I realize that many people who frequent HN are quite grumped about wakemate (and perhaps rightfully so).
Nonetheless, its worth pointing out that designing and then manufacturing an electronic gadget (as a single end to end process) is in many ways orders of magnitude more difficult than shipping a webapp that works on a post IE6 web browser. Theres perhaps certain regulatory elements that need to be dealt with, as well as liability issues that just don't happen with normal software, and thats ignoring quality control issues in manufacturing.
Moreover, somehow amidst being busy with all this (and perhaps wanting to actually ship both so that theres no CA suit from those who pre-ordered, as well actually having a product with sales), they're doing a pretty good job about being open about hiccups along the way, and to in a relatively timely fashion respond to most nice email requests.
Pray tell hn, how many companies discussed on hn are open about the end to end design process for some physical product? I can't think of many myself, and I'd actually really like/enjoy it if once they're comfortably got v1 shipping, that they take the time to write some more elaborated posts documenting their whole design through to final manufacturing or something like that.
It doesn't help that they have an uncanny ability to piss people off with every major blog post.
They haven't even reached their first major shipment yet, but already:
* They told people in January that shipping Q1 actually meant shipping July 31st.
* They mentioned "premium analytics" or the like and gave everyone fears of having to tack a monthly fee on top of the $50 they had committed to paying for their devices.
* They said that they haven't taken any money from customers yet when they actually have.
None of those are really that bad on their own, but the fact that they've had 3 of these gaffs before the first major shipment understandably gives some people doubt.
>As previously stated, we misjudged demand for this product. Having too many people wanting to buy your product is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Our original method for assembling and shipping devices simply wasn’t scalable in terms of cost and time. It was no longer good enough to get easily accessible parts, buy a few hundred or a thousand of them, and pay somebody to assemble them; time and expense would be too much.
But <20% of the preorders paid $5 for the product (source: OP). Couldn't they have assembled at least those and shipped them out by now?
Or, to state it another way, didn't they wake up one morning and realize they had enough preorders? It would be a lot easier to convert the preorder form to "Sign up for more info when we have more units available!" than to convert it to GCheckout, another way of preordering, which is what they did.
I'm confident that Craig could have spent all his time soldering, but then we'd have a far inferior product right now. Obviously the initial delivery estimates were way off but we have a much better product for Craig's efforts sans soldering.
don't get me wrong...I am proud of my ability to solder surface mount chips by hand. that said, certain SMT packages (FBGAs, LGAs) are pretty much impossible to solder by hand with a conventional iron.
its great for the "first 1000 or so" - if something gets popular i can send it off for manufacture - but only because i can bridge manufacture thru the never-ending-leadtimes. having trouble getting a fantastic oven tho. the apsgold's look nice but we dont have 220 :( had great luck with some common reflow plates if you can deal with single sided
This brings to mind the wider discussion of DIY fabrication (MakerBot et al) and while it has been dismissed by many "experts" there are distinct advantages for companies who can benefit from the added agility it provides(in this case, delivering your product on-time vs. wrangling with external companies, who probably don't consider you important in comparison to "big" companies).
Perhaps having your own "pick-and-place" wouldn't scale up to Wal-Mart levels of demand but having a small end-to-end factory of your own gives you the ability to satisfy early-adopters who are willing to pay a little more to be "first"; and usually drive mass purchasing down-the-road.
Thanks for the kind words! Documentation of the whole process is underway, including the lessons-learned along the way. "WakeMate: Origins" is a vast undertaking and I've only been here since January. The original founders have even more stories.
Somebody wrote up a few paragraphs; it was mostly a joke. The link you're commenting on gave information on said product work so I don't really understand the hostility.
yeah I have no problems waiting, I'd imagine it would be very difficult. I do think they should clarify what they mean by saying they didn't take anyones money though. Unnecessary statement and one that can be disputed given everyone paid $5 deposit.
Didn't they send an email that said "WakeMates are shipping!" months ago?
They're not open about their process, they're "open" - which means they call themselves open, while not actually telling us anything. Or, you know, telling us lies.
Although no money was ever collected from those who have pre-ordered
Bullsh!t.
Just because they didn't collect the entire cost of the wakemate, they can't claim not to have collected money. Many here on HN and elsewhere (myself included) paid the down payment of 5 bucks to get on the waiting list. Of course I don't care about the 5 bucks, but for them to claim they didn't take any money.......
I find this a very troubling mentality on an official blog post. This makes me think that the general mindset of WakeMate was to disregard or forget about the initial payments by their customers. The fact that they had to be reminded of this by those customers tells me more about their delays than anything else. It just seems so nonchalant.
As one of those customers I would definitely like you to take my pre-order more seriously. Money was exchanged, and no service or product has been provided yet. 6 months + and I'm still waiting. Hopefully you'll meet your goals at the end of the month.
To follow up on that further: PayPal quickly limited the account, hence the move to Google. PayPal funds remain in PayPal and are used to process refunds.
To make it 100% clear: the only entity to profit from pre-orders has been PayPal, from interest earned on locked funds. We have not made a single dime.
Did you confirm the charge was never returned? That's how the $1 authentication charge works on our new store; we charge $1 and if the full amount isn't settled within a couple weeks the $1 is returned and we're charged a small fee (so pre-orders actually cost us money). If that's not the case, it's probably a fluke.
I apologize for the accusation. I have an email from Google confirming that my card will be charged, and an email from my bank alerting me to the ($5) charge, but there is no actual charge on my bank statement (though it was there at one time).
Did they lock the account similar to some of the paypal horror stories we have seen float around? If so, that's another strike for paypal and a reason to motivate everyone to avoid them like the plague.
