I was according to the website among the first 10 backers and I also thought that I would get mine December 2015. I was expecting delays, but not 1.5 years.
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I think this point @palmercr makes is actually very valid, and the point of difference in the starting arguments. Like @palmercr, when I ordered the product it was certainly marketed as shipping in 3 months (see the archive.org for October 4th, 2015):
I think the starting point of expectation, and some of the discussions back earlier this year about the first or second delay come from this idea that you are pre-ordering at a discount for initial shipment.
Its easy to see when there are investments in the company ,that the impression was that it was simply getting the funds to get production started (given the 3 month schedule).
The knowledge provided by @dan that the operational costs are coming from the money invested, and not by the pre-orders is a safety net for those (like me) who believe the refund option will be viable till they start shipping.
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It is confusing because there is that huge banner that said, âThe biggest 30-day crowdfunding campaign in historyâ. It still says that on the home page, even though we were buying pre-orders, and because they did not use our purchase money (except for interest) to develop the GFs. The terminology can be confusing. - Rich
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No doubt. Enough to interpret either way. Couple that with a snazzy marketing video, you have enough to believe that you could get something in December.
That we are in December 1 year after that, and now we have another projected 7 months delay, its not hard to understand the frustration most are feeling.
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Things can be crowdfunded in many different ways. Sometimes those funds are used for initial development etc.
In the case of the glowforge I think they just needed to hit a certain threshold of purchases to know if manufacturing was going to be viable or not. If they didnt raise enough funds, they might not have gone to market with it (speculation).
Aside from the products that have already been developed, tested, and had a pre-production run, this is my preferred method of crowdfunding.
The situations where you are also contributing to the development of the product can get hairy as things arise that were never considered a factor. I think that is why a larger percentage of those type of campaigns fail.
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Yes but that wasnât there when I ordered. And Glowforge both claim it is the biggest crowdfunding campaign and also claim the purchase money is ring fenced and it is a VC funded development.
It canât be both and never could be said to be crowdfunded because we the crowd could have all demanded our money back and left them with no funds at all. If they didnât have other funding they would be on very shaky ground. A panic among the customers could leave them bankrupt out of the blue. No one in the company would have any job security.
So the fact they have always said we could claim a full refund made me think they had other funding from the beginning. If they didnât it was a massive gamble.
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I would suggest you review the history of how the funding changes occurred and how Glowforge has protected the crowdfunded monies.
Initially, the crowdfunded monies were paying for operations, development and manufacturing. But once the VC funds came into play, ALL of the crowdfunding monies were protected and refunds are without question made available.
Right now, over half of the Pre-Orders (if not all) could request refunds and outside of having to start up a new marketing campaign, Glowforge could been selling Pre-Orders at the higher price and even before one was sold, 6 to 8 months of operations (all components) funding are covered and money is still left in the bank.
It is discouraging to see speculation using terms of âbankruptcyâ and others being referenced, and even worrying about past months (that nothing can be done to change it).
It is reasonable to express disappointment with how communications WERE handled and expectations WERE not met, but has does 20/20 hindsight and worrying over unchangeable past events do anything but poor salt and vinegar in the wounds.
I, for one, have seen @dan making a much better effort at revealing where things are at (within sensible reason) to help encourage Pre-Orderers and address the number 1 complaint about communication.
If that is not acceptable to someone, they probably wonât be happy with what they do get. For those people, I would suggest that they get their refunds and allow their wounds to heal rather than continuing to pick at and reopening those wounds.
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The refunds were always offered right from the beginning. That is why I said if they didnât have other funding at that time it was a massive gamble for them as they wouldnât have been able to refund if there was a run on them while they were burning through the cash.
It doesnât matter how many times people tell me to claim a refund and get lost, it doesnât make any sense for me to do so. I expect they will produce a good machine they can ship sometime next year. My original reasons for purchasing have long gone. I also had some plans to use it around now as well but nothing vital fortunately because I have a CNC router.
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That is the exact site I ordered from. It is also just one page of a multi-page website. Also there were press releases, FAQs, videos, interviews and more to draw information from. I thought âcrowdfunding a tech device shipping in December? Not a chance.â And I dug a bit deeper and found that the December shipments were to be betas. So they werenât lying because they were, in fact, supposed to ship in December. They were very ambiguous, and they have admitted to that and apologized for it.
