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Comment by derwildemomo | Hacker News Reader

I totally like cool products like the one on display here. But i'm so tired of those preordering-sites.. really, i want to order your stuff. now. Tell me when it's finished, put the site online. If you really need an indication whether someone likes/needs it, perform market research without irritating potential customers. And if you need additional funding to make your vision happen, sites like kickstarter offer a clean and generally well understood way of making that happen.

No, I'm not going to preorder a product now that ships sometime in 2015. Not even for a 50% discount.

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> But i'm so tired of those preordering-sites.. really, i want to order your stuff. now.

Agreed, but unfortunately the business environment has changed. The cost to start a business has decreased so much it is much harder to convince investors to drop a few million into something when there are so many cheaper alternatives.

Additionally everyone is doing preorders, and you are not, you are probably at an disadvantage.

> And if you need additional funding to make your vision happen, sites like kickstarter offer a clean and generally well understood way of making that happen.

They do not allow medical devices.

> They do not allow medical devices.

thank you, i was wrong there.

I understand your frustration but I think pre-orders are important for them to understand how many units to manufacture. What if they produce too many, and people don't buy them ? what if too little and they can't cope with the demand ?

Another way of looking at it is that the delivery horizon is too long. In six months there will be other similar products announced and probably released. I fell like 2015 so so far out that the value of pre-order as a forecasting tool is minimal.

Acceptable and calculable business risks. How did new products launch before the internet?

I can think of an example of an industry that has been doing pre-sales to fund production for a long time and that's property development.

That's what market research really is good for. And frustrating potential users to minimize your business risks isn't acceptable, in my opinion. There's always risk involved. That's the nature of business.

"That's what market research really is good for."

Pre-orders can be an excellent form of market research.

Don't think you can consider it research if you are billing people, it's just business/sales.

It seems like getting people to commit to pre-orders is possibly the best form of market research. You've done enough R&D to get a solid outline of what the product will be, and you're testing whether or not people are actually willing to put money on the line to get ahold of it.

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