As mentioned in the costs calculation thread, what makes the Pyra more expensive than mass-produced products is the upfront investment.
What Kickstarter might do is gather enough money to reduce its impact on the final price. Let's put it this way :
We'd need like 150,000 € to cover the development costs. If we do a kickstarter with this price plus the estimated reward Pyras' costs as a goal, we can offer the Pyra for less than the calculated retail price.
How ? Because we covered the upfront costs, which for 1,000 units would be of 150 € per unit. If we can sell 10,000, that reduces it to 15€.
Now, if the Kickstarter isn't successful enough, we don't have these cheaper Pyras to send. But if it is, we can sell them for cheaper because we have those costs covered.
We wouldn't lose money in the process, given that we can cover the Pyras' cost.
Else, we can offer them at retail price, with no reduced price, but with a preorder priority over the post-release orders.
It may be a bit more complicated than just that, and ED said himself that he wouldn't like too many orders at once :
The more units I sell, the more people and space I need to hire to be able to ship them and have enough space for the stock.
That's why I want to grow slowly - what would happen if I have 10,000 sales per month, and after 6 months it suddenly goes down a lot...?
I still had to pay the rent and wages - and then would probably run out of money at some time.
There's always more relaxed sites than Kickstarter anyway. We can gather funds from Indiegogo for example. Some of these sites don't need rewards, and take a lesser share of the profits. Plus they don't have goals, so that's direct donation. This would allow us to gather some of the dev costs, and we can still offer an order priority and a bit-reduced price, given that they already paid this part of the Pyra's price.
