Flutter News April 2017
about 7 years ago – Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 12:44:57 AM

Hi Flutter friends!

I love you! I hope you are all well.

Life is better over here at Flutter HQ. The job search was a stressor back in January/February and I'm happy to report that things are really starting to settle down for me now.

I've been saving a bunch of cash to throw at Flutter shipments, and I believe I have found a shipper I want to use for our products. The shipment company Whiplash came recommended and they look like they are just what I need. They integrate with Backerkit so I have already imported our items into their system.

A friend and I inventoried the product I have at my apartment and I pulled more from storage. This is the count we will send as a "test run" to a fulfillment house. It should be enough for more than 200 shipments, and I've currently got $3000 set aside to fund that.

A slightly annoying issue is that Whiplash seems to have closed their Bay Area office they had open when I signed up for the service, so I have to call them tomorrow and get the low down there.

But I have 10 big storage boxes counted and full of Flutter product I seriously want to ship to y'all, so once I can find out where to send it I should be able to process orders with a few clicks in Backerkit (Whiplash has an API that Backerkit hooks in to for seamless integration - cool!).

It has been a big challenge for me to do this last very important part of this Kickstarter - shipping. But I will not give up until you are all refunded or swimming in hardware and I do oddly still want to keep doing this electronics business thing, so I've got to learn!

So the product is counted, the funds are ready, and I seriously hope we can be shipping stuff again soon, and at a much better cadence than before.

In other news, I fixed Flutter's battery charger bug in the PCB design, and have been trying to learn KiCAD so I can migrate the files from Eagle. I did do the design translation but it needs more work. I'll try to get that in a git branch for you all to review, but don't wait on me for that as my primary goal is still just shipping.

What's the record for longest time between funding and fulfillment on a Kickstarter campaign? I bet we can break it! :-D

That's all the news. I'm going to throw this refund notice at the bottom of my updates now and see if that helps with some of the despair/confusion.

Also, did you know you can listen to all of Martin Luther King Jr's speeches on YouTube for free? This one is my favorite. What strikes me more than anything is how many of the problems of times past are still with us today as strong as ever.

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REFUND POLICY:

If you want a refund, you'll get one! We'll ask you before we ship anything if you want your order or a refund. For now please just sit tight and wait - when you get an e-mail asking what you want, that's when you can let us know! Refunds will be processed after all shipments are shipped.

Flutter loves you Feb 2017
about 7 years ago – Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 08:09:24 PM

Howdy folks,

Just wanted to update you on The Adventure of Flutter, version 5, 2017 edition.

Shipments have been slow going. I was letting life stress get me down, which I think was apparent from my last update. My previous employment contract was ending and the job search was stressful. I've got a new contract now, one that will hopefully run longer. Mechatronics Prototype Engineer at Google X (yes, really). It's a phenomenal thing and should help me a lot with my sanity and happiness.

That means having more available energy to move Flutter forward. Yaaay! The big goal for 2017 is to have all orders shipped or refunded by the end of the year. I really wanted to have it done sooner but it's pretty expensive for me to ship all orders and/or issue refunds as requested, so I'm financially limited here.

In the immediate future, I will be processing the backlog of emails that I was letting pile up, I will try to add the "REFUND" token to all backerkit accounts that requested a refund via email or comments here so I can easily sort out which backers want what, I will investigate external shipping services since I am clearly not doing a great job moving things myself, and when all else fails I will be mailing packages myself.

I won't begin issuing any refunds for a few months at least, so please hang in there. As always, everyone will either receive the hardware they ordered or refund... eventually.

I love you.

Oh, and did you see that SpaceX flew and landed a previously flown rocket this weekend? The landing footage is breath taking.

Taylor

Flutter Update Jan 2017
over 7 years ago – Sun, Jan 15, 2017 at 09:40:38 PM

Greetings all.

TL;DR:

• The process for verifying addresses did not work. I will just verify them manually. I will verify addresses in small batches via email before shipping.
• I've started packing the "random" orders. That is, orders that are not part of a large batch of identical orders. If you added add-ons, previously we were not shipping those orders. We are beginning that now.
• I have shared my thoughts on the future of this project below. As always I will make sure you get your hardware or a refund, but I'm unsure what I will do after shipping the hardware.
• I will be relicensing Flutter as a BSD or MIT style permissive license in the future. If you have a need for that to happen on a specific time scale please let me know.
• I wrote a post about automation for my website.

I want to apologize for some issues with the procedure introduced with the last update. It did not work as intended. I can't make Backerkit do what I was trying to do.

This means my automated way of verifying your addresses will not work. I will use the old manual email method instead. I will positively confirm your address via email before shipping, and anyone who wants a refund can tell me at that time. It isn't nearly as fast or simple as the new method was supposed to be, but the good news is I can still use those tokens on the back end to track refund requests and address status.

That said, I'm working on shipping the bulk of the shipments now. That is orders that are not identical. Many of you added add-ons via backerkit which makes most of the orders unique or common with only a few backers. Last weekend I started packing up orders from the batch of people who were able to verify their address using the method from before.

