That sounds amazingly stressful … but FWIW, I would find an update along those lines to be far more reassuring than the silence that we’ve seen thus far. As an artisan/designer, I can totally relate to the "Build → Test → Fix → Test → etc. " process, and such news would not be discouraging to me at all - in fact, I would read it as a positive sign of progress.
To be clear, I don’t expect you to divulge proprietary secrets or detailed minutiae - but a once a month update would go a long way to retain my trust and interest. It would seem that I’m not alone, as this request has come up again and again … and frankly, when I see requests for updates that are met with silence by the GF staff, it raises some big red flags for me. While it’s great that so many other GF customers weigh in on those threads, at the end of the day, those opinions are irrelevant to me; I need to see replies from the folks who will be accountable if this thing goes south.
GF has been posting a lot more sponsored ads on social media, geared toward attracting new customers. It would seem that there’s a staff member or intern responsible for answering all of the questions that come up on those ads, so it’s difficult for me to understand why that same person cannot be responsible for a once a month update for your existing customers. I get that this will entail additional time and energy from your team (trust me, I’ve been there and I really do get it) but given that so many of your customers have echoed this request, I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth the time and energy to respond in a meaningful way.
As a disclaimer of sorts, these comments aren’t meant to be antagonistic. Online communication can be so limiting, and often our words do not read as intended. I was so excited about this product, and I’m trying very hard to hang in and stay hopeful … but like so many others, my finger has been hovering on the “cancel” button for some time now. Regular, reasonable updates and a genuine response to this ongoing community request would work wonders in terms of preserving my trust and business.
Just adding my twopenneth (as the person that started this crazy long thread), I want to thank @Dan for taking this seriously and providing an honest insight into what is happening right now. It’s very braze to say, “we have crazy problems but we’re fixing them”. It feels like most people here are reasonable and can see the wisdom and honesty in your progress report.
If you can do more of that… great. But a little, “everything is cool” post every now and again will also go a long way.
Whatever you decide to do, I’m fine. I doubt very much I will jump ship at any point cos I have patience but the wait will be a lot less harrowing with more info.
I wonder if you’re in the majority or minority. I’ve backed a lot of crowdsourced projects so am used to delays. But I have limits as well. Once a project gets delayed a second time or goes more than a year late it starts to get more likely that it’s never going to deliver, or when it does, it will be old tech because competitors have improved on the vision and delivered while the startup struggled with issues an established player has already overcome.
With the GF, I’m in it but not forever. I wasn’t too concerned with April’s delay but if December brings an announcement that it’ll be June, then I’ll reassess. Fortunately I can build a bigger more powerful machine for less. I’d lose the autofocus and some of the tricky camera controlled recognition functions like alignment and the cloud software control. Faced with not just another delay, but a confidence impactive event, I’d rethink my “I’m in it” decision.
One of the Kickstarter board games that I backed does an info-graphic on their progress. It doesn’t give many specifics, just milestones and their progress towards completing those milestones. Perhaps something like that would appease everyone.
For the record, I am perfectly fine with the limited flow of information coming out of GF. While I would love to hear more, the fact that we have this forum to discuss topics that we as a community want to discuss, and the fact that @Dan and other staff not only participate, but do so regularly is an amazing change to most crowdfunded projects.
I know how difficult it is to parse the flow of information. If you say the wrong thing at the wrong time bad things happen. I once described the field work I was doing to a resident in the neighborhood I was working in (really all I said was “we’re designing a bike route from x to y”) and the result was the cancellation of the project. My firm was still paid, but the City had to shelve the project, effectively wasting all of the money that they had paid us to that point and probably screwing with their federal funding to boot. Thankfully my firm’s relationship with the City was very strong, or it could have meant an end to a recurring project source that, had it dried up, could have ended the whole company (small firm).
Would certainly like something like that but it’s exactly what the company is trying to avoid. Often the last two percent takes 90% of the time. Some things won’t be addressed until the last month. So it only really means something to techs or those folks that see problems in everything. I could see where that level of detail would cause a lot of grief. That’s why my fallback position was feel good info with a slice of honesty.
This is the internet so let’s face it… any amount of detail, from zero to complete, does cause a lot of grief to somebody.
In my opinion, we have what you want anyway. From the schedule at the top of the page we know that as of right now, the GF is still on schedule to ship in December (to early backers). While what @dan says above is completely true, and will remain true well beyond delivery as they have to work on softaware, firmware, catalog, etc… we still know that despite any issues that they may be having this week or next, they are still on schedule. We can also assume that, as before, any change to said schedule will be accompanied by an explanation… whether it’s “We’re awesome and will deliver your Glowforge three days early!” or “We’re sorry, but…” On top of that we get to see cool stuff from Laser Thursdays and @jkopel from time to time.
