[VLM]

I've seen several preorder strategies in the recent electronics kit field.

The P112 project did a kickstarter. Mines sitting on the bench, too many other things to work on. A very simple kit given what it does. I'm sad I had to wait like 4 months for someone else to put the SMD components on, I could have done that myself in less than an hour.

The N8VEM people sit on preorders until they get 20 at a time. Sometimes thats a very short amount of time indeed like days, sometimes its a bit longer like years between orders of certain obscure PCBs!

The SpareTimeGizmo people have done some ship off the shelf and some preorder, I think? I was fast on the draw and got one of the last 6120 PDP-8 full kits ever made some time in the 00s.

The KB9YIG SDR people were supply line limited at a very low price, so as they put together sets of bargain price kits they put them up for sale and usually sold out in an hour or at most a couple hours. To say this aggravated people who missed the 45 minute sale window, every time, would be a profound understatement. They switched to a much higher price and off the shelf shipping a couple years ago. I miss paying $11 for a single band fixed freq SDR although its annoying to pay $21 today for the same thing, its nice that its always in stock rather than being something like a lotto.