Crowdfunded pre-order campaigns generally can't afford to cover any R&D work, and it's a miracle if they even cover actual one-time manufacturing setup costs pl

Crowdfunded pre-order campaigns generally can't afford to cover any R&D work, and it's a miracle if they even cover actual one-time manufacturing setup costs plus the cost of the rewards -- let alone funding the engineering team through all this time. The incentives are almost backwards: the earliest pre-order customers have come to expect the biggest discounts at a time when the per-unit costs are highest and the up-front investment is yet to be done. If product survival is really the goal, the price curve should probably go in the other direction: from high to low over the product lifecycle. Manufacturing hardware is really, really hard, even for teams with experience. Super hard if your past experience was in shipping software, because you don't realize how easy you've had it! (Disclosure: after a successful Kickstarter campaign, we shipped https://www.pantelligent.com/ https://www.pantelligent.com/ to all our backers and were only a few weeks late from our original delivery estimate. Even for a team that's shipped HW and SW before, it was still very challenging. Most importantly, our backers are telling us that the product really delivers on the benefits of what we promised in the campaign -- and apparently that's a rare and noteworthy occurrence!)