Yeah, that was my immediate thought (as an outside observer). Seems like a major snafu in either communications or (worse still, and less likely) corporate attitude to think 'no money has changed hands' when it actually has.
The last update email I was sent from these guys (coincidentally received on April Fool's) said I'd receive a unit no later than July 31st, as a conservative estimate.
No communication between then and now, over 3 months, so I emailed them 5 days ago - no lick of a response.
And can someone clarify this for me, because I have a paypal receipt showing I sent them 5 bucks:
"Although no money was ever collected from those who have pre-ordered..."
To be sympathetic to a group that I (and others) have been giving alot of flack (deserved or undeserved), I am personally still working through a backlog of 200 user questions/suggestions. If you don't stay on top of them, they can pile up. Catching back up when you get behind is difficult without sounding canned, and I understand the pain.
However, it's definitely a good sign for your company that you have identified a pain point of enough severity that you generate this much talk and correspondence. Believe me, even when all the correspondence is praise and appreciated suggestions, staying on top of them is difficult!
Honest question here and I apologize if it comes off as snarky. I'm just curious. But why is Wakemate pursuing this sort of business model as opposed to say, producing a few prototypes and shopping those around to gadget makers who would manufacture and sell them? Gadget makers are notoriously good at making gadgets, and notoriously bad at making web sites. Even if they were to steal your idea for the gadget, they'd still farm out the web site and probably pay $250K to some agency to get that part of the job done. So partnering with you would make a lot of sense. You might even have been able to get some up-front money out of the deal.
When I first joined the company I felt the same way. Then I was told the whole story and it made a lot of sense. Basically, without pre-orders, there would be no WakeMate. They were in the tough position of having to prove the product's viability to investors and the investors wanted actual credit cards to prove that viability. At the end of the day, it worked out as best as could be hoped for given such a bad launch estimate: roughly 90% of customers were never charged (PayPal being the exception, though the money remains PayPal's) and investors ponied up enough cash to hire the necessary people and pay for everything going into the first big run, which all together will end up costing waaaay more than what those $5 could have bought.
Don't get me wrong, it's still embarrassing to everybody that we've had pre-orders waiting for so long; that was never the intention. It's a shitty way to treat our first customers, but it was an honest mistake. Many such mistakes were made—especially with regard to communication—but knowing what I know now I don't feel the pre-order taking itself was one. In fact it's probably the only reason the product is nearly out now.
I'm curious as to why their "About us" page is empty. Beyond their manufacturing complications, I'm wondering what qualifies them to make statements and a device that claims to help people sleep/wake up better. It leaves the door open to everything from "read some academic papers written by grad students" to "medical doctor with years of sleep research". I'm sure a quick google search would bring up more info about the founders, but it seems more appropriate to be able to find it from the company itself.
That aside, this product does seem promising. I typically sleep only 5-6 hours per night and wake up naturally (without an alarm clock). I feel fine most of the time, but I do notice on those occasional days that I sleep 8+ hours, I feel much better. Being able to analyze my sleep with a $50 device at home is something that does interest me.
Here is the background of the Wakemate staff, yes they are qualified to build a sleep aid device: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WakeMate Craig has a PhD from HST, it doesn't get much more qualified than that.
PhD from HST in itself is just a credential and doesn't mean much beyond that. I'm sure you've seen the commercials for "doctor recommended back-pain relief products" that are being endorsed by dentists...
While many people seem uberly disturbed about the delays and "$5" charges (under 20% of people who pre-ordered it even seemed to affect), I took the opposite opinion. I'm excited to see a startup trying to build hardware and software, all from an original seed investment with ycombinator. It is suffering from situations most other seeded and angel invested startups go through, and they seem incredibly excited to improve.
What more could you ask for? Sure, the product. Fair enough, but give them some slack. It's not like some of the software vaporware we've seen (like The Hit List for iPhone). I know it must be hard not to be able to get that Venti Double Whip Quad Shot Mocha until you get your $5 back!
Whatever! This negative response only excited my interest in the product and I just got done pre-ordering one. And if I don't get it in a couple weeks, they'll release my $1 hold. Nothing lost. And if it ships, I'll improve my sleeping habits.
People are taking it too hard on these guys. It's $5 for a nifty gadget, the lack of which is not the end of the world. I pre-ordered one, and I don't think their delays are a big deal - probably because you expected that from a startup.
they have fixed this. They regularly blog, have sent email messages, twitter posts etc apologizing for the delays and keeping us informed on the latest updates on shipping, demos of the product to show they are making progress etc. I'm really not sure what else they could do in the communication regard, their only problem now is they aren't shipping the product.
Take full and complete responsibility for the fuck-ups and people will give you a break. No hedging, no explanations... nothing that can possibly be interpreted as rationalization.
Express only pure remorse and gratitude and the mood will change immediately.
Nonetheless, its worth pointing out that designing and then manufacturing an electronic gadget (as a single end to end process) is in many ways orders of magnitude more difficult than shipping a webapp that works on a post IE6 web browser. Theres perhaps certain regulatory elements that need to be dealt with, as well as liability issues that just don't happen with normal software, and thats ignoring quality control issues in manufacturing.
Moreover, somehow amidst being busy with all this (and perhaps wanting to actually ship both so that theres no CA suit from those who pre-ordered, as well actually having a product with sales), they're doing a pretty good job about being open about hiccups along the way, and to in a relatively timely fashion respond to most nice email requests.
Pray tell hn, how many companies discussed on hn are open about the end to end design process for some physical product? I can't think of many myself, and I'd actually really like/enjoy it if once they're comfortably got v1 shipping, that they take the time to write some more elaborated posts documenting their whole design through to final manufacturing or something like that.
just my $.02