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Preorder down payments are a thing I won’t do anymore.

Never done it on something that huge but I’ve been burned on one or two kickstarter type things.

If you can’t pay and then take delivery it doesn’t exist.

I see kickstarter projects as gifts until proven otherwise.

Did you mean grifts?

No, I would have added an 'r'. But seriously: there are obvious grift kickstarters, though the platform operators do quite a bit of work to keep those out. But at some point the line between 'grifter' and 'highly motivated but delusional founder' gets blurry and I'm happy I don't have to make the call. More so because it's going to be a mess of false positives and false negatives with plenty of overlap, even for experts in the various fields. So making it a marketplace is a good idea, the problem with that is that it then becomes a competition in marketing and glitz rather than solid financial, technical and commercial planning.

Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds.

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