During the week we’ve made good progress but had some problems too. Let’s start with the negative side.
Spam issues
Since January we’ve been reported several times that our emails ended up in spam and as you can imagine this is extremely problematic.
When we made the offer of selling prototypes to take part of the closed beta 130 persons confirmed that they would buy one. From those 130 we picked 50 and emailed them. Many of this people never answered back and when they did, they reported the mails were in spam. During multiple weeks we sent news updates to this 50 testers to later realize that we had to contact again more people.
The end result is that we’ve sold 45 and we’ve learnt a bunch of stuff:
- Use a communication channel that can’t be blocked (blog posts vs emails)
- Use Mailchimp or similar services for mass emailing. Even if mass means 50 people.
- When you make an offer where people have to pay, they must be able to pay in the moment, if not you can’t assume they’ll buy later.
Well… Lessons learnt!
Blog section update
Because of the spam issues mentioned previously, we’ve updated the blog section with all the newsletters we’ve been sending with slight tweaks. From now on we will only send a monthly summary update by email to all subscribers and we will do frequent blog updates.
If you are curious to know what we’ve doing for the last couple of months, check our new and amazing blog!
V5 Progress
On Saturday our PCB manufacturer sent us this picture:
PCBs are ready and during this week they should finish the assembly of SMT components and ship it. If nothing goes wrong, in one week we should be building the prototypes.
This week has been pretty intense on mechanical design modifications. We’ve tried multiple tilting systems, thumb and wrist adjustable systems, magnets instead of screws and more.
We started on Monday with this:
And two versions later, on Friday we had this:
The magnets are very cool but not stable enough. We’ve discarded that idea for now but will come back to it in future prototypes. Another thing we tried and discarded is making the keyboard fully independent of the wrist rest. The thumb is way too wobbly if it doesn’t have the wrist support attached to it.
During the weekend we did the following design and we’ll build it during today. Removing all the extra pieces makes it much more solid:
Next Steps
During this week we will:
- Validate last mechanical prototype version
- Build a full V5 with electronics and test that everything works fine. If there are no issues we will do an assembly line test.
- Assembly line test. We will build 3 or 4 prototypes timing all steps to make an accurate estimation of every process. This will help spot issues and optimize the assembly process for the 50 prototypes
We are really close to making our first 50 prototypes and that’s really exciting!
