What's wrong with saying sorry?

I'm posting this here because it seems like the Peachy team keeps a fairly close eye on this forum, and I'm more interested in their response than in complaining on the KS comments.

I want to make it clear that I'm not actually angry, and really really not trying to troll anybody here. I knew when I signed up for the original Kickstarter campaign that there weren't any guarantees. I knew that I was placing a bet on an untested technology and that I would have to be willing to shrug off the hundred bucks if it didn't pan out. I still believe that my printer is coming and that it will be awesome.

Being this far past a deadline is usually considered a catastrophe. The Peachy Team has been very good about frequency of updates (at least better than a lot of crowdfunding campaigns). Yet, every single update is written like it's good news, like we should all be thrilled to hear that the software is coming together a year (or whatever) after it was expected.

I don't want a refund, and I really don't mind waiting all that much. I still think the peachy is a good idea, and the team seems like a good group of dudes. I'm just curious, why has there not been a simple direct statement: "We screwed up. We underestimated the problems and overestimated our abilities. We are still going to get you your printer, we'll tell you all about the process but most of all we're sorry."

Other crowd-funded projects also seem to suffer from this weird optimism, glossing over what are obvious struggles. My guess is that the team is afraid that simply apologizing and asking for patience would lead to more people asking for refunds, effectively de-funding the project, resulting in no printers for anybody. However, with all the stories of crowd funded projects that turn out to be outright scams, it would seem that honesty and transparency would be a better course than obliviousness and spin for keeping our confidence.

I agree with every word in this post.

Hey jamdis_the_mandis,

I think, that's a very interesting point.
I'm following some other Kickstarter Projects and one of them is just repeatedly going silent for half a year (It started at almost the same time as peachy and is overdue, too)
just to come back at everybody who would have believed it to be dead with an amazing update that just gives a glance at features each of which in my opinion could easily have made a large update on its own.

At this point I guess that the anxiety you are talking about might be the reason.
A lot of my tech-friends have problems promoting what they did; when they have to write or talk about something, it just happens to easily that you expect the audience to have the same level of knowledge as you and just keep omitting the details of the work and don't give it the space it would actually deserve.
This might be one reason and especially this probably makes it difficult for Kickstarters who don't have someone who is good at public work.

The Peachy team rather isn't one of these. They do have some really amazing guys like Nathan doing all those amazing videos but still there seems to be this kind of inhibition to say sorry.
I think this is rather something that pretty much everybody does and somehow is kinda expected by the people.
Giving in, admitting failure is really difficult.
You can see the same behaviour at many projects and the scheme always is the same one, whether the project still is going forward (as peachy) or not.

Actually I often can see the same thing with myself. When something doesn't work out as expected I tend to think that I did expect it and wouldn't have to tell anyone as it would be kinda expectable and nothing worthy to speak about.
As in this case, people are used to projects being late; need for development resources being drastically underestimated has become somewhat normal.

TL;DR: I think that this is just kinda human; keeping your self optimistic and probably also some kind of marketing strategy that is very commonly used.

this probably is a question that is really hard to answer,
but I wonder what developments we will generally see in the future on this topic, especially on Kickstarter etc.
quertz.

PS: yes, I too have already agonized from time to time about why people, especially from Kickstarter projects, tend to talk the way they do, as stated above.

There is no valid business model that has saying sorry in it anywhere. If a company starts saying "sorry" then I would run a mile because close down is just around the corner. If they can't even be optimistic enough to be positive then it aint going to happen.

It is up to the consumer to make a valid assessment and act accordingly with their money.

Its worth mentioning also that when a project is your 'baby' its kind of difficult to be negative about it. Remember these guys are putting a lot (if not all) of their time and money into it and every step forward is the greatest thing in the world in their eyes.

Objectivity... you know?

Hmm, thought they were shipping peachies. is that not the case ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by curious aardvark

Hmm, thought they were shipping peachies. is that not the case ?

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In the last update they said shipping would be towards the end of October. Unless I've missed it there's not been any mention since which I can only assume will mean that it will be pushed back again. I think if they were going to be shipping in a matter of weeks then we would have had a video update with Rylan surrounded by boxes of peachies. As that's not happened I'm going to make a guess that the next update will announce a 3-6 month slip with the ship date being pushed well into the new year.


Still, I'd love to be wrong and I agree with the above comments that the team seem to be doing some great work.

They said it was possible it might get pushed back as far as December

This is a very interesting Thread, and I really respect the way the first post was written. I feel grateful for how the conversation has gone so far and to be part of this growing community. Personally Im not the type of person who has any trouble saying sorry, infact I go around constantly asking my employees and friends, how Ive messed up, how they think I could do better. I consider finding out Im wrong to be the exact moment that I have the opportunity to learn something. Today Iv learned that for many people a straight up apology would be appreciated. We have talked about giving one before in an update but came to the conclusion that people probably didnt want to here sorry when they could here situation + action plan. As for the positive spin, I think it comes from a combination of our own optimism for the project and the excitement for our accomplishments. We work on Peachy Printer every day, and we work hard to make it great, we see problems simply as opportunities for solutions. Our positivity is what gets us thru the years of what most would call painstaking R and D. Without a glass is completely full of air and water mentality, we wouldn't make it thrue to the end and we wouldn't try crazy things like dip feeds and mirrors on a thread.



now for that apology.


