Delivery Status Info?

No, but we’ll send email. We can’t ship your Glowforge until you reply because we don’t have your address.

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Well in the vacuum of information left by GF one has to just make educated guesses. As described above they could easily put us out of our misery by disclosing information they must have at hand. Why is it a secret?

I think there are probably more around 300 orders on the first day from graphs that have been published and probably less than 50 letters but there could be lots of secret customers just like the non-public beta units.

I could be wrong and they might finish the first day basic orders before the end of this month but so far we haven’t seen much acceleration in letters going out or units delivered.

Only the people at :glowforge: HQ have access to that information. It always looks further away from the outside perspective.

I can’t agree there is any vacuum of information since the CEO is actively participating and responding to this thread. It’s perfectly reasonable to be excited and frustrated from wanting to know more and waiting, but the fact that @dan is here and listening and responding shows that indeed there are real people - with lots more skin in the game than $3000 - just remember that your feelings are real and reasonable, just as the :glowforge: team has real and reasonable feelings too, and they are telling us as much as they can right now. They want us to have our machines just as much as we want them, maybe more.

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Good advice, this is what I would do.

@dan Good to know, though my worry is that I already got my email and not only did it go to spam, but was purged as well… meaning if I waited silently, I might not get my Glowforge before October.

But if the above spreadsheet is any indication, I’m still in line, so that’s cool. =)

btw… If you get no response to the email, do you send another follow-up at some point?

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I do think when a company is very late delivering they have a moral obligation to give an accurate delivery estimate. When I ran a small business I was always honest with my customers and I judged my suppliers by how reliable they were their delivery dates.

A lot of people have bought for business use and would like to plan when they can used them. And people are worried they missed the email when there is no indication when it will be, or has been, sent.

With 10000 customers they obviously can’t do anything that needs work per customer. When we purchased the first confirmation emails showed your order number but they soon removed it. The account must have that data as that is one of the criteria they are shipping by. If it was displayed on your purchase screen we would have a good indication where we were in line. If a few people volunteer that number when they get there machines then we would also know where deliveries were up to and start to estimate how far we are from delivery.

So, for example if @pauljima had order 200 and we knew the highest order number disclosed was say 100, we could say with reasonable certainty their email would not have been sent yet.

But GF have refused to give this number, so one has to wonder why they are so secretive with something that gives a good indication of their delivery rate. We are shipping! (but we are going to make it as hard as possible to know how many we have shipped, our current rate and when you will get yours).

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Sorry to say, but I don’t think this is correct. This was discussed early on here in the forum and it was discovered that the order numbers don’t really correspond to the order date. In other words, several folks who ordered AFTER I did, had numbers that would indicate they would get theirs before me.

Here is that discussion; Order sequence

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If invoice number is the same as the order number that got removed from later order confirmations then I stand corrected.

In that case the only metric is order date and time, which everybody knows but isn’t very useful to see where your are in the queue without everybody filling in the spreadsheet.

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You just answered your own question. You already know the answer. It’s inconvenient for purchasers, yes, but it’s equally difficult for Glowforge competitors so that they can’t use it as fuel or ammunition in malicious advertising.

This is just continuing to beat a dead horse.

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Necrohippoflagelation! Woohoo. Break out the popcorn. :popcorn:

(I just like to say necrohippoflagelation :grinning:)

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Yes but only if it is embarrassingly low. If they were rolling out of the factory at a rate to meet the schedule it wouldn’t be ammunition for anything other than GF meeting its schedule.

I think we are in a bit of a Catch-22 bind. We have gotten used to a significant amount of communication from @dan and other :glowforge: folk. This makes us feel like insiders and gives a sense of entitlement. It also has, I am pretty sure, kept a lot of people from bailing on an expensive purchase. That communication has created a lot of trust, but also some distrust when delays have been announced.

But there are things they can’t, or won’t communicate. This being a privately held company, these non-disclosures are not unexpected–but they seem jarring to us “insiders”.

Even to the point of your business use planning… lets say they are steadily shipping 10 units per day for the last three weeks, and units shipped near you arrive in two weeks (totally made-up numbers).

The nifty position in line indicator shows that you’re 15 units from getting your email. Just 2 days! You can finally expect your :glowforge: in just over 2 weeks. So you tell your very patient client that they’ll have their custom plaque by the event in three weeks!!! Whoohoo!

Then something happens: an earthquake hits Militias, a flaw is uncovered, or they finally unlock deliveries to country X and 100 customers are now ahead of you in line, and your :glowforge: is now pushed out…again by an indeterminate amount.

No one withheld information, no one lied, you had “transparency” but the shipping estimate you inferred from that data was bunk, and you now need to tell your client about the delay. You feel sad, angry, and let down.

There is a significant difference between Data and Information. Data without context is often less informative than simple informative statements without having public data to back them up.

Glowforge has a moral obligation to deliver our units. They want to keep our morale as high as possible so we stay. They have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders to make good decisions about disclosures. And IF they created such a counter system, they would have an obligation to make it as accurate as possible–yet it would still have the effect of raising and or dashing hopes. In essence it would possibly decrease morale.

We feel like insiders…but that is an illusion to a degree.

I’ve been waiting longer than most, but not as long as some (late 9/28)… I want my Pro–and plan to make parts for a prototype design for a small partnership. But I want the company to do things right, deliver a quality product, and stay around for a long time.

Go :glowforge: Team!!

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Do you have numbers here to back up your conspiracy-like speculation? No. You lack evidence to support your premise. Because Glowforge doesn’t release them. Lack of evidence is not evidence in absence.

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@palmercr gave an alternative to this in the message you excerpted. The alternative is that it isn’t fuel for malicious advertising and Glowforge is being over cautious in hiding it.

Yes, it’s speculation, but it still seems more likely than not that the ramp up to full production rates is necessarily slow. It’s very likely that as it ramps up, more issues are found that need to be addressed to avoid too high a percentage of assembly problems, shipping damage, initial reliability etc.

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That’s the plan. We want you to have it as much as you do.

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I love the stories we tell. So entertaining – we don’t know something so we make up a story to explain it to ourselves and work very hard to convince all and sundry that the story we made up about what we don’t know is actually a fact that tells us that we are actually fully in the know – about what we don’t know.

I think making project files and setting up our work spaces are far better uses of our time and energies. Each and every one of our GF’s will actually arrive when they arrive.

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That’s what I figured. Thank you kindly. =)

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All I said was it would only be ammunition to competitors if it was embarrassingly low. I don’t think that needs numbers. It is just logic that shipping on schedule or close to is not ammunition for competitors.

The only firm data point we have is after 1 month not all the first day basic customers have had emails and there are four months to ship all of the rest. That is about 80 per day.

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