Great marketing is as important (possibly moreso) than a great product. It's probably easier to make a mediocre product a success with great marketing than to make a great product a success with ho-hum marketing. There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.
Product development is like eating out: if you can't afford the marketing, you can't afford the product development. Paying for one and not the other is a great way to throw away the investment. It's just such a rookie mistake and completely unavoidable.
> There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.
You didn't read carefully what I wrote above. They already have a lot of people who know and care about the product to buy it. They aren't running to increase that number up to the extreme. They match that number with their current production level. When that will grow, they'll have to boost the effort in marketing too. They do plan to grow, but gradually.
Personally I think they cut the marketing / community side a bit too much, but I understand that they have limited resources, so the product is their priority #1.
Companies, new and established, just can't afford to be conservative when it comes convincing people to give them money. Bad marketing = bad sales.
Your general logic seems to circle around expecting massive sales and huge production mindset (where investment has to be compensated with millions of sales). Jolla has modest expectations for the starting stage, so massive marketing would be an overstretch. But it shouldn't be abysmal either, I agree.
I never said they should grow unsustainably and run out of cash, but my money is on them running out of cash anyway because their marketing is so poor it'll fail to drive the sales they need to keep the lights on. Frankly, supply shortages would be the best thing that could happen to them because scarcity drives demand and perceived value.
How is it exactly, if they were serving all their preorders already? They don't seem to have the lack of demand atm.