[_curious_]

"Imagine if you could fund a tech startup by pre-selling product to customers"

I know of a couple tech ventures that did exactly this...they (1) had established a minimum viable audience and then (2) queried their people for what they wanted and how much they would pay for it, and (3) developed technology that delivered above and beyond functionality at (4) less cost than people expected which resulted in (5) a lot of pre-orders that (6) they delivered on which (7) that was the genesis of how they raised $VC to scale rather quickly.