crowdfunding is just equity-level risk for customer-level return

I read this in a newsletter and it kinda broke my brain, people pre-order products that don’t exist yet, then things like the Limitless pendant happen, company gets acquired, product disappears, users find out on twitter. Pebble had a similar story years ago

so basically you: take startup-level risk, wait months (or years) and your best-case outcome is… getting the product you already paid for

why does this model still make sense???