When you see pre-spend, you know it’s hot.
When price is fixed, the real supply / demand for some products can’t be gauged easily.
Maybe you can measure the length of a waiting line. This can be observed for a bubble tea shop, or for a Tesla car in the form of waiting time.
The problem is, the company won’t extract more value from a customer even when demand exceeds supply.
How does a company allocate demand when supply is limited?
How does a company do more price discrimination without changing the price?
Certain products from Hermès has implicit pre-spend requirements. Hermès is even sued for this practice.
What company can copy this “pre-spend” strategy? Nvidia.
Buy more previous chips to get the right to buy the next/latest chip.
However, you really need to have a product that everybody wants and they can’t get it from other places.
Don’t pretend to have a huge demand to draw more demand. That’s not a long-term winning strategy.