[djrogers]

I think you might be taking the term ‘selling’ too literally - it’s pitching an idea and soliciting feedback. If you’re taking orders for something that doesn’t exist yet, you’ve done it wrong. OTOH, if use the 3/12/24 months it takes to build the product to listen to future customers, you can ship something of value as soon as its ready.

[mygo]

Then every single Kickstarter is doing it wrong.

Nothing wrong with taking orders for something that doesn’t exist, so long as you can deliver.

The sales team’s problem is that they didn’t know what was technically feasible.

There may have been a way to decipher whether what was promised was build-able... before trying to build it.

And in any case, the point of collecting payment is to validate the market. No better validation than actual sales. But doesn’t mean the money has to be spent. They should hold on to it in case they need to give out refunds, and give out refunds when they have determined that they can’t deliver.

And in the special case of a kickstarter type campaign then the basis of that relationship was that the product may or may not come to fruition and that they don’t have to give out refunds.

[sobani]

Plenty of Kickstarters fail because the people creating the product realized too late how hard it was to create what they promised.

[mygo]

did the kickstarter fail?

Sounds to me like those people got tons of people to give them free money to try to bring something to market with no ramifications if the product can’t go to market. And no obligation to give out refunds if the product doesn’t go to market. How is that a failure?