Hacker News Reader

I've backed Kickstarters only after they've already reached their goal, just for the sake of preordering the product.

Yes, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are not meant to be storefronts and I might be a bad citizen for treating it as such, but the incentive is there. If the developers are going to treat these fundraisers as a place to sell a product, I'm going to use these fundraisers as a place to buy a product. Especially in cases where the Kickstarter product is significantly less than the price of the product when it hits retail. If you tell me I can "buy" your product for $8 on Kickstarter and get the product in the mail weeks before it's officially for sale, or I could wait longer and buy it for $20, what do you expect me to do?

Or would fewer have pledged? I'd be willing to bet there were a substantial number of people who pledged in order to convince Ubuntu that there was interest in the phone, but knowing that they wouldn't have to commit funds to it right now (at least not permanently.)

But the problem is that if it reached the goal of $1M but didn't get far past it, they'd be expected to then supply the phones those people had pledged for without actually having enough money to produce them.