I am still excited to receive my WakeMate, but why did they not send me this update via email? Why was this in a blog post and not sent to the email I used to pre-order?
Furthermore, what is the point of saying "still a long way to go" - I am literally almost 6 months past the date I was told I'd receive it. Did WakeMate not have any software or hardware done at all when they posted the pre-order?
They probably didn't email it because people would then complain of spam. The industry standard is to grab an email address to make only a one-time notification.
All this is irrelevant anyway; Wakemate will get crap no matter if they remain silent, or write blog posts, or send email, or update twitter as long as a physical product is not out in the wild.
I'm actually in support of the Wakemates on this one; I wouldn't have sent out an email either.
I don't envy their position by any means, and I only hope them the best. However, there is nothing wrong with regularly updating the people that are making it possible to start your business. Due to a limited budget ($30k or so from YC?), the pre-order was necessary to get hardware ordered and shipped to the first customers; in essence it is an interest free loan to kickstart their business. As a result, I want to know when my loan is going to be 'repaid', hardly a standard situation.
Call my cynical but my impression of this is that when I pre-ordered they must have literally had nothing done. I understanding some of the tricks you might pull to perform customer validation but their approach seems unambiguously disingenuous in hindsight...
You know, I'm sure the Wakemate product is going to be stellar and really useful.
I can't help thinking they've made a mistake in their approach though - everything I have seen from them has promised more, even this which has actual "stuff" on show promises bigger and better.
They should have:
a) waited till they had the physical product reasonably ready for distribution before announcing. All the hype from the intial launch is lost now. And if they hit unseen snags there should have been open and running updates so people stayed with them.
b) the web stuff and the phone apps are great and useful - but that's stuff you can develop and iterate over time. What you need to do with a physical product (and I have bitter experience here!) is get the damned thing out the door and into the hands of your users. So long as they realise the web/app is a work in progress all will be fine.
If I were a Wakemate pre-order, I wouldn't be happy to see three mobile apps before anyone shipped me my device.
The Wakemate team seems dedicated and smart, but as an outside observer watching the it all unfold, their communications skills are sorely lacking. Hopefully a great product will overcome in the end.
edit: On second thought, they have got to be just crazy. How is it possibly the right idea to have three unfinished mobile apps than one that works?
The time consuming part is probably getting the HW manufactured. Why not code up the software for multiple platforms while waiting on that? I think covering both iPhone and Android is a pretty good move.
I am not a hardware guy, but the few pieces of hardware I've seen ordered took a week to get a run of 100 test units, they spent two weeks working some bugs out, then put in an order of 1000 which came a week after placing the order.
This was done out of a shop in the US, not sure what it is like doing production runs overseas, but I can't imagine it's much slower.
This of course ignores the time spent designing/redesigning units, however, ordering batches of something from a manufacturer doesn't take long.
Unless you are dealing with supply chain issues on new(ish) or rare components, which can take many months to resolve. The WakeMate is simple enough that I wouldn't expect this to be an issue, but who knows?
Their blog talks about how you have to have a special auth-chip to pair with an iPhone, that could be an issue...Though I think Apple would make sure those were in large supply.
I saw an FCC stamp – getting FCC approval would have taken at least a month. And I have no idea whether something like this would require FDA approval, but I'm sure they had to at least research that.
I preordered when it was announced earlier this year and they said that they would support both iPhone and Android phones on the sales page, and possibly Blackberry (I'm not 100% on BB). Today's post wasn't to announce that they are doing 3 apps, its to show they are working.
Why do you think they should not of worked on all 3 platforms at once? For the sake of a minimum viable product?
See my response to the other commenter's similar comment... but yeah, basically so you start with a good MVP instead of three products based on preconceived notions about users.
I'm sure you already know this, but the mobile apps aren't just complimentary to the wristband, they are mandatory. For the device to work the way people expect it to, interaction with the phones is necessary. So trust me, you want both the device and an app shipped at the same time.
I suspect that the wakemates themselves aren't doing the mobile dev work, but are outsourcing it and spending their time on the difficult stuff - getting the hardware operational and approved. In that case, if you've got the money, why not get them all developed simultaneously?
The reason you don't do all simultaneously is they all will likely suck, and then you have to redo three apps instead of one.
I would think you would want to do one mobile app just right, and then port it to other platforms. You might do a spec for all three up front so you think through each platform, but why not push one platform, iterate, and then take what you've learned before building?
