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There's nothing inherently unethical about taking preorders. Tesla's controversial business practices aside, pretty much every car manufacturer takes preorders, not to mentions books, games, etc. Where preorders get unethical is where people start selling things that don't exist or they can't reasonably deliver on, or when companies don't have sufficient financing to produce the good without the preorder sales (since then all the money goes right out and you can't return people's money if you don't deliver). To be honest it sounds like this may be the case for you, since you say you don't even have the prototype, let alone the final device so you really have no idea when it will be ready, what the bill of materials is, how much it costs to manufacture, etc not to mention real inflation and supply chain risks on a 6+ month time frame, given the state of the world. That all being said, why do you not want to crowd fund? It seems like it's better suited to the speculative, in development nature of your project where there is significant risk of not delivering as described, not delivering in a timely manor, or even delivering at all. While people get upset when crowd funded projects fail, they aren't nearly as upset when they purchase something from a company and it goes under before it ships. I wonder if at the heart of your question, there is another core problem which is that if you need either preorders or crowd funding to finance the initial run of hardware, then you really don't have sufficient financing for your hardware ambitions, and that's going to make it very high risk for anyone ponying up money either preorder or crowdfunded. Perhaps this issue would be better address by talking to banks about lines of credits or investors about raising addition capitol. Maybe I'm off base here and money is not the issue at all and you just really have idea how many to order, but if that's the case you really need to invest in hiring some kind of business analyst who can help you develop models that will tell you optimal numbers to buy given lead times, expected market size, margin, etc. |
Our MVP worked fine. In fact we were reviewed by the BBC last year. It's our new version that isn't ready yet. Our chip supplier has asked us to order 6 months ahead. We do have the BOM and the hardware files at this point. We are at the point of getting our prototype boards manufactured. But the state of the world is definitely a challenge.
We would like to take preorders for two reasons: firstly to convince VCs that there is a market, and secondly to gauge how many chips we need to order.
Thank you for helping me think this through. I am beginning to see some upsides to crowdfunding even though I am turned off by how manipulated it has become (with paid backers, etc.)