I have a hard time believing they will be here by xmas. I've had a broken cloud for 7 months that they wouldn't service as they ramped up the EVO which when i contributed at IGG i was supposed i gettin October. As a customer with a broken cloud that is unable to be serviced i absoulutely should get bumped up to a better spot in line. It would be better for them not to make false promises. October was never going to happen, why did they say that? I find it really hard to believe that they'll be getting through all of IGG by december. Why doesn't vapexhale hire more people for assembly so they can get there product out in a reasonable time? I'm going to be upset if the december date is another broken promise.
ETA for an unbuilt product to arrive was not a promise. It was not a pre-order and as we know from TV Cartoons (Pre-Order doesn't mean shit!)
Why does anyone ever list ETA's that don't happen? Because it's part of doing project planning. You plan for something, and something else comes up and changes the plan.
My company is very good at launching products and doing it at the time of the announced plan. But we don't make vapes, we are not just 5 people, and it costs us MILLIONS of dollars to do it. We also have regulations and all sorts of pressures outside of $$ to launch within certain tight windows. We have hundreds of millions of dollars set aside to make it happen.
And we've been doing it for over 25+ years.
Another key to note is specifically to the electronics hard good industry, launching "on-time" rarely benefits the consumer. In fact, if you look at some of the big electronics launches recently, they sucked and were saddled with faulty hardware.
XBOXONE is already apologizing for their faulty disc drives. It launched on time tho...
The list goes on and on. I'd much rather have a working EVO in December than a faulty unit in October.
I hear ya, i think its a great product. My thinking is that they will have to hire more people eventually why not do it now and get everyone on the same page for when production ramps up. They appear to have the cashflow with all the IGG and preorders. There have got to be some people or friends they can trust to hire to get it out and not sacrifice the testing process. 5 guys is too small a team, if they had just 8-10 people they could do a lot more and i find it hard to believe they can't find 4 other people they can trust. And what makes the VXH team such qualified excellent product testers and assemblers? There are people who have years of experience testing and assembling products for a living, why not have one of them on your team? I understand they are trying to lower costs as they are a start up but this process is so slow that its disrespectful to the customers that were promised something months ago. I understand they want quality control and they can have that while still having more people on the team, they should have hired more immediately after the indie gogo campaign went so well so that they could deliver on there promises.
Going out and hiring a bunch of people you think you might need IF you succeed is what kills many start ups. I can tell you for personal experience, I worked for a start up that was going great UNTIL we hired a bunch of people we didn't need yet.
I was in heated arguments with our CFO and CEO about that. I was right of course, bu there were no hard feelings. They blamed it on the VCs. 2 years later, I was the last employee laid off. I had to watch everyone around me get canned. I kept looking at all those 2-3 year old PCs and fancy european desks, sitting empty. Expensive monuments to our failure to control spending in the face of external pressure.
Why not hire a tester? Cost. The same reason no one hires testers full time. Test cycles are exactly that, cycles. Temporary work. My favorite tester in my office is gone this week, and we haven't launched the release yet! Her term ran out, and that's that. I would personally loved to hire her full time. But if I was actually in charge of hiring testers in that dept, I could not have done so with a clear conscience. The test cycle is complete. We can't pay her to sit around and look busy.
Going from 5 guys to 10 would DOUBLE the size of their company. DOUBLE! Doubling the amount of salary and benefits and overhead...
Again, they didn't make promises that they are not delivering on. They are running a start-up and trying to launch a product. No one pinky promised shit.
I understand that everyone has different opinions on how things could go, did go, will go with VXL, but armchair CEOing and 2nd guessing stuff from months ago based on hindsight doesn't do anything.