What's wrong with saying sorry?

[Slatye]

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

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!)".