Trevor also responded on reddit:
Thanks, I'll reply to some points here.
trevorvapor said:
It's insane that we have been accused of posting on Reddit and on other forums with fake accounts.
I don't believe that I made that accusation. I said that a new member on fc made posts
expressing enthusiastic interest in the product from the same IP used by
Zenpen. I also pointed to some instances on other websites where the company founder and an unknown promoter engaged in some curious behavior. When considering these occurrences I think it's reasonable to wonder if there might be something strange taking place.
It was a member here that alerted me to the reddit and grasscity posts, and I created this thread to give this community the opportunity to look at these things and think for themselves. This is a vaporizer discussion forum after all, and this isn't the first time we've seen this type of thing. It is the first time the company in question has been seeking six figure crowdfunding.
About the Spacecow posts: This was Conrad's brother, which I agree is close enough to astroturfing. You'll notice that it has not happened again, to my knowledge.
I'm not going to argue the point, but I will say that in 6 years and many more instances of IP collusion, no company found doing this here has ever admitted to doing it themselves. It's always been a relative or a friend or a house guest. I do wonder if we would have seen more posts from Spacecow if I hadn't let the company know that we knew.
Questioning our business model with little knowledge about the product is outrageous.
It's true that I ventured into this territory in my post, and I regret that it led to confusion with the astroturfing discussion. With that said, we discuss vaporizers here, and this company has secured $366,000 from their crowdfunding campaign. If the company founder himself says that that there's not much information about the product available, it's hardly outrageous to discuss the business model on a vaporizer discussion forum.
It seems unfair to me that a FC mod would make this post when it's mostly speculation. As a mod, you hold great respect in the community and I have no doubt this will affect our campaign negatively. When a reporter writes a story, he gets the facts right before going forward because he knows his story will affect the people he is writing about. You could have at least contacted us before this post. My direct email has always been publicly available. The fact that this was not done is what disappoints me the most.
I'm pretty comfortable with my track record here. I care about the members of the vapor community a lot more than a new vaporizer company asking for money. I'd like to know which facts -stated as such- that I got wrong.
I did contact the company as stated in the OP. After being told "that was my little brother haha" I replied that we take this sort of thing seriously on fc, provided some background information and asked that they be sure it didn't happen again. That was on August 28th and I never heard back.
"Disappointing, hurtful, very personally upsetting, insane, outrageous, pointless, extreme, unfair." I'm genuinely sorry that I made you feel so bad, Trevor, it was not my intention to do so. I know that it hurts when people don't have entirely positive things to say about your baby. Reading over my post again I could have done better. Still, I don't think that it was so completely off base. As I said before I truly do hope that you and your team have something groundbreaking. That's good for the vapor community and it's good for me.
