Unfortunately no, but if you’re signed up, we got you.
I’ve never worked with them before but I’m boggled by how effective they are and how, once you get the hang of it, vector art becomes a great 3D tool.
We don’t have any different plans for international customers at this time.
@dan can you give me a number on how many Glowforge’s that are on order that have NOT been canceled?
Your logic is flawed, company size is based on number of employees, not money. A friend of mine works for a small mobile app company with less than 40 employees and they pull in around a million a day. Yet they occupy half a floor in an office building that you would never know existed. Maybe GF has hired 200 people, but they feel like a pretty small shop from their communications.
Now, maybe that’s part of the issue and cause for delay… it’s hard to say if they are understaffed with so little information about the cause of delay and staffing.
This delay means two year of dead investment now. I think glowforge should have sold initially in US only and then should have gone global. Really scared to go ahead with this now. If there will be technical issues when it arrives it will be impossible to be repaired or to service, which may take months again, when I stay far far east.
[quote=“ade, post:85, topic:3657, full:true”]
I’m not trying to be funny here, but if that’s the only thing you can do that earns you our trust, then your track record doesn’t exactly shine, to say the least.[/quote]
@dan You can do a hell of a lot more than give a dismissive answer to a very serious question.
I’m not trying to be funny here, but if that’s the only thing you can do that earns you our trust, then your track record doesn’t exactly shine, to say the least.
I gave you $4170 dollars on 9/15/15 (upgraded to pro after). You are a very charismatic person, you come off as honest and open. But lets be real here, people don’t trust you right now. They feel cheated, betrayed and defrauded. Simply saying
Since you utterly missed the mark the first time, here are some suggestions for what you can do to START earning back our trust.
1: Hire a full time person to share everything going on at Glowforge and your manufacturing facility. This person is responsible for multiple daily updates to the community and showing new examples of things designed by the community. No more votive candles! 1 person, 1 camera, 1 computer and unlimited access.
As someone who has 20 employees I know that you could have this done in less than a week if you were properly motivated as there are a lot of people in Seattle who could do this. I could make recommendations for people with a lot of community management experience
2: Stop hiding behind the full refund. It’s a passive aggressive cop out that more people are seeing through as we move forward. It is going to result in a lot more anger than you are seeing tonight.
3: Use your new hire to publicly document and updateson your successes and failures. No more everything is fine the week before and I am so sad to push back the date another 6 months the next week. You are trying to keep a competitive edge, that’s fine don’t tell us all the secret sauce. But you goddamn better quit lying to us, even if its by omission or else you’re going to set the reputation of Glowforge for years to come.
4: Give more detailed and realistic timeline for what is happening. I have three kickstarters that provide weekly updates with SPECIFIC DETAILS on the process. Each of them have had multiple manufacturing setbacks and were UPFRONT AND HONEST so my expectations were managed properly.
I am more pissed about feeling lied and deceived than I would have been if you managed the expectations by communicating better
5: Update your website, it still says delivering in December and the wrong warranty info.
The above is off the top of my head and I am sure there will be other ideas from the community. So lets do this again…
While I don’t like your tone, after I get past that I think you have some good ideas in there.
That’s not a number we planned to share, but I can look into it when things settle down. May I ask why you’d like to know?
Thank you for taking the time to care about this, the time to think through this, and the time to share your recommendations. I don’t fault you for being mad and I think your anger is justified.
My priority is delivering above all else. It makes it all the harder for failing at that. Perhaps I should reallocate resources as you suggest, and I should be spending more time and resources every day on this, for example sharing our daily or weekly triumphs and disappointments as many Kickstarter campaigns do. If that’s true, and I’m making the wrong decision, than both I and our company will be punished by you, our customers, for my mistake.
But regardless, I understand that some people who want us to conduct our business differently will decide that monthly updates aren’t for them and will take their funds elsewhere. We’ll make that as painless as possible, because we’ve already caused you enough grief and disappointment by letting you down.
