Flojack Dead on Arrival | Hacker News Reader

Flojack Dead on Arrival

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20 pointsgrundyoso14 comments

Paragraph 1: It's likely your fault, luser

Paragraph 2: If it's NOT your fault, stop whining about the shipping costs. Do you know how expensive it is for us to pay for that stuff?

Paragraph 3: If we made stuff that didn't break we wouldn't make money. So we make stuff that breaks.

Paragraph 4: We've ditched this anyhow. Why are we still talking about it?

OK, maybe "NFC ubiquity" is crazy hard, but so, apparently, is customer service.

That's a good summary. We definitely underestimated the cost of customer service. I'd say that after a year of having our KS campaign, we've spent 40% of our time keeping people informed. The irony is that with that time we could have easily added the quality and polish that most customers are upset about.

That's not irony, that's bad decisionmaking. It's akin to saying that it's ironic that the cost of the cleanup at Fukushima outstrips the amount of money saved by not building it well enough to withstand a large tsunami.

Maybe so. We're not building nuclear power plants though, but NFC readers for iOS. We're doing it more to bootstrap an industry than to sell widgets. The mistake was to not consistently reiterate that message throughout the campaign.

Has anyone had an experience with KS where:

- the product shipped on time

- the product worked as advertised

- the founding team didn't go overboard

In all the Kickstarters I've seen, it seems like the founders lose interest in actually delivering a product after they get the money. They run up against the challenges of support and manufacturing, and they seem to just skip on to the next thing because that's what they enjoyed in the first place - having a cool idea and getting it funded. Sometimes the next cool idea is just scope creep for the current product ("Sorry we're 3 months behind on shipping, but now it can also mine Bitcoins and chop salads!").

My point being, I don't think KS will ever work for technology, because the funding comes at exactly the point where the project stops being fun. Besides the guilt of providing a product to backers, there's not a ton of incentive for a small team to keep building after they get funded, so they'll just delay and peter out, or punt on key objectives and move on.

Maybe every Kickstarter should have a 30% (?) margin put on top (ie ask for $10,000, your target becomes $13,000) and this is paid out as a second tranche on delivery of the project.

It's all added complication, though.

I agree that it's a tough deal, one that's filled with unknowns. If you overestimate, you price things out of the range of what the market will bear and you get no backers. If you underestimate, you get pissed off customers. What motivates us is not the money we raised or the guilt of delivering, but the potential of what we're doing. KS has done a good job of giving us an audience to speak to. An audience to educate on what we can do. Without this connection it's likely R&D projects like ours would take much longer to surface, even though their impact on society is a good one.

The DigiSpark seemed to live up to expectations, and it shipped only a little bit late. That made me back the DigiX, even though it's a more complicated product.

I think the more ambitious the project is, and the less actual production experience the founders have, the more likely they are to run into problems. So that should be a big consideration when backing a project.

This guy is wrapping up his 3rd project:

http://www.richardhaberkern.com/?cat=47

It looks like they've been sideswiped by iOS 7 changes that make their product infeasible. A common problem of proprietary APIs :(

Also, software people developing hardware seem not to have realised that it's much harder to fix problems after shipping, which sadly makes good quality small run hardware very rare.

>We cherish every dollar we get from our community and would not do it justice to spend it unwisely. So yes, we expect you to cover the postage back to us.

I'm not sure I would've worded it this way. There is a lot of negative connotation is those two sentences, and some of it is in reference to the character of the company founders.

Good luck, and I hope you have less customers inserting their batteries wrong in the future.

Interesting.. how would you have worded it? I mean we charged KS folks $39 per device, which pretty much worked out to our COGS. Covering postage was something we included as a good faith in our early backers and the patience they've had with us.

charging, or not, for postage for the (hopefully) 99%+ of people who don't need a replacement is something that you factor in to your costs, and tell people upfront so it factors into their decision. your call.

charging for subsequent postage for the (hopefully) <1% of people who have a problem and who need your love and attention is a really bad idea.

because - even ignoring the terrible PR from forcing someone to spend cash because of your product issues - you lose the best friend you have: a backer with a problem who's WILLING AND HAPPY to actually work through this problem with you and help you fix it.

Our quality yields from the factory were more like 90%:10% but we did basic testing before shipping to reach the 100% target. First customer defects were covered but we quickly discovered these were user error which led to our current policy.

I feel Kickstarter backers of hardware projects should have a certain sense of tolerance. If they are expecting "commercial grade" products they should stick to buying retail as we're angling to test a concept and knock out the kinks with early backers.

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