I am sorry that I predicted such early shipping dates in the kickstarter campain.
I was completely naive about the shipping dates, and the amount of time it would take to really take the peachy to v 1.0
I should have done more research on how long hardware product development takes, having said that I dont think research would have made me wise enough. I know now that getting a grip on how long R and D takes really requires one to experience it first hand.
I do know one thing, I was dead wrong about our original shipping dates, and I posted those estimated dates without having the skillset to really estimate them.
Im also glad we didnt stick to our estimated shipping dates. When your wrong about something its disastrous to not admit it and just stick with the original plan.
If we had shipped what we had at the original shipping dates we would have disappointed everyone, The printer didnt work that well and wasn't designed to be produced in high volume. Today, after alot of R and D, we have made something that we cant wait to send you.


lol and I reading over my apology I suddenly realize it ends with a positive spin…. well what can I say at least its honest.

Rylan, I just read update #56. You are a class act.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jamdis_the_mandis

Being this far past a deadline is usually considered a catastrophe.

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I don't think that's true for Kickstarter projects. For Kickstarter projects, shipping anything at all to the customer counts as a major achievement - even if it's late, even if it doesn't work as well as it should. There's no shortage of projects that fail to get this far; some are outright scams, but most are just people who hopelessly overestimated what they could achieve in any amount of time, let alone within the planned timelines.

For the Peachy team to be shipping anything to the customers is very good. Assuming it works reasonably well (unlike, say, the Makibox) it's a pretty exceptional result for a Kickstarter project.

The Peachy team definitely has underestimated the number of problems (and the time taken to solve those problems), but unlike so many other projects they haven't gone and made shiny new problems to solve half way through the project (eg. by adding major new features). The only thing I can think of that's changed in a big way is the control circuit (from analogue to digital), and that seems to have been done for logical reasons (it would replace a few potentially unsolvable problems with solvable ones).


With regards to saying sorry: I think you'd get away with saying that once. Maybe twice, if you were lucky. However, if you say "sorry" every time there's a delay or something doesn't work out quite right, the project timeline starts to look like this:

"sorry, circuit board design took longer than expected. Delayed one week."
"sorry, circuit board design took longer than expected. Delayed another week."
"sorry, didn't realise that the parts weren't in stock at Digikey. Delayed three months while Digikey finds more stock."
"yay, parts turned up!"
"sorry, parts don't behave how we expected in this application, redesigning the board."
"sorry, redesigning the circuit board took longer than expected. Delayed three weeks."
"sorry, it's Chinese new year, it'll be six weeks before the new boards turn up."
"sorry, didn't realise that power supply brownout was such an issue for this circuit, redesigning the board."

... and so on, every few days for two years. It's very easy for even the most avid backer to get discouraged by so many bits of bad news, especially since good news is pretty rare (after all, it only takes a couple of major breakthroughs for the project to be complete). There's a fine line to tread between giving the backers insufficient information (so they assume that the project is a scam) and too much information (so they assume that the project is never going to be completed). I suspect that this is a major cause of the scope creep mentioned above - the team is desperate for some good news to give to backers, so they come up with a "free addon" that makes the device much more attractive. Of course, it also doubles the number of problems, but it achieves the short-term goal of making backers feel good.


Better to focus on the good bits when those occur, and right at the end make an apology for everything that isn't right (since by then you know what isn't right). In the case of the Peachy, the apology is (as above) essentially "sorry it took so long". In other projects it's "sorry we didn't manage to produce what we planned", or even "sorry we took all your money and ran (suckers!)".

The 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration that Einstein said is so true and unless you have been down that road you do not realise how conservative he was with that statement.

Rylan, thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate the sentiment here, and that (as stated by others) apologizing isn't without risk to yourself and to the project.

I have absolutely no problem with you or your team experiencing this learning curve. I'm enjoying going on the ride with you. Some people might prefer for you to pretend everything is perfect, but I am much happier knowing that you are communicating honestly with us, and not (as some have suggested) so enamored of perfecting your own work that you cannot see that you failed your promise on the timing. I'm looking forward to receiving my printer. If it comes in December, great. If it comes next December... okay. I trust you guys.

There is no gain for anyone by an apology. Rylan has kept updates going on an almost monthly basis, and has been very open about the trials he and his time have gone through. Yes he underestimated his timeline, but that's a relatively minor glitch in the whole process. It looks like we are going to be getting a fantastic printer, and the community got a birds eye view of the R & D that went into it. Anyone who watched the video the kickstarter knew that this was a risky project, and the fact that one of the awards was a beta version should have clued everyone in. The project was still in development.

lovely....""" Unfortunately we ran into a delay in the process of finalizing our packaging. Our styrofoam insert samples took weeks longer than expected to show up, and upon arrival we found that we’d been sent incorrect samples. This resulted in a substantial delay in our ability to finalize our packaging and order the boxes. While our box order has now been submitted, we don’t expect them to arrive until late November. That means we won’t be able to start shipping until sometime in December,provided no other issues arise."""

I kinda find it funny how many people whine about the length of time these things take to finish, when they have no clue about the hardships experienced in the process of actually doing it.

It takes quite a bit of effort and not a small amount of courage and persistence to achieve something like this. Personally, I think anyone who can't afford to contribute to a project, kickstarter or not, and tolerate the loss if it doesn't pan out...probably shouldn't contribute.

In lots of ways, this is not unlike gambling. You take a risk for the potential reward, if it is worth it in your mind. Like gambling, you have no guarantee of success. If you can afford to gamble, don't do it. It's that simple.

This isn't Amazon.com where you are purchasing some product and they didn't ship it for two years.

I just signed up yesterday and paid my money.. i can deal with delays, its only a couple hundred bucks... Ive been a backer on dozens of kickstarts, so im used to the delays.. all good here :)