To be honest, I wasnât responding in order to argue with anyone. I was merely sharing my personal experience to illustrate that the information was available.
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Were you bothered, finding out after the fact, that monies (specifically yours) might have been at risk or that going forward your committed funds have some potential of risk?
The reason for commenting about getting a refund is that it seems that @dan 's change of communication and willingness to answer more detailed questions doesnât seem to be satisfying for you. The forum is wanting to help, encourage and support those involved, but if the discussions are stuck on circling issues (that which have happened in the past) without looking at what changes are occurring now, everyone gets frustrated.
If you know what it is that you want in this forum, please express it (understanding resolution happens in the present and future) while past requests need to be compared to what changes are occurring now.
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No worries @chadmart1076. I didnât take it as an argumentative response. It was a multi page website. I think that you correctly anticipated that 3 months would not be enough, a lot of us actually took things at face value, given the slick video and shiny marketing.
I think lying is not quite the right word for it either. At best, overly optimistic. Its a common occurrence. The assurances of delay are mainly on @danâs word, which did not pan out. At this point, outside of the crowd that thinks there is nothing the company can do that will do harm, a lot of us are sticking around mainly from a standpoint that again a 6 month delay seems palatable given that right now there isnt a laser in this class that looks to be as user friendly as described.
Having played with a K40 like a lot of other customers here, I know I am in the camp that as far as this tool is concerned, I want to make things with it, not spend time getting it to work right.
Being first to market with a product like the glowforge with its user friendly features is a huge draw. I can guarantee you that if there was a competitor out there in the same ballpark price, I would cancel my order in a heartbeat.
Good news for Glowforge is there isnt, so I continue waiting, because âŚwait for it⌠I can still get a refund! (Howâs that for suggestions my fellow forum members? 
)
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Why is it so hard for people to take a deep breathe, and try to look at the common denominators in the big scope of things, and then go with the simplest explanation?
Couldnât it be possible that the plan was to tell FLEX on Dec 1 to start churning out, and the team expected to work out the few minor details in time? @Dan admitted to taking pause a few weeks or month prior and recognized that it appeared to be too risky as is, wouldnât the natural response be to crack whip on the team with crunch time and overtime to get it ready in time for deadline day? There is enough examples of companies developing things do just that when it comes to deadlines. Almost every video game ever is like that.
So crunch time didnât put it to 99.99% reliable, and @Dan couldnât let GF be made en masse, I donât see it as a failure, but rather a respectful best effort practice. @Dan put himself out to hear everyoneâs complaint directly afterwards. That is integrity.
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I work in videogames, and crunch time is no joke. I am positive that if you start pushing people, the product will suffer. I am sure the best practice is to take the time to do things right. In my line of work, we have three things we want. Make a quality product, release that product on time, and come under budget. We can only have two of these three. In the case of the Glowforge, we cannot change the price, as we have already paid up, and they are firm about making a quality product, so the deadlines will slip. I accept this.
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I am in this forum to try to get some realistic idea when my Glowforge will be delivered and what its capabilities will be. Normally that would be in the marketing material but that is not to be believed in this case. One has to glean information from the questions Dan refuses to answer as well as the ones he does.
For example I can infer that it doesnât have UL / FCC or CE yet and that is a major reason why it canât ship. It would be nice if that was admitted instead of saying the only reason it isnât shipping now is reliability issues. And it would be nice to know what the earliest or expected date CE approval can happen.
Yes things can slip when something unexpected happens but they donât unexpected happen early. Is it realistic to fix the reliability issues, update the design, get world wide approvals and ramp up production by end of July? I donât want to find out on 2nd of July that it will be Dec17. It may well be but I would like to be told when that first becomes known if that does happen.
I donât have a burning need to know like some people that have business needs but I am designing a 3D printer followed by a pick and place machine over the coming year. It would be nice to know if any parts can be laser cut as it affects the design.
I also learn about laser cutting in general from people that already have experience with them.
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Entitlement
Let me first say that Iâm in the same boat with every single other person here on these forums⌠Iâm unhappy that thereâs been another delay and Iâm very excited to receive my Glowforge as soon as possible. That saidâŚ
I keep seeing posts that describe how weâre entitled to know this or that about Glowforge as a company and specifically what went wrong to delay shipments, or how many people have canceled their order, or whatâs being done differently now, etc.
Thing is, weâre not Glowforge employees, or investors, or shareholders of any sort. Weâre Glowforge owners. Weâre not entitled to anything except a Glowforge the moment ours comes off the line. Internal processes or metrics are just that⌠internal. Theyâre not for us.
Iâve read a ton of answers from staff since the announcement. I found some to be extremely insightful and reasonable, some were a little short and didnât necessarily address a question in a direct way, and some missed the mark completely. No matter what, Iâm happy to have seen these responses. Iâd bet almost every, if not every, public response has to go through their legal department, or something similar, to ensure they donât mistakenly hurt the company. And I really respect Glowforge for taking the time to supply those answers.
Iâm not saying donât ask questions if your curious or if the answer will somehow make your life a little better. Iâm just saying that weâre not entitled to a detailed answer or, in fact, any answer at all.
Looking forward to getting my Glowforge! Hereâs to the near future!
- Tom
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Really looking forward to that (GF hacks).
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+1
In the real corporate world when thereâs a mess up hereâs what happens:
A RCA (Root Cause Analysis) document is created for the customers. Typically it enumerates the various things that went wrong and has some kind of timeline that shows what happened when and what the companyâs response was as it unfolded.
Then, the second half of the document it shows what steps have been taken to mitigate what happened and shows that it can never happen again.
This is how you build trust and reassure your customers you fully understand what went wrong and that youâve now taken the appropriate steps so that they can trust you again. This is corporate professionalism 101.
What has bothered me is @Dan has never (to my knowledge; I visit here sparingly) outlined, even in broad terms, what has happens in each of the three shipping slips and even more importantly, has not documented what steps have been taken to mitigate the exact things from happening again. Itâs not clear to me that the company even fully understands what went wrong and why their schedules are so far from reality.
Hereâs is my totally imaginary RCA @Dan could write that I think would go a long way to making people feel a lot better:
"- We were unable to hire enough the engineers needed to meet our schedules. A company manufacturing daughter boards to our specification had a 15% failure rate when exposed to the thermal cycles in the cabinet. The power supply was over heating and this blocked extended laser testing. When we added additional cooling it meant we needed to go back and redesign the reservoir for more capacity, which meant we needed to change the case and completely retest everything. The regulatory testing was delayed due to the cabinet redesign.
To mitigate the above problems, hereâs the steps weâre taking:
-
We now have a recruiter onsite rather than outsourcing the search for engineers and already have some offers out.
-
We supplied our daughter board contractor with pre-release units so they can test for thermal conditions at their location and make sure their designs can withstand the conditions.
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Weâve contracted with a world famous power supply company to help us design a powerful but cool unit.
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Rather than having engineers spend valuable time doing the testing weâve now created a new QA department that does nothing but test the units 24 hours a day and quickly finds and resolves problems. This will get us caught up on our testing.
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We bought a new $250K Stratasys 3D printer so we can rapidly prototype new designs. We can now turn around changes quickly and get back on track with regulatory testing."
Again, the above is completely my imagination but I think shows the importance of understanding what went wrong and communicating the problems have been solved.
I hope @dan takes this to heart.
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many an rca i have written, they are never shared with our external customers they are only used internally from inside the company to provide stake holders (of witch us pre order people are not) a status of the situation and reason for outage and future mitigation. We would never in a million years provide that to our external presence this would only hurts the company in either bad publicity because we had some type of application issue that in reality didnt actually impact doing business or the Customer in any fashion however releasing it people would have no context to what the true scope of impact is. It could also cause us to loose some of our security as people could find out how something is plumbed together or could cause proprietary up leakage
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While all the minutia of a RCA (or whatever your company calls it) may not be shared, you can be sure that the customer is informed of where things are, and when things can be expected to be corrected.
Not doing that, and just saying we are looking at it , give us another 6 months 3 times would not endear you to your customers, and they would lose faith. When that happens, its a much harder sell to maintain your customer base or gain new ones, as those experiences will affect new acquisitions due to word of mouth.
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