Grumpy_Mike:
You must remember that this is just five people who are amatures at production.
Why? With all the out-of-work, retired, and bored single engineers and production management people out there, why are these 5 amateurs trying to go it alone, instead of recruiting some volunteers with a clue? One would expect that an engineer from a fabless semiconductor company that sells lots of bleeding-edge chips to startups would already know from watching other people's fiascos how essential that "boring detail work" is.
How would you handle 100,000 individual orders on day one, when you only had 10,000 boards in the pipe line?
I'll second most of what Osgeld wrote (although I wouldn't be quite as harsh). Instead of blogging about how totally kewl it is to unexpectedly be a celebrity, I'd spend the time putting together a webpage with:
a. A semi-realtime counter (updated at least daily) of how many people are queued up to buy,
b. a table/chart showing how many boards we plan to ship, and when, and
c. a weekly-or-so update indicating whether we're on track to meet those goals.
That wouldn't satisfy everybody, of course, but it should satisfy enough that you could blow off the rest with a clear conscience. And come off looking like you're trying to satisfy, and learning how to do it, instead of just playing.
At a total cost that's probably less than the taxi ride from the airport to a Maker Faire.