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Comment by appleiigs | Hacker News Reader

That was a bit too detailed and rambling, so I skimmed it. Some missing info: 1) Will all the backers receive the products they paid for? 2) Losing $100K seems large in comparison to their kickstarter revenue of $650K. Are new customers safe to order?

I also don't get this logic: "On the other hand, Kaia pointed out to Jesse the other night that this actually makes her more confident about our ability to manufacture products in China in the future."

Nevertheless, running a small business is hard. I don't judge them too harshly. When you are small potatoes, you also deal with other small potatoes who could be incompetent (the factory owner is also blame here). You also don't have the resources to micro-manage (ie. have someone in China all the time).

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This is an update from a Kickstarter that ran in 2015. All the backers got their rewards, and I ordered one after the Kickstarter was over and got one of the highest quality products I've ever ordered.

The logic here is that, despite being lied to by a trusted account manager, they shipped all of their promised products, at very high quality. They have made continued software updates for years, much better than either Kickstarters or other project's I've purchased: https://github.com/keyboardio/

If you follow their updates, they've made many trips to China, despite having a newborn baby and running a new company.

The incomplete items that this update is about are an extra set of keycaps that I honestly can't even find where on the Kickstarter we were promised them. The main product successfully shipped long ago.

To expand on a sibling comment, the "this actually maker her more confident..." logic goes roughly like this:

- Jesse and Kaia had considerable difficulty manufacturing and shipping the products this update is about (a keyboard with parts from multiple factories, and additional accessories for it)

- They managed to do it anyway, with a lot of effort on their part.

- It turns out there was actually a person working against them, and not all of the problems they met occured "naturally".

- Without such an antagonist in the future, it should be easier to pull off the same result.

they got a trial by fire, as the saying goes. they now learned not to put their trust into a single person. next time something goes wrong they'll be sure to check through alternative channels if there isn't some (intentional or not) miscommunication.

in addition, given how that account manager made them look to the factory, the factory owner showed incredible patience and good will and vice versa. such people are exactly the ones you do want to work with, especially in china.

factory and keyboard.io people likely bonded over the experience leading to a better cooperation in the future.

"I didn't read the article, but here's some info I missed." is a bad faith way to engage with the content. They made it quite clear that it's not enough money to kill the company, and started the article by mentioning that keyboards are in stock and ready to order from their website.

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