By not following almost every page from "Scamming for Dummies" and being an honest and open company.
1) NOT doing pre-order sales at all
2) providing verifiable business contacts and company information
3) NOT implementing their version of AB as an all or nothing feature which would let the market decide if AB is a good thing or not. So far the T1 performance compared to the s9 and A841 is -- meh.
Are you saying that if you were in their shoes, had spent the so called millions on development, had working units in hand and a pretty good feeling about success rate of the design based on experience, that you wouldn't have tried to do presale? As an Engineer, I hate pre-sale stuff as much as the next guy because in reality, at that point it isn't ready. And then you have a time limit your final R&D phases have to be restricted by. I could probably argue both ways, sure business sense wise and the optics was not good, however, I can't say that if I were in their shoes that I wouldn't be one of the first to want to hawk my 'wares ASAP. In the end its about the miner and not about the launch PR, or lack thereof. I'd much rather them focus on getting the hardware right than trying to quiet down the peanut gallery.
That is exactly what I am saying.
As you said, doing public pre-sales sets a huge milestone that MUST be met regardless of how the technology co-operates. ref the fallout from BFL's Monarchs and Bitmine.ch/AMT A1 Coincraft miners. Unfortunately input from the Engineering side of many companies - not only those involved in crypto - is ignored once the Marketing group is unleashed. In the crypto mining business pre-sales translates to anything from 'we have this idea...' (ala the GMO vaporware) to Halong's 'we have some engineering test rigs built and running' (but still a work in progress and not ready for Prime Time).
Much to their credit Canaan and yes even the 'evil' Bitmain
never did that. They stay quiet while developing and once factory production trials start only then announce upcoming products.
In the beginning of their thread Halong specifically stated that they were fully funded all the way through to at least pre-production trial runs and "we have no need of further funding via pre-orders". Then went on with their spiel never to this day saying *why* they did pre-orders.