Please let us know if that’s the path you’d like to take, and we’ll issue your refund right away. If not, then I accept your criticism, and will continue to work to bring your Glowforge to you as quickly - and as well - as I possibly can.
The flaw in your logic is that with $36 Million and an extra year past its initial promised date. They shouldn’t be a small shop if they needed to be a big shop to deliver on promises. Missing deadlines by 18 months is a management failure to provide the proper resources, planning and execution.
I could understand if they didn’t raise big checks before and after as they would need to be very careful with the pre-order money so they had enough to pay for the units. But that isn’t the case in this situation as they had $10M before the campaign and another $22M after.
Yes. It is. I take full responsibility. We have an amazing team, and this rests solely on me.
Removable laser head makes me see a motorized tiltable head in the future 
There is a principal called Brook’s Law, however. Avoiding it becomes a balancing act.
It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the “ramp up” time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of several engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even make negative contributions, for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion.
So you have taken responsibility. I commend you for that.
@dan When does accountability kick in and what does that look like?
So business as usual with no changes in communication, quality / quantity of updates, and details. Is everything going to be OK up to the day before we get a 4th? 5th? (I can’t remember if this is the 4th or 5th delay message) message that conveys your regrets, teases some new feature, borrows credibility from a 3rd party who exposes small flaws but gives a hopeful stamp of approval and you give another small ultimately inconsequential gift to the community?
You have failed for 18 months with business as usual. To use a well worn cliche “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
So @dan, to borrow a phrase… Is that your final answer?
I could not agree more on scottmillersb thoughts. The communication is just terrible. Everything is fine, no need for updates, and then boom another huge delay.
Please try to gain some trust back and start being open and honest. I see other companies that have public trello boards. Why is this so difficult for glowforge? I really don’t get it. Take a look (http://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-public-trello-board)
And please don’t tell me that you don’t have any resources for that because everybody is working night and day to deliver asap. We are talking about minutes per day or maybe half an hour per week. This will not cause the next 6 month delay. I am absolutely not interested in any secret sauce. Just be open and honest. Sometimes a photo and a tweet will do.
And please stop telling over and over again that we can cancel our order. I think everybody who reads this forum understand this by now. And this is quite natural. I mean we ordered, we payed and the delivery gets delayed again and again. Of course I can cancel my order, but please understand, that for some (maybe most) of us, this is not an option because we want or need the glowforge.
I am currently to stirred up to write more.
@dan_berry I am well familiar with this, but typical ramp up on a well managed project for a programmer is 2 weeks for initial code and full productivity in a month.
If you are referring to my suggestion on hiring someone in less than a week for community, the ramp up time there can be measured in days if done properly.
Just what I said in a different thread.
By the time we actually get this machine, I could have invested my money in other avenues and possible be in a better place now financially. A lot can happen in 12 months let alone a year and a half and we are here left twiddling our thumbs!
I just don’t get why the delay notices are so last minute - both times. I am also disappointed that some of the specs really sold the machine to me and made me make a hard financial decision, are either not ready yet - like features 3 and 8 and the filter for the pro(?) - or are not as they are described in the feature list (feature 8).
We’ll have to continue to use outside services until we get the GF - it’s not the end of the world. And because I apparently live at the end of the world, we need to get a machine that - at least hardware wise - works, especially when paying $1700 for shipping. So we’ll wait.
For what it’s worth though, I have faith in GF as a company. Not because of how they handle the PR (or some of the apparently simple questions for that matter), but because it seems as thought they seem to eat, sleep and breathe GF and are committed to get a great product out there. I respect that a lot.
So my criticism does not mean you don’t have my support - you have it.
I really like this… @dan, what about a UV printer specifically? That would be awesome because everything else is in place for that function. And because that industry is also ripe for ‘desktop-status’ and maker accessibility.
Nope, it wasn’t in reference to that. This is what caught my eye:
While Dan has obviously stepped forward to accept it falls on him, sometimes trying to find the right person with the proper skillset is a challenge and can hinder the progress you’re suggesting. That’s all I wanted to highlight.