Based on the scarcity of communication or engagement, and lack of shipping, I think that it's clear that the initial crowdfunding campaign and then consumer-direct website were a means of drawing attention and proving interest, and that once investors got involved they became the primary customer and we were demoted to being a number in a slide deck representing market demand and guinea pigs.
I'm not mad. Just setting expectations.
Oh, it's a gross over-simplification, but I think truer for it. That we account for 2-7% of the required funding confirms my point.
Silence = working hard to get it right -- That's a great way of looking at it.
I'm not saying that we're not going to get an awesome product. I'm saying that we are not your primary investors and that reporting to us is not your highest priority.
Hey Dan,
That's a bit of an oversimplification. The initial crowd funding campaign was cancelled and we got investor funds several months later. Since then the focus has been on creating a product that was aesthetically pleasing that hit several internal quality points we had set. Along the way we had hit some snags and had to shuffle some suppliers.
As I have stated before, when we go silent it means we are working very hard and simply have not had the time make an update. The glasses are complex and we had to overhaul our internal communication processes and add people to the team in order to get things where I wanted them. There will be an update this month. Our first one in a few months.
If the folks who made pre-orders where only ginuea pigs, we would have developed the product to completion first, then put it on kickstarter, as many other company's have. A lot of those companies don't exist anymore (it's basically LAFORGE, By North (formerly Thalmic Labs), and Magic Leap that are left) and their product's 'deviated a bit' from what was described.
We are taking our time, being careful, and applying a lot of study on the best way execute this product. This has admittedly taking a while to develop but so did the light bulb, the concept of an assembly line, and the first PC. Our next update will have details around a performance improvement, the OS, timeline estimates for beta and gen-1 production, as well as some other changes.
The amount of funds we took in for pre-orders currently account for less than 7% of the funds required to get us where we are today and by the end of the year will account for about 2% of what was required to get my vision of the product into production. This is not to meant to diminish the role of the pre-order customer but shows that we have been working hard to leverage pre-orders into investment to ensure that everyone will get something that is better than what was described.
I hope this helps.