[Cryptech Tech] What's up with the Crowdsupply campaign?

[Fredrik Thulin]

On fredag 9 december 2016 kl. 17:36:11 CET Leif Johansson wrote:
...
> > People who back crowdfunding projects understand
> > that there is a large risk of things being delayed, or of the entire
> > project failing - what annoys them more than the delays is the lack of
> > updates / feedback...
> >
> You're right of course. We're not really good at the logistics side of this.
> All of us who try to keep the wheels spinning have to keep $dayjob happy
> too - there is 0 money in the budget to do the customer-facing side of this
> even close to professionally.

Warren, I don't dare to expect it to make you feel any better about the 
project but I wanted to say that you are 100% right in your criticism. There 
are no excuses, but some explanations that I think it might be better if I 
share with you (and the rest of the list) rather than keeping quiet about.

I've given the situation a great deal of thought and I think it can be 
summarized to this:

1) None of us had done a kickstarter campaign before. There are people with a 
lot of experience in producing software in the project, and some of us have 
experience with producing hardware. These are two very different things where 
hardware is much much more complicted to get out the door than software. I 
don't believe anyone of us had any experience with running a campaign. There 
has been a lot of valuable lessons in this for me in the future - 
communication and having someone in charge of running the campaign is two of 
the most important ones. I'm really sorry we failed here.

2) We estimated we would need to make 50 Alpha boards (turned out to be a 
rather good estimate so far) and I am largely responsible for the long delay 
in getting these boards to you all since I strongly advised we would produce 
25 boards before Berlin, and 25 more afterwards.

I'm sorry it has been a very long wait for you and the others, but I can't say 
I would advise differently if we could rewind the tape. We did not know for 
sure if the rev03 boards would actually work, and it would have been hugely 
irresponsible of us to waste up to $40k of donated money on producing non-
working hardware. The money was donated to facilitate development, not to be 
risked on manufacturing gambles. I think preassure to produce the Alpha made 
us do a lot of things the wrong way as it is, but we at least made it to the 
other side alive... although with understandably dissapointed backers :(. 
Sorry again.

In other news, I recieved the next batch of 25 boards from the assembly house 
late on Friday afternoon. I will be spending the weekend testing and 
programming them so we can ship them to Crowdsupply first thing next week.

/Fredrik