfortunately linux is a different story and you'll come across users that really like to benefit from the 'quad-core A53 at 1.2GHz' since you advertise this as an SBC. Then you probably realise the difference (Allwinner SoCs aren't fast but cheap. Since the A64 is said to be able to be clocked up to 1.2 GHz I would suspect it's rather slow compared to other A53 designs and produced in an inefficient 28nm 40nm process)
 
Regarding benchmarks: They're all wrong. A good starting point when it's only about CPU performance is http://slideshare.net/brendangregg
 
But in your situation there's something special: Since you focus on Android CPU performance doesn't matter that much. It's GPU/VPU performance and the former definitely sucks (Mali400MP2 -- old and slow). But most people won't realise that since they focus on irrelevant metrics like "64 bit is twice as much as 32 bit" or "2 GB RAM is twice as much as 1 GB" or "15$ is less than $16" even if they can't tell how that really affects their use cases. You're lucky guys
 
But in case you really want to provide a good 'Linux experience' there's a lot to do.

In what are you interested?
 
Paid consultancy to 'bring up Linux BSP to Ubuntu' (quite easy: simply fix the BSP you got from Allwinner here and there and add any Ubuntu rootfs you find somewhere on the net. Then you've fulfilled what 'the community' already expects: just another broken OS image for a new Allwinner SoC without 2D/3D acceleration and no HW accelerated video encoding/decoding)?
 
Or should the community do this job for free and hack together such an annoying OS image?