[davismwfl]

It depends a great deal on the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve. If you are pre-selling a solution to a problem that you have never solved then this is a recipe for disaster IMO. That is unless you have significant funds to invest in hiring people that have done it. This is not a knock on your skills to assemble something, but if you have never solved it you may estimate it will take you 1 month, and in reality it winds up taking 6 and you will have likely oversold your abilities too early harming your reputation for at least a portion of time.

Of course, if you have solved the problem before but think you could do it as a product and sell it, than a lot of the risk and unknowns are removed so you can be way more aggressive.

Personally, I like to market and get firm commitments, plus build up a list of needs as the product is being developed. And as soon as I can I start converting some of those commitments into sales by putting them on the system, I get them paying. This means some might be able to be on it in a month, others might have to wait 3 months while specific features are flushed out.

To me there is real exposure and risk to taking money for a product you can't deliver quickly (~30 days). Tesla is selling refundable reservations which is different and even then they have a material exposure if a large portion of reservations decided they wanted to back out. Also remember, there are banking rules around presales and credit card transactions especially as it relates to refunds, charge backs etc.