[jacquesm]

Great to see a sign of life from wakemate, now let's hope stay awake and keep updating, say a small progress report once every two weeks or so.

At that level the time invested is manageable and you keep your customers in the loop.

[zaatar]

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. :)

[jacquesm]

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.