I followed tlrobinson's advice and bought Sleep Cycle for the iPhone. It's 0.99 and works well. Still, I'm optimistic about WakeMate, especially the analytics.
This company is a good reminder to folks that "minimally" is only one of the words in the now-sacrosanct "minimally viable product." You still need the other two, or else you will surely piss people off.
A demo, a YouTube video, or a web form hooked up to Paypal is not a MVP. At least, not in my book.
Edit: Too harsh? Maybe, but knowing people who ordered this thing and are annoyed that it still hasn't shipped tells me there's a lesson to be learned here.
It's good they're updating, I'd like to think my HN post helped with that. Now as other suggested, if they keep us all in the loop with (bi)weekly updates, then they're golden. Let's hope they do.
Edit: Just got an email from them stating they are planning on weekly updates. Awesome guys, keep it up! :)
The biggest issue with this whole WakeMate fiasco was the original ship date announced. Given all of the recent communication and delays, it is clear that the original January ship date was a fantasy from the start. If they had pre-announced their product but gave a more realistic ship date, they wouldn't be dealing with all of the negative press they are now. While figuring out how to ship hardware is very difficult for a company doing this for the first time, it appears they were nowhere near a shippable product when they set their original release date.
Amazing! It's funny how if Wakemate hadn't screwed up, the world wouldn't be justified in demanding periodic updates! I mean, do you really ask Posterous to give you bi-weekly updates? I just hope the Wakemates realize that (a) the bar is significantly higher because they're YC-backed (b) every day they spend not putting the product in a customer's hands, they're setting themselves up for more work (such as sending bi-weekly status updates) which may not even be common under normal circumstances, or risk pissing off more [potential] customers.
I really hope someone does a detailed post-mortem analysis on the Wakemates (AndrewWarner?); there's a ton of stuff to learn about how not to do PR/marketing in here for the rest of us to learn & implement. :)
If they had delivered when they first promised there would be no issue at all. But once you go across your self-imposed deadline you have to make sure that those that pre-ordered are kept in the loop on the hows-and-whys.
It's like BP estimating the outflow from that leak way too low. If their estimate had been 'on target' or 'high' there would have been no problem, by estimating too low they've set themselves up for all kinds of trouble.
The interesting thing is that I don't see any perceived cost in overestimating, but a significant cost to underestimating.
My main takeaway is that when their website used to say "compatible with all phones", that was as much a piece of speculative fiction as was the ship date.
I hope the Wakemate can be used without a phone...
It's about a company promising something and not following through. Top that off with a big helping of poor communication, and you start to get an idea of why some people are frustrated.
My biggest problem with them is their empty promises; more than once, they've said, "really soon", and apparently that means nothing to them. It's important they say what they have to say ("won't be ready for six more months"), rather than what they think the customers want to hear ("coming really soon"). Be precise, not vague/subject to interpretation. "Six months" may be "soon" in a certain context, but as a customer, to me "soon" means "the next 10 minutes". They should instead be more precise.
It feels like they take me for a fool; I do understand and accept that projects slip schedules etc., but I don't enjoy being exposed as a naive fool every few months when the Wakemates wake up and make a "coming soon" blog post. In their last blog post, they said, "coming soon, but this time we learnt from our mistakes, so our projected ship dates are even bogus, we are actually going to beat the dates we posted!" -- http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/01/first-units-shipping-new... -- so now my expectation is that they in fact beat the date they posted, and if they simply met their second commitment, I'd still feel like they screwed up! This is them setting themselves up for failure. Further, they invalidated the brownie points I would have handed out ("wow, they promised date X, but they actually beat it; maybe they're not so lame after all!") ... if Wakemate shipped right now, they still don't get the brownie ... ("they promised they would beat the Sep 2010 date, and hey, they just beat it. whatever") ... kinda sad side-effect which probably wasn't thought out before they made the blog post.
After all this mess, there is no space left for sympathy; "oh, building hardware is hard!" - sure it is, but if you make me look like a fool in the process, I don't really care if it's hard or not. The value of setting expectations is vastly under-rated, in my opinion.
Edit: And the blog post title could not have been more inappropriate - "WakeMates are shipping!" was the title - I clicked that to see where to get my tracking information, and instead I'm told "Oh, wait until Sep 2010". I mean, really guys?!
Furthermore, what is the point of saying "still a long way to go" - I am literally almost 6 months past the date I was told I'd receive it. Did WakeMate not have any software or hardware done at all when they posted the pre-order?