Comment by carterschonwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carterschonwald | Hacker News Reader

carterschonwald

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.

just my $.02

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.

It probably would have been better for them to build all the initial units themselves while they ramp up the outsourced manufacturing.

Stuffing boards and soldering isn't too hard while outsourcing is never easy.

the surface mount packages we use for the chip components on the WakeMate are a little difficult to solder by hand, unfortunately.

That may be true, but experienced people can solder surface mounts. I do it all the time.

It may be a little more costly, but you know what they say, undercommit & overdeliver.

It sounded like they were planning to do something closer to that, but the higher-than-expected demand made that not a viable option:

from http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/26/questions-answered/

>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.

y'see, thats why i got myself a pick and place! :)

(http://www.ladyada.net/wiki/mdcpickandplace)

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.

This is another example of a thing done wrong: we want to hear that you're working on the product, not a book about it.

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.

The implication being that its not orders of magnitude more difficult than shipping a web application that works with IE6. Don't I know.

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.

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