This, once again, was reassuring to hear. I know things in this world of development aren’t all butterflies and rainbows, but its good to hear this. I have to remind myself that it’s only been 3 months since the delay announcement and we still have about 6 to go.
Not trying to belabor the point too much… I’m looking at this only from a logical point of view. The announcement post is an “Official” schedule of a shipping plan. It’s accuracy is only very loosely connected to the actual status. It’s like a rubber band that only needs replacement if it breaks. Should a fire burn the manufacturing plant to the ground that post could not change until a new assembly line is identified and confirmed, and the new shipping plan is thoroughly vetted with the investors. That might take months and you would have no way of knowing. So it’s better not to use the shipping post as an indication of whether things are good or bad. It’s not an untruth, it’s just not necessarily current information. It’s simply Project Planning 101. That’s why other avenues of reassurance are so important.
You could apply the same logic to any regularly scheduled update though. If a monthly update happened yesterday and the plant burned down today, then you still have nearly a month until the next regular update where you would be in the dark. The only time you don’t have that dead-time is with instant, real-time updates.
Personally, I would much rather have the news and resolution in a single announcement.
I dont understand this. Particularly the resolution part. Lets say we only had annual announcements. Wouldn’t monthly announcements give more resolution into progress?
If the plant burned 1 month after the annual announcement you would be flying blind for 11 months. Unable to make a personal decision if you still wanted to pre-order the product with the risks involved.
I personally dont want the “over the shoulder” updates. Yet, the lack of communication is starting to wear on me.
But it is certainly a huge scale from one person to the next. And i don’t see any level of arguing over the regularity of updates changes anyone’s opinion. Just like telling someone they are risk averse doesn’t make them more risky.
So looking back at this post i probably should have just kept my mouth shut
I agree arguing is getting pointless. I think we are all somewhere in the middle of the extremes. I don’t want zero updates. But they also don’t give zero updates. When an announcement is necessary they have made it. If the plant burns down and it will take an inordinate amount of time to resolve, then of course they should (and would) make an announcement prior to affecting the resolution. Where every person’s opinion differs is in the frequency of, and the content of those announcements.
My real opinion is that while I love seeing all of the progress, the minutiae details that aren’t affecting schedule are irrelevant in whether and when I get my glowforge, so it isn’t necessary, in my mind, for GF to make them.
here here. This sums my opinion up. of course it also annoys my wife as that was my families default mindset and she has an all up in each others business at all times approach.
I’ve driven by there and stopped recently, on the way to a Mariners baseball game. I peeked in the window. The lights are on and he’s got Santa’s Elves working in there! It’s Santa’s slow time of the year and the Elves can use the extra money! Who do you think will be doing the December deliveries anyway?
I was really glad to hear something. Thank you for that @dan. My wife runs her own business and I have seen how much effort she has to go through to even give quarterly investor updates. However, like many on this thread, the lack of any real updates was getting frustrating. It’s funny how even a simple post, without many real facts that you can sink your teeth into, can soothe my fears and unease.
Um, actually no. Those awesome show cars you see at trade shows, may actually run, but more likely while it may look like an amazing car, runs like a used Pinto. The functioning units of things at trade shows are either the only thing the dev team can get working or the same unit over and over again.
Not saying either of the scenarios are the case here but as both a frequent participant in trade shows and a prior trade show displayer, I would take anything I see in a booth that isn’t an already shipping product with a huge grain of salt. My favorite version of this was seeing a new version of windows in the very early days at a company internal demo and the demo crashed (ok, it’s like pre-alpha, nobody would have minded) but it was actually a hypercard stack running on a mac because they couldn’t get the build to work that day…
Actually @Dan that’s more reassuring than you know. First off please pass along (I am assuming nobody on the forums dissents) our heartfelt gratitude towards the team. As someone in development, I greatly sympathize for the push for a major release (our V2 of our huge software suite goes live tomorrow), and know you guys are working hard.
As for your second part, you actually did a great update earlier in the week with the posting of the dominoes you made. It didn’t show anything secret, since it theoretically could have been made on any laser cutter but shows that you guys are using/learning from using the GF, and keeps excitement up. A simple “hey we’re working hard, fixed a whole lot of things, progressing forward and check out this cool thing that Bob in accounting made last week on the GF” is actually extremely reassuring.
Some friends were working on a gizmo that involved a couple of custom chips, and the chips were not working yet. But conveniently they had built an, um, emulator for the software people to use, out of a suitcase full of wire-wrapped 7400-series chips. So they took that to the show instead.
Still completely confident in the company and staff…the fact that have been very present here on the forums and have chosen quality over putting out a product they are not yet completely satisfied with says alot.
I own my own company and when you loose sight of excellence your reputation suffers and in the long run, you lose good customers.
They are in this for the long run…not some fly by night take your money and run…
Yes, delays are unfortunate but sometimes you have to wait for quality.
Otherwise you go with a cheaper brand and complain…
