During the last 10 days we’ve been focusing exclusively in two things, assembling Shortcut V5s and shipping them. Completely exhausted because of it I can proudly say that we’ve managed to finished them all. Well, to be honest, we’ve finished all but two, we are still waiting for those testers to send their hand image so we can customize them. Anyway, the insane workload it’s finally over.
My daily routine, carrying V5s to the post office.
Most of the prototypes are still in the air but few lucky testers have received them already:
Even though it’s been an extreme amount of work to build them, It’s been amazing to designing, building and shipping this prototypes. I know this is just the beginning, it’s just a tiny step in our plans but we’ve created something that we believe it can improve people's lives. Not only that, over 40 people trusted us enough to pay for the prototypes and want to help us improving the Shortcut. If I had to put in words how I feel about all this it would probably be extreme gratitude.
Because a few testers received their keyboards before we expected, we didn’t had the documentation or the forum ready. Luckily started working on it weeks ago and in one morning we were able set it up. It’s not fancy but it’s already rolling and proving to be really useful.
We are extremely excited about starting the testing phase. In just two days the few testers that have received their V5s have spotted few important issues and we are working on solving them. When the 40 keyboards are being tested is going to be an awesome learning experience.
During the last week something interesting happened. A few pro and semi-pro teams contacted us showing their interest in trying out the Shortcut. Most of them asked if Riot would allow the Shortcut in the LCS. I couldn't see why Riot wouldn’t allow it, in any case they should be positive about it, it’s designed to decrease injuries. Just in case I asked and they told me there shouldn’t be any problem. In the future, when the product is better developed I’ll send one to be 100% sure.
All V5s should arrive during the next 10 days. This means that we will have an intense month of constant feedback and improvement. We’ve already started working on the industrial design for the commercial version but we want to implement all the feedback from the closed beta before making a decision. We also have to greatly improve our documentation, learn about the learning curve of the testers and work ways of shortening it.
It’s interesting how things evolve. Last month we were immersed in designing and building hardware. We suffered from our lack of experience, we had really inefficient processes but we figured it out and accomplished our goal. During the next month we’ll be completely focused on gathering feedback of our testers and optimizing our product. Probably we will fail miserably multiple times but we will learn of our mistakes and improve. And in not too long we will be looking into mass manufacturing. The future is scary and exciting at the same time.
