WakeMate Blog - In Production | Hacker News Reader

WakeMate Blog - In Production

blog.wakemate.com

40 pointsspydertennis40 comments

Last week WakeMate was part of an AppSumo bundle. I was excited thinking they were finally available and bought the bundle.

Confused as to how I was going to get the device without being asked for my address, I e-mail AppSumo and am told to buy one at wakemate.com. What the bundle will include is not the pictured WakeMate, but 3 months of premium service for it.

Problem? WakeMate doesn't exist yet, I can't buy one, and neither does a premium service for it.

My money was refunded and WakeMate was pulled from the bundle on the site.

I don't hold a high opinion of WakeMate anymore, and probably shouldn't have fallen for the deal. There are wristbands that track your sleep and your fitness now from companies that actually ship things when you pay them.

[Edit: Should note below that WakeMate says they never approved this bundle. Blame AppSumo, perhaps.]

I'm a co-founder of WakeMate and this is the first I'm hearing of an AppSumo bundle involving us. Also as of right now there is no premium service. All analytics services are currently free.

That's strange...

"Healthy Holidays Bundle Part 3: Bigger Brain" on December 13th was WakeMate and FitBrains.

http://i.imgur.com/AGMW8.png

I can tell you that was never approved by us. Not sure what was going on there but that might be why it was pulled.

Hey Arun.

Shot you an email to see where the disconnect happened.

(Unable to edit previous comment)

I spoke with Noah from AppSumo and this was WakeMate's fault. I apologize if this cast any negative light on AppSumo because it was 100% undeserved.

Morning everyone, Noah from http://AppSumo.com here.

We love the WakeMate product and pulled them because the service they were offering was not public as expected.

Here's our emails confirming WakeMate wanted to be in the bundle: http://cl.ly/3p3u3T3I3e3p3e231c31

Not trying to be pessimistic, but they're so far off what has been promised when I placed my order that I completely lost faith and trust in this company.

I could understand a delay of a couple of months, but what has it been now... over a year?

I have moved on, I'm sorry.

I feel like it's easy for the vocal minority to overpower the conversation here; the people who don't really care about the delay probably don't feel the need to say anything.

So, for what it's worth. The delay isn't a huge deal to me. When it finally ships it looks like it will be the cheapest and yet most well designed product in the space.

Cheapest, sure. But the alternatives are better devices. Their main competitor (sleeptracker) looks much more professional.

To be fair, I've been beta testing the device and it is very bad ass. It works extremely well, is very comfortable, and offers a lot more than any competitors at a much better price.

EDIT: I should also mention that I own the sleeptracker watch and it doesn't even come close to what the wakemate offers.

what the WakeMate Will offer.

After a year, people who don't care about the delay don't care about your product any more either.

I suppose you may be right, people who have been thinking "I'll have this very soon" for an entire year are right to be annoyed. But you also have to realize you're a tiny tiny slice of the devices these guys are going to move, and by that definition are also a vocal minority.

I was excited by WakeMate when it first appeared and signed up but it's been so long in shipping that I no longer have an iPhone that I can use it with. Talk about disappointment.

Wake me when these things finally ship

I've been part of the Wakemate beta program. I was told to not post a detailed review but that I could give my general opinion. It's a great device, and I would pay $50 for it. I understand why those who pre-ordered long ago might feel burned, but for others who may be considering getting one, I would urge you to ignore all of that drama and evaluate the finished product as it stands.

...this is where you’ll get to update any of your information that has changed since you pre-ordered).

Like whether you qualify for the senior citizen discount now.

Sigh, yet another almost ready :(

Glad to see stuff progressing though and the update is hugely appreciated.

If you've been following the blog lately you'd know we have been updating quite frequently with important information. I think that everyone is going to be very happy in the very near future.

too late for this audience. maybe the mass market that has never heard of them will be kinder. but I doubt it.

too little, too late.

they didn't have the right people to execute on this, and from what I can tell, they still don't.

