

Flojack Dead on Arrival - grundyoso
http://flomio.com/forums/topic/flojack-dead-on-arrival/#post-5031

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rfrey
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.

~~~
grundyoso
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.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

~~~
grundyoso
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.

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alanctgardner2
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.

~~~
grundyoso
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.

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pjc50
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.

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JonSkeptic
>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.

~~~
grundyoso
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.

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brey
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.

~~~
grundyoso
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.

