Yes it makes sense to start high and get all the rich customers first and then reduce it later to get the next tier of customers and so on. That way you maximise profit and prevent a huge rush of orders at the beginning that you can’t fulfil.
And I am not saying that people won’t pay $3,000 or more for a Glowforge. But the number of people that will pay $3,000 for a Glowforge is not that great in my opinion. When the first flat panel TV’s came out the people that would pay $4,000 or more was pretty small. As the price dropped to less than $2,000 many more were sold. As the price has dropped to below $1,000 for them they have replaced tube TV’s for almost all new purchases.
There are many products on the market that have some of the features of the Glowforge. The Glowforge is trying to make a product that will appeal to the non technical people and be as easy to use as a color laser printer for paper. There are other makers that have Laser Engravers and cutters that can print directly from a file just like a color Laser printer. Glowforge has promised some features that will make the process easy for the average non technical user and that is a great goal. They are trying to be the “Apple” of the laser engraver/cutter market and hope that people will pay a premium price for the convenience and ease of use. This type of strategy is very difficult to maintain in the long term as others will add many of the same features to there products at a much lower cost.
Look at Smartphones as an example Android Phones came after the Iphone and now account for about 88% of the smart phone market. Apple only accounts for 11% and Blackberry which started the market is nearly dead. Why has Android been so much more successful is that they cost less and have price points from very low to just as high as an Iphone. the personal computer is another example. Apple has a very small share of the market compared to Windows PC’s Microsoft did not try to control the hardware market and only makes the most common operating system. Apple controls the hardware and software for everything they sale. It does make for fewer problems on average and less issues with compatibility but you pay a premium price.
In my opinion for Glowforge to succeed long term they will have to make a product that is vastly superior to all other products being sold. Many of the features they have promised are vastly superior to what is on the market today. Only time will tell if they can maintain the same lead and innovate more than others. I can tell you right now they will not be a player in the business market for laser cutters and engravers without some big changes to the machines. They will need machines that are much larger, higher power and with features such as rotary tools. This is a market that will pay $10k or more for a machine but it needs to have these features and more.
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Things get past checks all the time. Example… I took this picture at an actual Arby’s drive-through. This was posted for the public to see:
The sign is advertising to vegetarians and it also states “we have the meats” and #meatcraft
People on “the inside” of something often don’t consider the point of view of the person on the outside. Granted, in marketing you want to be considering the people on the outside, but the point I’m making is that we just don’t think about it. How many times have you told someone to “just copy and paste it”? In doing so you assume that they know how to select the material, then copy the material, then position the cursor properly, and finally that they know how to paste that material. It seems easy. Drag to select, CTRL C, click where you want it and CTRL V… but to someone that hasn’t used a computer before (or my mom who has used computers but forgets it all after 10 minutes 
), it might not be that easy.
With a modicum of research I confirmed prior to purchasing that the product shown was a) a prototype, and b) wouldn’t be delivered until sometime in the later half of 2016. The website and video were vague on the subject, but some Google searching, YouTube videos, and interviews, each of these points were obvious.
I even told my wife before we ordered that we shouldn’t expect the Glowforge until at least 2017. I had experience in crowd-funded projects so knew that delays were fairly inevitable.
Was deliberate deception regarding the delivery date the tactic of Pebble and Oculus? Is it proven that it was intentional? Did they provide compensation (as GF did) to “pay for” their mistakes? I’m not being argumentative, I’m simply asking the questions. I know that Pebble was a huge crowd-funded campaign, but while I’m familiar with Oculus itself, I’m unfamiliar with their crowd-funding campaign.
To assume that Glowforge was deceptive, assumes that they knew at least the first delay was inevitable. This then assumes that they lied about producing overseas, as one of the major changes triggered by the first delay was to produce in the US. If they knew that they were going to produce in the US, they would have led with that in the original campaign. It would have been a huge selling point and brought in more US customers. In my opinion the lie is too complicated with too many people and moving parts to be a viable deception.
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speaking only to the thoughts about the marketing video (i.e. a commercial for a product) being deceptive…
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Funny you should mention Pebble, given today’s bad news.
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Yeah I just saw that. Can’t believe they didn’t sell when they had the opportunity. That was a board that wasn’t paying attention. 