I disagree. The product concept hasn't changed; it's still the same idea that all these boo-birds loved a year or two ago. Maybe they've burned bridges with some early adopters, but the other 99.99% of America will never know about that.

The other 99.9% of the world will never hear about it because their early adopter friends aren't going to recommend this.

I made that point, so actually you agree.

I also made the point that they've failed to execute so far, which reduces my faith in their ability to all of the sudden start executing well. Perhaps that's what you disagree with? In which case, you are more of an optimist than I am. :-)

I don't think it's fair of you to comment on the people involved in the execution of this. What do you know about anyone on the WakeMate team?

It's entirely fair. If I knew them, I'd keep my mouth shut, because I don't talk negatively about friends.

And it's entirely fair because I know what I see. And that's more than enough to gauge their execution.

The ONLY important information at this stage is the shipping date.

This update is really good though. They address pretty much all of the open issues. The only thing they have to watch out for is people who respond to the email faster skipping the queue, but I'm sure they've sorted that.

My November project http://sleepyti.me attempts to achieve a similar state of restful awakening by timing your bedtimes around your sleep cycles.

WakeMate and Sleepyti.me are two different approaches to the same problem, so it's cool to see a product based around similar principles.

Some very negative comments here, which surprises and dissapoints me. I would have thought the HN crowd would be a little sympathetic to troubles a startup faces early on. And remember these guys aren't throwing together a rails app, they are working with hardware, which involves more factors out of their control. It's not like they can just drink more coffee and code longer to get this thing shipped.

They have an exciting, innovative product, which is something recent articles on the front page have asked for.

They perhaps shouldn't have taken cash so early, but lets cut them some slack.

I doubt any of the negative comments are coming from hardware entrepreneurs -- in fact I would go one step further and say most of the negative comments aren't from entrepreneurs. They're from whiney consumers who expect the world and don't create much.

Maybe I'm going insane and what's on my monitor is not what I'm reading inside my head, but I just spend a few minutes going through their compatibility checker and they don't list a single phone that it's compatible with. Just a whole bunch of unsupported phones.

http://wakemate.com/compatibility/

I think you're going insane.

I just looked up all the smartphones in both my family and my girlfriend's family, and they're all compatible (BlackBerry 5 (9650), iPhone 3GS & 4 (iOS 4 for both), and Android 2.1 (Ally, Droid, Droid Incredible).

I think the idea is that if your operating system is listed as supported, and your specific device isn't mentioned as specifically unsupported, you just hope for the best.

If you go digging through the support forums, they do actually have a more detailed list of devices supported. It's just the front page that most potential customers will see first that's badly designed, and as we all know, if a customer doesn't find out what she's looking for quickly, she will always go on to devote extra time and resources to digging through support pages.

I noticed under the first pic it says "Designed and Assembled in the U.S.A."

My first thought in reading that line was "hmm... so they wasted a whole bunch of money by not outsourcing it to China where they could get their PCB assembly done for 20% the cost."

50 bucks for this is still a very good deal, they probably are not actually making money on the USA produced ones. They will probably offshore later to get the profit margin back. Just a guess.

That's not necessarily true these days. Fabrication costs have been steadily increasing in China. For something on the run-level their doing it's probably more like 50% and rising fast.

That's at least what I'm hearing from a couple of startups in my area working on physical products.

I'm waiting for the Wakemate Forever edition before I buy this.

Sure sure. Sorry for the negativity but I'm super unimpressed by the whole wakemate saga. I really wanted one but being led around like this is too much for me. I won't be buying anything from this company.

Everyone seems to be very negative here. I will still definitely buy one of these. It's an absolutely unnecessary product that had many alternatives already when announced a year ago. And none of that has changed.

I see this whole process as a fun learning experience of how difficult it can be to ship a physical product (fun because i'm not on their end).

I don't need the product so who cares if I have to wait for it...

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