Saent’s Mea Culpa: The Curse of Hardware Crowdfunding
A wise man once told me to always get the bad news out of the way immediately, so here it goes: we’ve just announced a second delay in the delivery of our crowdfunded hardware product to our Indiegogo backers.
It goes without saying I’m truly sorry for this, but words are wind, and contrary to popular belief, “saying” sorry in a blog post or an impersonal video isn’t all that hard. Even though I mean it, it doesn’t amount to much and it certainly doesn’t bring those people who’ve entrusted us with their money their product any sooner.
Besides apologizing, the real questions to address for our backers are: Is Saent for real? Am I ever going to get my product? What’s going on over there? It’s time to explain why The Curse of Hardware Crowdfunding is upon us too.
This second delay can be attributed to three clear reasons:
- Technical issues.
- Missing process.
- Expanded scope.
1. Technical issues
In the first half of December, we discovered a problem with the internal design of the touchpad of the Saent button. After thousands of presses, there was a small chance the touch surface and underlying components would wear down and malfunction. This is a risk we clearly couldn’t accept.
At first, redesigning and fixing this part seemed like a two to three week job. At the same time, we found a new shipping partner that could deliver our orders in five to ten days anywhere in the world, as opposed to the four weeks we had originally calculated for this; our shipping gains canceled out our delay in redoing the touchpad, which is why we didn’t communicate anything about this problem and kept our revised shipping date of January.
Over the course of December, it became clear to the hardware development team that the redesign of the internal structure of the touchpad had many more consequences. In the end, they ended up redesigning almost the entire inside of the device. Not only was this more work than anticipated, it also caused us to have to test everything from scratch again, as well rewrite both the firmware and parts of the software. This process is now almost done, but will still require considerable testing in the weeks ahead.
2. Missing process
Last summer, we boldly declared our intention to become “The Zappos of Hardware.” Not because we were planning to do online hardware sales, but because we too are going down the Teal-route by implementing a system of self-management (such as Holacracy).
While we did embark on this journey, the process stalled when we got completely caught up in the crowdfunding campaign and the process of finishing and delivering our product. The result has been a working environment in which there have been few regular checks and balances in the form of meetings and reporting.
This doesn’t mean we have been slacking, far from it; each of us has been working incredibly hard. But with Saent being a distributed company, without an office and key members spread out across the globe, we didn’t always communicate well enough who was doing what. Neither did we really push each other enough on assumptions and plans, or recognize when someone had simply taken on too much to handle. As a result, some things slipped through the cracks and only became apparent when it was too late.
3. Expanded scope
While we originally set out to deliver a product to help you focus, we always felt Saent is not only about productivity and working more. However, until our crowdfunding campaign was well underway, we weren’t sure how to put this into words, nor did we fully understand exactly how to express this in the product, even as we sensed the opportunity and need.
Then, based on conversations with backers, early users and others, we had our eureka! moment: it’s about work/life balance. This encompasses the work part (being productive, focused and effective) of the equation, but also another part we strongly believe in: working in a healthy, sustainable way, by managing your energy, refueling and addressing compulsive (digital) habits.
There was one big problem, and this became especially clear as we started working with our first 50 beta testers in the last quarter of 2015: the original interface we developed for the software was not built with this purpose in mind.
Based on this expanded idea and the feedback we got from those initial testers, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and begun implementing a completely new, super simple and yet quite revolutionary interface for the software.
This was not an easy decision. We could have softened the blow of the hardware delay by rolling out the existing version of the software to all our backers. But we strongly believe this new interface will be exponentially more useful, valuable and fun than the previous one, and you can only make a first impression once. So rather than spend time and energy onboarding and supporting hundreds of people into an app (interface) that will soon be scrapped, we’ve decided to implement the new UI first, before opening it up to more users.
For more information on Saent’s new UI, please see the article: Why We’re Redoing The Saent Software Interface (UI)
What happens next
None of this delivers the product any sooner, but we’re taking several steps to learn and hopefully prevent a similar thing from happening in the future:
- More transparency: we’ve already tried to be quite transparent, but we’ll expand on this by posting biweekly progress logs, estimated delivery date(s) and risk assessments of those estimated dates.
- Double down on Teal: we’ve already started further solidifying our Teal journey, by implementing useful elements from Holacracy and other systems, as well as working with a more rigid structure (which results in more accurate updates and internal accountability).
- New UI brief: we’ve be posted a very detailed brief of our new UI concept and will be starting beta tests with this new concept in the coming weeks.
- Demo videos and devices: we are currently able to produce devices, but they’re hand built and therefore cost ~$200 a piece. Once we’re done with our current tests, we’ll be distributing a few of these to third parties (e.g., journalists), so they can review and validate the device exists and works. In addition, we’ll be creating some additional videos in the next couple of weeks and will be sharing those here.
Don’t hesitate to write in with any questions you might have on support@saent.com and we’ll be keeping you up to date on our journey here on Medium of course.
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