Peachy Printer: Backer Update #66
Here is the latest update from the KS campaign.
Quote:
Dear Backers,
We’ve taken note of your desire for us to drop the fancy videos and take a raw, off-the-cuff approach, so that’s exactly what we did. Many of you have asked for a full, start to finish, uncut print demonstration, nothing fancy… Here it is:
https://youtu.be/llIc79P3YIEWe’ve never done a video like that before simply because we didn’t think anyone would be interested in watching long, rather uneventful videos. In this case, we completely understand it’s value. I appreciate that it’s important to think critically. If you have doubts about the printer being real, then it’s our job to prove the work we’ve done. I hope that this along with our recent move to publish our work helps remove some of the skepticism around the project. Also not that using pop bottles is simply the cheapest way to make a peachy printer, you can certainly make yours look much nicer.
In our next update I will do a video of me going through our inventory of parts.
In other news, today I was pleased to learn that the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority will be conducting an investigation! I spoke with Eric Greene, Director - Consumer Protection Division, and we are arranging for an investigator to come and meet with us. This is extremely good news.
Now let’s talk about some of your other questions and concerns...
What about all the other money you raised?
Peachy Printer continued to raise funds at various times after the original KS & IGG campaigns. To date the total amount of received funds - less the various fees and the stolen funds - are just shy of $1,150,000.00
So, where did all of that money go? Largely to the development of the various rewards offered during our campaign. As we mentioned before, getting the Peachy Printer to work as well as it does now took a long time - a lot of man hours.
We also spent a portion of those funds on ordering components for printer delivery, setting up our manufacturing & packaging facilities, actually manufacturing printers, and finally, certification. As mentioned in the Report of Received Funds section in the Executive Summary, we have yet to finish our books for the 2014/2015 Fiscal Year. An expense chart for that period is not available yet, but we will certainly provide that when we can.
Many of you may think that it’s absurd or unnecessary to have spent so much on developing this product. I once had that same naivety, which is part of why we consistently missed our delivery estimates. The fact is that hardware development is a long, hard road with many unexpected twists and turns - especially when dealing with difficult design constraints - we had to get this thing working while maintaining our $100 price point. The goal of creating a $100 3D printer, not only for our backers, but for the world was central to the campaign. We’ve done that work. I think any veteran of hardware R&D would look at our spending and development time and say this is normal.
I did not intend to shy away from the fact that we’ve raised a lot more money. Rather, I felt that it would simplify an already complex story if I just focused on the Kickstarter funds. That is the pool of money that the theft occurred within, so I focused on that while telling the story.
I apologize if that has caused additional confusion concern.
Based on the files you released, it looks like there was a fair bit of feature creep and dead ends.
Dead ends? Certainly. Most notably, we spent a lot of resources pursuing the audio approach. In the end, digital turned out to be the right choice. While it’s unfortunate that we didn’t realize that sooner, that is the natural course of hardware R&D. You put resources into design directions and some of them turn out to be dead ends. Although, that doesn’t mean that no value was gained from those efforts. We’ve learned valuable lessons from our failures.
Feature creep? Not really. The amount of time and effort that was put into additional features or products is very minimal in comparison to the Peachy Kit. It was by far our main focus. Things like the z-axis print base system may seem like feature creep on the surface, however it proved to be a valuable tool in troubleshooting. By eliminating the drip system from the equation, we were able to determine that it was the true source of many issues.
What’s with the video?
It’s become staggeringly clear that we took the wrong approach with the main video that introduced this problem. Unfortunately, many people found it to be unbelievable, disingenuous, and downright cheesy. There have also been concerns about the high quality of production. I can assure you that just like all of our update videos in the past, this was a very low budget, in house production. We have never outsourced that work to a production company.
Lastly I would like to apologize for something...
I am extremely sorry that I ever let my Kickstarter campaign be set up in such a way that this problem could occur. Although I didn’t steal the money, I’m still accountable for this project. I don't expect anyone to let me off the hook. I still think it is my responsibility to do everything I can to deliver printers and bring this project to the best possible outcome. I’m not sure how this will turn out but I will be here to play my part.
Rylan Grayston.
