Crowdfunding is designed to be a win-win for founders and backers alike. As a backer, you get a heavy discount by supporting a crowdfunding idea. Garden Stack has an interest in offering you such a big discount to get momentum going early on in the crowdfunding campaign. By encouraging people to sign up early, it becomes more likely that the campaign will gain traction and turn Garden Stack into a commercial reality. So you get a big discount, and Garden Stack gets better odds of taking off.
So there is no catch. By signing up at a low price, you help Garden Stack to gain momentum early on. This maximises Garden Stack's chances of success, while you get a Garden Stack device at a historic discount. It's a win-win.
Also, the way Kickstarter works, if Garden Stack fails to secure its target fundraising amount, you will never be billed. This is because the fundraising amount represents how much we need to raise in order to get the ball rolling. If we can't raise enough, it won't be viable to manufacture and ship the product out to people, and so nobody is charged, all bets are off.
You can learn more about how Kickstarter works over on their website, for example by following this link.
Thank you for reading, and please leave a comment below if there is any more information you are interested in. We'll either reply to your comment or write a whole new blog post addressing the topic.
To head back to the Garden Stack signup page, click here.
Sources:
Belleflamme, Paul, Thomas Lambert, and Armin Schwienbacher. 2014. "Crowdfunding: Tapping the Right Crowd." Journal of Business Venturing 29, no. 5: 585–609.
Gerber, Elizabeth M., Julie S. Hui, and Pei-Yi Kuo. 2012. "Crowdfunding: Why People Are Motivated to Post and Fund Projects on Crowdfunding Platforms." In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Design, Influence, and Social Technologies: Techniques, Impacts and Ethics, 10.
Kickstarter. 2021. "Frequently Asked Questions." Accessed 15th February 2023. https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq
Mollick, Ethan. 2014. "The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study." Journal of Business Venturing 29, no. 1: 1–16.