@ryanjl9, I am really sorry that our mistakes made you this upset.
You've made some valid points and I understand why you're feeling this way.
I hope that you understand that we are a small startup and we're working 12h per day to deliver all the rewards. 95% was shipped now and for the past two weeks, we've focused on production and didn't handle our communication with the customers quite well - which produced quite a few angry customers.
I'll clarify a couple of things just so that you can understand our situation better:
they should have order a general amount of parts as soon as they were backed.
we couldn't becuase Kickstarter has a 10 day tampon zone in which it's reminding folks whose credit cards are empty or not working to change a credit card and is collecting payments. After that, comes the wire transfer processing time for international transfers (3 days, which is 13 days in total).
Secondly they've had terrible communication with their customers. Sparse, random updates are something that probably annoyed a lot of people.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed or not but the community.makerbuino.com site is completely gone.
True, the server was down for two days because I fu*ked up some server payment-related things
There was no mention that the initial forum had moved to this site.
What initial forum? The forum is still at community.makeruino.com
In fact, the paper inside the kit tells me to go to learn.makerbuino.com for the tutorial on how to build my makerbuino.
True, we didn't manage to set up the new learning system until today and printing that on the papers was a mistake because the site was down.
horrendous, god awful job of helping their community.
OK this is maybe a bit over-exaggerated
band resistor and it ships with 5 band resistors
true, we need to fix that
why did they ship me a red board with blue caps? Why wasn't that something I could pick?
Because producing boards in 4 different colors is much more expensive than producing it in one color.
The boards are red because I find that color appealing.
You could've chosen the button caps via the survey sent through Kickstarter, if we've sent you the wrong button caps, please accept my apologies and send us your Kickstarter username so that we can find your address and send you a new set of button caps.
Why can't they tell their consumers what is going on, the fact they are moving url's, etc. I know this kid is 18, but he is promising a product to people who are paying good money, lots of money, to receive it, and it honestly feels like a rip off.
Because
- our company is very young and was founded during the campaign because of the sudden success
- we've sold 10 times more devices than we've planned to sell
- I'm a kid that is learning how to lead a company
- we're having problems with space and we're overwhelmed with the work we have to do
- I'm having problems organizing the production for 1800MAKERbuino units, finding the right people, sourcing the components, etc.
only have a few weeks before I go off to college and I can't wait 2 months for replacement parts. I have no idea if I fried the microcontroller by flipping the regulator and transistor. I may have to replace that too.
We will send you the part via EMS so that it can get to you faster than usual post (3-5 days to Europe and 5-7 days to the rest of the world.
We've set up a new ticketing system and hired two people to handle the community along with me to fix the problem you're talking about through the text-
The microcontroller is probably not fried, they're pretty durable. Swapping the regulator and the transistor is a typical mistake that inexperienced users do because they're both in a similar package, that's why we've tried to point that out with big red letters in the build guide.
- MAKERbuino-buildGuide-63.jpg (90.89 KiB) Viewed 10720 times
Bottom line, until someone takes over this company that knows how to deal with consumers, that knows how to give and take feed back, I don't think makerbuino will last very long. I think an 18 decided that he had a product and wanted to share it to the rest of the world and thought all he had to do was start a kickstarter and everything would magically work out. It might get better, it might get worse. I think he's in over his head. Just beware everyone, makerbuino may not last much longer.
When starting this company, I was pretty serious. In fact, I've dropped out of college to fully dedicate to the company a few weeks ago. I'll do (and am doing) my best to keep the company alive, I am also motivated by the fact that I'll be very hungry if my company bankrupts because I don't have rich parents or an uncle from Germany.
I am willing to give you a full refund, or at least a we're-sorry-gift and (as I said at the beginning of the post) I completely undertand why you're upset.
Sincerely,
- Albert