You can check your target date, (which can be accessed by each individual in their personal Purchase History at http://www.glowforge.com/account/ ). It’s the best estimate until Glowforge gets word that a certain type of machine is ready to ship. Glowforge will send you an email directly when it ships.
If you want to know where it is exactly, sign up for UPS MyChoice in advance of the shipping. (For Filter tracking and Repairs, the manufacturers might ship using FedEx, so signing up at FedEx Delivery Manager is a good idea as well.)
Nicely written - the only thing I’d edit is the title to “Why the Delay? Why Can’t I get my machine NOW?” (since as is it looks like you’re addressing waiting for questions via the forum, as opposed to delivery)
and link to www.glowforge.com/account/ rather than just glowforge.com since the account page is not linked anywhere currently and it’s the only place your shipping estimates show up!
I think we still have some countries awaiting local jurisdictional approval for the glowforge models and most of them for proofgrade. Might want to add something about hose delays If you can think better than me on what should be said. I’m afraid I’m not really any help with it
Not sure I’d know what to say either. We don’t know what the holdups are for the individual countries waiting for authorization to ship. (It would be nice to be able to do something to make things easier for the folks living there though.)
The thing about the “when can I expect to get my machine?” question is that it is one GF can easily answer. They know to a fair degree of accuracy how many machines they can build and ship in a day. For any customer with an open order, they know with absolute accuracy where that person is on the list of pending orders. Where someone is on the list divided by machines shipped/day equals days to wait for that person. Sure they can’t necessarily be accurate to the exact day, but they should be able to say with accuracy of a week or so.
By way of an anecdotal story, I ordered and waited for my GF for a year before I finally got agitated enough to reach out to GF for a delivery date. The response I got was that they could not say when my machine would ship. I basically called BS on that with the argument above. That was late in the day on a Friday so I wasn’t too surprised I didn’t see a response. Monday rolled around and I was anticipating another “go around” with GF on the “can’t say” argument. But instead I got an email notifying me that my GF had shipped.
GF should notify customers immediately if they are still waiting for regional certification for the country of delivery of the order. They know this with 100% certainty at the time an order is placed, too. I’d argue they should not book the order until they’ve informed the buyer that certifications are pending and they cannot ship. Not doing that is IMO just bad customer service (and customer support is what I do for a living so I think I’m equipped to judge).
With time, and once their orders slow down some, Glowforge will get to that point. They’re not there yet.
In the meantime, talking about how things will be one day doesn’t help out the people who are ordering now, and doesn’t do anything to alleviate their concerns about the lack of contact, so that’s what this is for. It’s not designed to tell Glowforge how to run their business either. Just explain to customers how it works, so they can decide whether they want to still be anxious about it or not.
And if any of this does reach them, they might send fewer anxious emails to Glowforge which will reduce the burden on support. Then maybe they can reduce the amount of time it takes to get issues taken care of for customers who already have their machines. (Because those have to be researched too.)
Anyway, it’s a long shot and I know it. But I’m not real good at sitting around on my thumbs waiting for someone else to fix things. I’d rather try and fail, than not try.
(Update: And obviously, since the original post didn’t work to reduce anyone’s anxiety, but seems to be doing nothing but promoting arguing among people who already have machines, I’ve removed the actual description that was provided in the first post and will just tell people to sign up for the notifications.)
My view is they must have implicitly been at that point in order to go in to business, it’s fundamental to running a manufacturing operation. You don’t pay someone to build something for you (or build it yourself) without knowing exactly how long it takes to build one, and how many can be built in a day. It’s just “Business 101”. And I didn’t even go to business school.
Being able to accurately forecast stuff like this is something I am 100% confident GF can do now if they want. It’s OK to put “error bars” around the forecast date. Anything is better than a completely open ended commit.
I’ve worked at my share of technology startups and techs with $B revenue streams and each and every one has understood this basic paradigm: the best way to keep customers happy in the absence of actual product is with a high level of detailed communication.
I’m thinking the solution to this problem is for the customer-base to “encourage” GF to change the way they communicate delivery dates to their customers.
Under normal circumstances…maybe. This was not a normal circumstance. They started out with 14,000 orders to fill, and they are still trying to get things squared away. If they choose to focus on development of the machine and providing support to the customers who have already received the machines instead of spending time looking up exact delivery notifications for new customers that require response from a third party manufacturer, I think they made the right choice. Those new customers will have the benefit of that policy once they receive their machines.
No, I don’t think they can. Not right now. If they could, they would. But they don’t have the information stream set up that way. And taking the time to do it would add additional cost and delay to the process.
