Ideas on how to pre-sell subscriptions for my premium research reports?

Hi Indie Hackers,

I've been lurking for a long time and this is my first post.

I’m creating a premium research reports subscription business and want to pre-sell the first issue before I start building it.

The conundrum is that it takes me 2 weeks to build and send each report, but I want to give myself 2 weeks pre-selling to get at least one customer before committing to starting the process. This means that if someone were to buy a monthly subscription tomorrow, they wouldn’t get anything for 4 weeks. This means they’d be paying for a month without getting the product.

An idea I had was that I offer 50% off for the first 3 months if you subscribe before two weeks from now (the date when I start creating the first report). This incentivises them to subscribe sooner and gives me the confidence to start building, but doesn’t solve the problem above. To solve this, I thought I could just get them to subscribe now but delay billing (using Stripe) until the date the first issue is actually released.

Would this work? Would I need to do something similar for future subscribers so billing all happens on a set day each month or would I just start taking payment as they subscribe?

I’m a bit stumped with this. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks!