How Grasshopper Labs should run their company

[MoltenTiger]

A little over 2 years ago they said they'd have these out within 4 months. You can safely assume from pre-ordering onwards, it's not like that.
I agree their marketing is bullshit, but i want a GH because of what it can do and I'm happy to use current options until that's a reality.
It's also very easy to piss off retail customers, but it's not that hard not to be pissed off. I thought that's what THC was good for

I want this thing as much or more than anybody. The only thing that annoys me is that I can't just buy a similar product from someone else. The fact I am almost certain my delivery estimate is way off, I'm choosing to overlook because they're actually going to build it. They've invested so much into this, I believe that and they're still telling me they're going to, still developing the production line and employing more staff (relatively recently at least, who knows how their expansion is planned).

February isn't over yet, stop forgetting that guys.

 

[ben7337]

Actually the email from Caroline on reddit was sent Thursday 2/18 saying that starting "tomorrow" which was Friday 2/19, they would be shipping out preorders. Today is 2/20 and they didn't ship any preorders as far as I can tell, no one here or on reddit seems to have made any claims to them shipping, and there were various early preorderers talking on there just a week or two ago.

For what it's worth this is also the company that said 1,300 units a month in October or November (I can't remember which) and 100 units a DAY in January with the last of the backers having their product shipped by the END of January. So this is a company that made an estimate 2 weeks out and here we are over 4 weeks later and they still haven't met their 2 week estimate, and they had the gall to make a one day estimate and couldn't even meet that. This combined with a couple warranty fulfillment issues with no responses posted out there has me seriously concerned if they are financially solvent at this point, or about to go under.

 

[zymos]

http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/

 

[slcbdco]

Man I'm glad I was hitting my grasshopper when I read that. FWIW @MoltenTiger has it right, having actually been inside their space, they are moving as fast as they can and seven days a week, and the amount of orders they need to fulfill they will be moving at capacity for quite sometime in the future. The only way to get a grasshopper is wait, and it is waaaay worth the wait!

 

[hi_there]

This combined with a couple warranty fulfillment issues with no responses posted out there has me seriously concerned if they are financially solvent at this point, or about to go under.

Ben, trying to catch them on dates missed is like shooting a whale in a bucket, it ain't hard. What it comes down to now is that everyone is hoping the company can somehow figure out what is going wrong and fix it. I think they have been afraid of being too transparent about obvious QC issues they are having. If too many pre-orders pull out, it would possibly sink the company.

 

[MoltenTiger]

Man I'm glad I was hitting my grasshopper when I read that.

Man, I'm glad you were too

There's no way to 'know' if they'll have success, those stats by Zymos show what they're up against.
Doesn't hurt to trust that, since they've made it this far, they are smooth sailing in slow winds from now on.
PCB pick and placing, I bet you guys have never used a microscope to do that - it takes sooooooo long.
I'm sure laser welding is pretty damn delicious to be around too, much kinder on the fingers.
I would wager that both of those would cost similar to a COO for a year, and would be way more productive.

These guys are doing alright, waiting is the easy part.

 

[osolx26]

No offense to those speculating about the hierarchy of GHL, but what the f@ck does it have to do with the Grasshopper vape? I still have not received my 2 SS cases or my oils front end just to stay on point about the vape itself..... Who really gives a shit about the internal structure of their company. Just keep making grasshoppers and keep fucking sending warranty replacements. This thread is an abject waste of time with all the back and forth about company structure.....Super glad I sold both my Ti hoppers, and I really hope not to deal with any more warranty bullshit after 8+ returns.

So then why are you posting here? This thread is about discussing the grasshopper, which at this time includes discussion of the company itself. If you don't like that then leave.

Their extrapolated production estimates are as accurate as their extrapolated time estimates. There are a fuckng huge amount of variables in this game. They know what they're doing, and they can't afford to pay the wages of someone that knows it better, do you know how much that costs?
It is possible to see inside their workshop, and I am very familiar with what goes on in that kind of environment.
It can take a very long time to assemble pre-fab items, and every piece is unique and has its own potential problems. There is good reason that most vaporisers are much larger than the GH.
I don't think many understand just how hard a project like this is. It's really, ridiculously difficult and immensely time consuming. It's not a simple case of plugging Lego bricks together, it is insanely involved at every stage. Even packing them in boxes would takes ages. It's a long, multi-step process. To reiterate I don't believe they have somehow reached perfection in their optimisation, but I really think they're as close as their budget allows. This is crowd funded all the way still.

Are you an employee of HL? How could you possibly know what goes on in there? And yes, I know how much it costs to hire someone that knows what they're doing. For a company like that, to hire someone young, I'd say around $52,000 initially. Obviously, his salary would go up as the company gets bigger, just like what would happen with the salaries of the owners. This doesn't change the fact that they clearly don't have a very good handle on running the business. I'd rather have a little less profit and have my business than a bigger profit with a failing business.

Man I'm glad I was hitting my grasshopper when I read that. FWIW @MoltenTiger has it right, having actually been inside their space, they are moving as fast as they can and seven days a week, and the amount of orders they need to fulfill they will be moving at capacity for quite sometime in the future. The only way to get a grasshopper is wait, and it is waaaay worth the wait!

Yeah, it's worth the wait, but goddammit it takes a month to send out a body? And 2 months to send out 300 hoppers when supposedly you can make 1300/month? And they allow people to add on more grasshoppers to their orders after they send out address confirmations? Come on, not a single part of this says "good business practice". These guys are clueless. 1 month and they haven't sent out a single grasshopper, but they keep hiring more people and buying new machines. If they got rid of 3 of those new people and sold 1 machine, boom, you're covered to hire a COO and maybe now your company can actually start operating like it's a real company.

 

[zymos]

They could just read your post and save 52K. Because it's just common sense stuff. But why would they need to hire someone just to tell them the obvious?

People keep saying how they are great engineers but lousy business people. Which may be true in a sense, but it's not like it takes an MBA for this shit...

@MoltenTiger - those stats show increasingly higher failure rates every year across the board for the first three years, and even higher for most industries at year four where they break it out by type. They aren't anywhere near the "smooth sailing" part yet...

 

[MoltenTiger]

If you don't like that then leave.

You should have made the 'make like a tree' line, seriously I worked an 8 hour Saturday packing three-phase meters into static bags ready for shipment today, to try and help the company I work for get their own infeasible order out the door. My dealer hasn't got back to me in two days and I gave all my weed away before then ('sharing'). I am not trying to stir you or anyone, but here I go: just be calm and patient dude, the GH is on its way.
Like I said before, why the hell would you pay someone 52g just for him to tell you "see how it takes hours to do all this painstaking work, just like, buy automated machines" (of course he'd have more to say, but it's pretty self explanatory to people who have experience in production and product design (Trevor at least) what that's going to be).
Only to chime back "soz we'll have to fire you and not pay you out so we can afford it"

Furthermore, you may recall they declared they were doing limited batch releases to test their different designs in real world use. They had pretty normal failure rates of effective hand-built prototype units in this scenario. You blow those failure %'s at 1300 units and you bankrupt your business.

I'd rather receive my GH than have a bean counter do an engineers job.

But I hear you man, it's so fucking annoying waiting for this bloody pen.

@zymos it's a bit concerning, and it's totally worth dismissing any cold feet. Otherwise you introduce new statistics that fall somewhere along the lines of "sorry we can't refund you because all our assets are held up in an unobtainable format, and we have filed for bankruptcy. We will try and sell our intellectual property to a business man who's ready to pick up what we put down and make an inferior product that probably won't be titanium for less than $200, and maybe, just maybe, you'll get some compensation for your failed support of this scarily difficult project we practically finished"
...
Okay I've rambled beyond appropriateness now, but yeah.
By the fourth year that's probably what would happen, but pretty hopeful new machines will aid in getting rid of current orders before the end of the year. I don't think they'd be still offering pre-orders if we had to worry about this. That would just increase the chances of that happening.

 

[YungLeaner]

Quality of the product isn't a defense. This is the same line of spin that has been coming from Hopper Labs since the beginning. Backers or pre-orders complain, and then CS responds with: "This technology is out of this world and a game-changer in the vaporization industry. It is a very complicated process to construct the various small parts required to make this mind-blowing vaporizer work."

I'm honestly appalled by the lengths to which people will bend over backwards to defend this company. Call me a capitalist, but companies that don't provide their customers with something they want in a reasonable time frame for an agreed-upon price fall apart for a reason. It's simple fucking economics!

GHL opened pre-orders with either:
1. kind-hearted intentions to get out hoppers to people as fast as possible (a task at which the company failed miserably)
2. business intentions to get pre-order money that could float the company while they tried to fix QC issues and optimize production and shipping

The issue here is that people are defending them with option 1, but option 1 STILL remains evidence of a company that people should no longer trust. As a consumer it does not matter if a company is run by 5 brilliant engineer college drop-outs who don't know how business works. If that's the case, then the company should NOT be accepting thousands of dollars in pre-orders.

They offer refunds, yes. But there is a veritable laundry list of clear violations of business ethics here. And if people really want the vaporizer and MMJ/recreational industries to expand, these types of bullshit quasi-legal operations need to fall by the wayside.

Also, backers were never informed that they were receiving a product in beta. If that was the case you'd think they would have got it sometime in the 24 month waiting period. At least they got something...pre-orders looking shit out of luck, either you cancel and further endanger a destabilized company or you don't cancel and maybe never get a vape.

 

[osolx26]

They could just read your post and save 52K. Because it's just common sense stuff. But why would they need to hire someone just to tell them the obvious?

People keep saying how they are great engineers but lousy business people. Which may be true in a sense, but it's not like it takes an MBA for this shit...

@MoltenTiger - those stats show increasingly higher failure rates every year across the board for the first three years, and even higher for most industries at year four where they break it out by type. They aren't anywhere near the "smooth sailing" part yet...

You really don't understand what a a business expert does, do you? It's not like the job would end at him coming in and saying "hey, don't do this anymore. Peace out!". There's a lot of work that goes into running a company. Have you ever done that before? It's really not as simple as you seem to think it is.

@MoltenTiger The fact that you keep referring to business experts as "bean counters" tells me you know absolutely nothing about what it takes to run a business. Do you have any idea how much work went into designing the manufacturing lines at the company you work for? Do you know what that took? A team of experts in the industry, people that know and understand what it takes to run a successful business in that industry. It's more than just saying "hey, buy this thing. Don't do that." etc. There's a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of planning, testing, etc. These guys know how to build a vaporizer but they don't know how to run a business. If it was as easy as you think it is, everyone and their mother would be a business owner. Just because you don't understand how much work goes into running a business doesn't mean it's easy and that anyone can do it.

A business expert wouldn't be doing the engineers job, he'd be running the business, something most engineers know nothing about.

Just because you don't understand how much work goes into running a business doesn't mean it's easy.

 

[mephisto]

@osolx26 I was answering a question as whether anyone has received their SS cases yet, that was the related topic part.......You can take your attitude and , ooops I dropped my perfectly functional, able to purchase now, no warranty issue, convection vape, gotta go.

 

[osolx26]

@osolx26 I was answering a question as whether anyone has received their SS cases yet, that was the related topic part.......You can take your attitude and , ooops I dropped my perfectly functional, able to purchase now, no warranty issue, convection vape, gotta go.

You know I'm a grasshopper OWNER, right? As in I've received my grasshopper already and have had it since September? Oh, wait, I thought you said you sold both of your grasshoppers.

 

[MoltenTiger]

You can't be a college drop out engineer @YungLeaner (that would be me, and I make a level II on the engineering pay scale, and I certainly don't call myself an engineer [I decided to be a chemist instead FYI, still in school<something that business masters are not well versed at>{yes I know what's involved}]).

All talk of business by people as qualified as I am an engineer should stop, I'm sorry for egging it on.

This is now just cyclical bullshit.

I will restate: February isn't over yet guys, preorders may still make their PROMISED deadline of initiation.

PS thank you @Averyminya for your continued input, it's good to keep in the loop of how this tech is working for people. I don't feel silly spouting bullshit in support for these guys because of it, and everyone else's. Maybe people who think a better job could be done should give up and support those examples. Or just suck it up and risk a measly sum.

____
PPS (sorry I gotta) a business expert is someone like Trevor after successfully managing this campaign, don't doubt his abilitities during his campaign. A bean counter is someone that manages purchasing and number crunches. Definitely examples of business expert bean counters I'm sure, you heard of Tim Cook?
Most importantly, not even Tim Cook can pick and place or weld as fast as a very expensive, specialised industrial machine

PPPS (wow here I go) just because you have little relative experience around production doesn't mean you can expect estimated dates to be precise. You should simply understand that it's not as easy as you make out and it is quite literally impossible and risky to make some decisions you recommend. But that's business no?

 

[zymos]

My prediction is that some preorders will get ADDRESS CONFIRMATIONS by the end of the month. That gets people off their back and lets them pretend their estimate was correct, with exactly zero commitment on their part, and is par for the course, looking at their history.

I hope for pre-orderers' sakes it actually happens quicker than I think it will.

 

[ben7337]

What about Caroline's promise 2 days ago of them starting to ship yesterday, they can't even estimate 24 hours into the future?

 

[biohacker]

I dropped my perfectly functional, able to purchase now, no warranty issue, convection vape, gotta go.

Care to share? Crafty?

 

[MoltenTiger]

@osolx26 What keeps my company alive is the fact that Chinese copies have a much higher failure rate (they suck) and they're industrial items where quality is fundamental to their value. Hence the huge expansion of sales, and the necessity for plebs like myself to do the fiddly bits so that the directors can continue to manage the expanding business, and still have time to develop new products, scope out causes of failures and repair dodgy PCBs from the factory (not a piece of Lego yet again) to save sending them back and reducing stock levels (wasting time). It's a huge amount of work. I am not doubting that, but the business is only part of the equation and quite frankly, like GHL, we already have too much of it. What I do doubt is that someone disconnected from the business could somehow do any of that better without being one of the genius' that created it. And again, we already have too many sales for our size, you can't just pay someone 52g and have them pull a rabbit out of a hat.
With infinite revenue, problems are less problematic and expansion is easy, but surely you realise that new companies in an emerging market struggle to find the funding required to do it? I'm sure my boss would love to offload work to a fresh out of school business master, but for the time being he still has free time occasionally. And he probably knows that's a somewhat oxymoronic person, hey..


Yo, Zymos. All they can do is continue keeping people off their back, and they're quite good at it. It's as if they know business well enough to make it work?
After all, a good product sells itself and a great one sells too many causing a staggered release.

The amount of people waiting for a GH vs. the amount of people who are actively watching its progression is not equal. Pre-orders will start receiving soon enough, even VapeFiend is expecting a batch of them for retail soon, and I'm sure he has a more interesting relation with GHL than most here.

What about Caroline's promise 2 days ago of them starting to ship yesterday, they can't even estimate 24 hours into the future?

All those bullshit emails on reddit are a big reason why warranty related emails get submersed and take so long to be acknowledged IMO.
Probably best to not enquire, just know that they're aware of standing orders and actively working through them. Their time estimates are terrible, does anyone expect them to get better?
There's reason behind why they aren't disclosing pre-order numbers...

Also, if you're waiting on a warranty resolution, it's not like they have excess to send you. You'll also have to wait.

 

[johnnyCanuck]

Man I'm glad I was hitting my grasshopper when I read that. FWIW @MoltenTiger has it right, having actually been inside their space, they are moving as fast as they can and seven days a week, and the amount of orders they need to fulfill they will be moving at capacity for quite sometime in the future. The only way to get a grasshopper is wait, and it is waaaay worth the wait!

I'm totally on board with you except for one thing... Is HL making enough income to make their new venture viable in the short and long term?

I'm already convinced that: 1) the GH is a game breaker and a must have unit. 2) the lights are still on and that they're working 24/7 to manufacture and get orders out.

But can they sustain thus business model?

Quality of the product isn't a defense. This is the same line of spin that has been coming from Hopper Labs since the beginning. Backers or pre-orders complain, and then CS responds with: "This technology is out of this world and a game-changer in the vaporization industry. It is a very complicated process to construct the various small parts required to make this mind-blowing vaporizer work."

I'm honestly appalled by the lengths to which people will bend over backwards to defend this company. Call me a capitalist, but companies that don't provide their customers with something they want in a reasonable time frame for an agreed-upon price fall apart for a reason. It's simple fucking economics!

GHL opened pre-orders with either:
1. kind-hearted intentions to get out hoppers to people as fast as possible (a task at which the company failed miserably)
2. business intentions to get pre-order money that could float the company while they tried to fix QC issues and optimize production and shipping

The issue here is that people are defending them with option 1, but option 1 STILL remains evidence of a company that people should no longer trust. As a consumer it does not matter if a company is run by 5 brilliant engineer college drop-outs who don't know how business works. If that's the case, then the company should NOT be accepting thousands of dollars in pre-orders.

They offer refunds, yes. But there is a veritable laundry list of clear violations of business ethics here. And if people really want the vaporizer and MMJ/recreational industries to expand, these types of bullshit quasi-legal operations need to fall by the wayside.

Also, backers were never informed that they were receiving a product in beta. If that was the case you'd think they would have got it sometime in the 24 month waiting period. At least they got something...pre-orders looking shit out of luck, either you cancel and further endanger a destabilized company or you don't cancel and maybe never get a vape.

Dispite all this, their products are in great demand. They don't need to please those bitching all the time. That's not the problem.

 

[MoltenTiger]

I'm totally on board with you except for one thing... Is HL making enough income to make their new venture viable in the short and long term?

I'm already convinced that: 1) the GH is a game breaker and a must have unit. 2) the lights are still on and that they're working 24/7 to manufacture and get orders out.

But can they sustain thus business model?

They're probably not working quite 24/7, that's pretty expensive.
Their business model is undisclosed, their sales numbers are undisclosed, but there's still communication happening, and so there's little sign of concern.

I just went on the reddit page, and apparently Caroline has stated via email that pre-orders will receive monthly email updates.

The amount we have all paid for a unit is definitely more than production costs, so as long as you keep your order it should be fine. Alternatively if you get a refund, because they have such a massive backlog of orders, it shouldn't impact much as it's less work they have to do and they're already blatantly saturated.

 

[zymos]

"Grasshopper Labs- spurring bitter internet arguments since 2013."

See, I just saved them ANOTHER $52,000- now they don't need to hire a marketing person.

 

[Gandalf]

At this point I think it just makes sense to accept that we will not get reasonable shipping estimates from Hopper Labs and decide whether or not that's reason to pull your pre-order.

If you're willing to wait, then just wait it out however long it takes. The product is most definitely worth it. It's not uncommon to have very long wait times for vaporizers. Look at Alan's HI list, the wait is about 18 months I believe, and there's only love and support in that thread.

The only reason that the long wait time is even an issue is because Hopper Labs is absolutely terrible at setting customer expectations. If they told people upfront that the wait was going to be 6-12 months (or longer) there would be no outcry. Sure, people will be disappointed and anxious to get it, but there wouldn't be this level of resentment due to false promises.

If you refuse to support a business that operates this way, it's well within your right to request a refund and move on, and that's perfectly OK. But if you're determined to get your Grasshopper, the best strategy is to just wait patiently and try to forget about it, or see if you can snag one of the retail units.

Sending emails to Hopper Labs bitching about long wait times, accusing them of lying, demanding updates, etc. does absolutely nothing to make them move any faster. In fact, it only delays an already painfully slow operation. Let's just let them do their thing and hopefully they will learn from their mistakes sooner rather than later.

One positive thing I can say is this: more GHs than ever have been shipped out, and I've been seeing much fewer reports of unit failures. Hopefully this is a sign of increased quality control. They did make an update to their back-ends recently, so we know they're actively taking steps to improve things.

By the way, none of this applies to @osolx26 's warranty issues, that's an entirely separate matter. Warranty repairs need to be handled swiftly and with good communication.

 

[nonbeliever]

Setting "estimates" on delivery is a really simple process.. For goodness sakes, it's math and they are engineers. The formula for units per day is timeperunit (75mins) x number of assemblers x number of hours - replacement units. This tells them how many they are making a day - I'd guess maybe 50 units a day, minus the number they "lose" to replace faulty units. It's pretty easy to extrapolate, based on where anyone is in the list a reasonable estimate based on that. Any which way you measure it, they've gotta know their estimates are bogus. I'm still waiting on the unit ordered with my backer unit, and waiting 6 weeks for a new clicker backend for that.

 

[zymos]

Sounding more and more like they are prioritizing some large wholesale orders. Or they've been out of backends for 6 weeks, which would just be more "WTF are they thinking when they send obviously impossible estimates?" Or both.

 

[grokit]

I think that these still aren't coming off of the "assembly line" very smoothly, to say the least. Their plans all seem to revolve around ramping up production, but that hasn't happened yet -- at least not reliably.