They are coming up with an estimated date for the customers, and as time goes on, that estimate will likely get better. But people demanding exact dates from them are probably going to continue to be disappointed.
I disagree. I think it’s a complete waste of your time and energy to do it, but if you feel strongly about it, and you’ve got excess energy to spare, give it a shot. They do listen to suggestions from customers.
And if they can accommodate them, they will. I just don’t think they can accommodate us on this.
Just throwing my completely pointless two cents in here, I fully agree with @randy.cohen
In summer of 2018 they received a $10 million dollar investment and in December JOANN gave them an undisclosed amount of money and partnership deal. There is absolutely no way in tech funding that a firm would invest that kind of money without semi-accurate manufacturing numbers, active user counts, and a realistic Cap table.
I feel like the complaints are valid. Us the early adopters will put up with much more b.s. then a customer from JOANN will.
For what it was worth much of what @Jules has laid out, I have seen and the parts I did not know are perfectly logical from what I do know. How many businesses would like to get ten years of expected sales in the first week? A terrific thing to think about but a terrifying thing to happen. Even software that you can make a copy in seconds still finds bugs in use that require updates. Building complex new technology machines and the software, while all those customers are getting antsy waiting, was rough.
Mine was a late (and more expensive) buy-in after I could see that some people were actually getting machines, but before they realized that the date when they would finally be caught up was not going to happen anytime soon, so the date when they would have all of them delivered as parsed out to everyone that estimated when their place in line would come up. Mine bounced around from early January to late February and showed up weeks before I expected it.
The high pre-sale volume also meant that any flaw was magnified and even if discovered before shipping out meant that many more needed fixing and the software was (and is) constantly evolving as well.
i get all of that, but the pain of the first overwhelming sales was literally 4 years ago this week. we should be getting beyond that at some point. that excuse can’t last forever.
Breaking close to even was less than two years ago and the filter problems not solved yet, much less the expenses of warranty repairs and getting that up to speed as a total loss, and having to learn what could fail in unknowing hands. Like magnets causing so many issues before anyone knew it was possible.
those are different kinds of issues. we’re talking about basic fulfillment issues.
after 2+ years of shipping machines, this should be getting better. but it’s not.
for example, people often still don’t get notified their machines have shipped before they arrive (unless they come here and people tell them to get UPS/Fedex accounts so the shipping company notifies them). that’s just plain sloppy and low-hanging fruit to fix.
it’s one thing to have technical issues that they’re still working out. it’s another thing to have issues related to basic manufacturing/fulfillment/business that continue to plague them. communication is a basic service for a vendor.
That happened to me, and it sat blocking the entry for a couple of days till I could figure a way to move it and in the mean time create a place to put it. The need for a window that could open meant it hijacked the Dining room.
Could have been fixed the day someone brought it up, Both services let companies attach an email address so a email is sent to the customer the instant the label is created. We’re talking very low tech here until something more official from GF can prove functional.
No one gives you VC funds based on the strength of your idea alone. You only get VC funds when you can demonstrate a satisfactory ROI for the VC investor via a comprehensive business plan. The VC will go over that business plan in agonizing detail. Nothing is taken on faith, everything must be validated with hard data. 3rd party audits might also be required.
Details related to orders shipped/week or month or quarter (whatever metric you prefer) is pretty much the foundation of it all. You have to sell widgets to make money, the VC wants some of that money, so the VC wants to see how it is you think you can sell as many widgets as you say you can, and they want to see the plan demonstrating you can actually do it, not just your handwaving and promises. And since few widgets are going to be manufactured 100% in house, the VC is going to want to see your supply-chain management plan, who your suppliers are and how you’ve determined that they can reliably meet your company’s needs. And since no business plan would be attractive without strong growth, the VC’s going to want to see that the suppliers can meet the anticipated future demand and not just near-term goals. And the smarter VC will want to make sure you’ve qualified multiple suppliers for a given component so you can continue to build product if one supplier has a “boo boo”.
VCs who don’t work this way don’t last very long at all.
I’ve been both on the acquisition side and acquired quite a few times over my working career. I would have a serious problem approving the acquisition of a company that could not say exactly how many widgets they can ship every week. You can be sure GF has this information in agonizing detail due to their multiple funding rounds. You can be sure GF also has an accurate list of outstanding customer orders. Doing simple arithmetic with that data is all it takes to solve this problem. It’d be so easy to fix, I’m at a loss to understand why we’re even having this discussion…
You’ve got a lot of spare time today.
