Richard raises an interesting question. I was party to a conversation recently about just that: Register a domain and put up a splash page with a newsletter sign-up form to gauge interest in a concept before doing any actual work on it. It’s an interesting strategy from a maker’s standpoint but it seems to me like it would make people angry (and less likely to participate) once it became widely known. However, convincing font foundries that there is a real population of paying customers who want to solve this might be worth the fallout.