Perhaps the most fascinating part (to me at least) in the article was his second step - he knowingly and purposefully created a vaporware product and took orders for it. He refunded the money from the customers, but used this as a validation step.

I'm not sure if there's a moral judgement to be made here that's meaningful, but it's an interesting approach to product validation. I feel like we see this approach with Kickstarter style approaches, but without the refund step (and without ultimately delivering the product), but this idea of getting transactions and refunding them to validate interest is... well it feels a bit off-putting(?), but interesting none the less.