Stay Human: The Future of Saent
Finally word from Saent. We’ve been quiet and some of you have experienced problems with our desktop application. So yes, something is up.
“The only mistake you cannot make is running out of cash…” — Ben Horowitz
This year has been difficult for us. We’ve lacked adequate funds for most of 2017. Our core team members have taken on other, full-time jobs to make ends meet (including me). We’ve gone from six full-time developers to zero. We’ve started paying essential operational costs from our own pockets.
The good news is that we’re still here and this is not goodbye. We strongly believe in what Saent stands for: ensuring technology helps us live happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives, instead of turning us all into mindless zombies. Saent is here to make sure we stay human.
What to expect?
Things will not be the same. Saent has transformed from a full-time team into a passion project run on love in our spare time. We’re now forced to focus on our strengths: creating beautiful, physical products. Building a movement around an important mission. Writing useful and meaningful content. We’ll have to abandon our weaknesses: software development. Chasing venture capital. Providing world-class support.
Here’s an exact overview of what you can and cannot expect from us going forward:
Can expect
- A working desktop app: we’ve resolved the nasty issues that plagued the software over the past weeks. We’ll also keep paying for server costs so the desktop app will continue to be operational.
- Our second product: a beautiful wooden box to deal with smartphone distractions and phubbing. We’re currently testing in Beijing and are producing the first batch of 100 units.
Maybe expect
- A stand-alone version of the button: we might turn the button into a standalone device that works without the software. It will be the perfect timer for meetings and followers of the Pomodoro Technique.
- Open-sourced software and APIs: we do believe in the power of software solutions to help us stay human. For this reason, we’re looking into open-sourcing our software and building APIs for our physical products. This allows others who do have expertise in software development to use our devices with existing or new apps.
- Revived blog: we love writing, it’s just that we’ve had little spare time. If things settle down and we can find the time to write again, we’ll revive our blog and perhaps an ebook or two.
Cannot expect
- Software updates: unless others heroically carry this forward (see “open-sourced software and APIs” above) we can not do any further software updates. We simply lack the skills on the core team.
- Responsive customer support: as we’re now all doing Saent in our spare time, our work happens in bursts. Sometimes we spend a whole weekend on Saent, at other times we can’t do anything for an entire week. This unfortunately eliminates the ability of providing reliable and timely customer support.
Get involved!
More than ever before, Saent now survives on passion and love. We keep going because we believe to stay human is important. If you feel likewise and want to get involved, please let us know. App development, graphic design, social media marketing, or simply helping to build a community: we’d love to talk and hear your ideas.
We apologize for any inconvenience we’ve caused over the past few months and hope the above clarifies why this has happened. Things will be different, but Saent is alive and not disappearing anytime soon.