In the last month I've written some custom javascript to make the backerkit packing lists work for our needs. I used greasemonkey to inject some code into the page backerkit serves. I've added some notes about which items are back ordered and included our logo.

Now the only thing left is to pack and ship the over 500 unique or nearly unique orders.

This weekend I took the order system on our website offline. All items are now out of stock and we've changed the welcome message on our home page to indicate that new orders are suspended.

We only ever took in a small trickle of orders on the site, and I made it clear those orders would ship after Kickstarter backers got their product, but it's clear to me that I should not continue accepting new orders at this time.

I'm feeling uncertain on the future of this project. I will absolutely ship hardware or refund all backers as desired. I have the hardware in hand, I just need to grind through the queue until it is all shipped. But after four years on this project I am feeling exhausted. I will not stop until I have shipped you your products, but I am unsure what I will do after that. The boards I have made are excellent for making hobby products and they're useful even without my support. On the rare occasions where I hack up a project for fun, I always use Flutter and really enjoy the form factor and features.

I started this whole project to learn what it would take to run a hobby electronics company, and had wild dreams of financial independence. The reality has been that I was not prepared for the amount and type of work that is required to do this. This project has educated and humbled me, but I long for whole weekends without work. I thought I would make money doing this, but instead have incurred great debt. I'm learning that I offer significant value as a salaried engineer, and enjoy the stability and relatively low stress of a normal work environment.

At a minimum I will keep supporting Flutter as an open source project and as a hobby project, but I wanted to share my current feelings of uncertainty. You all supported me in this, and I think it will help me feel better to share these thoughts.

Oh, and a small announcement: I will be changing the license for all Flutter code and hardware to a more permissive one. It is all of you who supported me for this work, and I want any of you to have full rights to use it how you'd like. I will be going to an MIT or BSD style license in the future, once I take the time to change all the licenses in the files. If you have a specific need for me to relicense the files now, please let me know.

As always I will keep shipping. It may continue to feel slow. But I know too the faster I do it, the sooner I can have an opportunity to take a breath and look at where we go from there.

Thank you for all your support in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. I look forward to getting everyone their orders in 2017.

And if you've made it this far, you may enjoy reading a post I wrote for my website. The post details a way I think automation can be used to help people become more independent. You can read it here: http://tlalexander.com/machine/

Flutter Update Dec 11 2016 - Action required to get your shipment.
over 7 years ago – Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 11:30:52 PM

Hey Flutter fans!

Got a quick update for ya.

• By tomorrow morning, we will have shipped another 73 packages. This brings us to 200 out of about 900 shipments since we started shipping in August.
• I've overcome some process issues on shipping and am ready to just execute.
• We have a new method for verifying your address or requesting a refund. Please see the section below under the header for details. You will not get a shipment or refund unless you complete this process.
• I've fixed our buzzer example. Backers with the Explorer board will want to check out the updated code on github. Our official repos are not updated yet, so please use the github link for now.
• Last weekend I hired someone from TaskRabbit to pack boxes and it made it much easier to prepare packages. I will continue to do this moving forward to speed up the shipping process.

Verifying your address or requesting a refund

In order to get your shipment, you need to do the following:

Please go to backerkit and look at the "Add Ons" section. You should see two new add-ons, "FULL REFUND" and "Address verification token". Pick one and add it to your order. If you add the refund to your order, we will not ship you anything and will begin issuing refunds after orders ship (all of our funds go to shipping right now). If you are ready for your order, please check your address to make sure it is correct and then add the "Address verification" item to your order. IF YOU PLAN TO MOVE SOON, hold off on doing this. It will take several months to process orders and I don't want your information to go stale. I will send reminders about this as we run low on verified addresses.

For the first 125 packages I manually verified addresses via email and it was very slow. This new process helps me verify your address without any labor on my part and makes it way easier to get your shipment ready.

Shipments will be a little slow in the second half of December but I expect to pick up the pace in January. I've got a clean process now without unnecessary labor and I can easily hire people via TaskRabbit to speed up the shipping process. So now we've just got to start banging out shipments.

That's all for now. Thanks!

Flutter Shipping updates Oct 2016
over 7 years ago – Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 07:35:12 PM

Hello glorious Flutter army,

Your leader is here for another update.

TL;DR:

• I've been packing boxes like crazy.
• 45 packages were shipped two weeks ago, all in the Adventure Time tier.
• 90 more are packed up and ready for shipping labels, and address confirmation emails have been sent out.
• We're setting up Amazon fulfillment so future orders do not require my involvement to ship.
• Shipping will take some time, but the pace is accelerating.
• Shipping all of the rewards appears to be a thing that will happen.
• I still love you.

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Shipping continues!

In September I started learning how to ship packages en masse. We started with just 15 packages shipped, and after a small detour improving our software setup instructions I'm back to shipping.

In October it's been all about packing boxes. I switched gears a little to the single highest volume reward tier, Adventure Time, with a pack and ship marathon. Two weeks ago we shipped 45 Adventure Time rewards, and 90 more are packed up and ready for address labels. I sent address confirmations last night, and the responses are flowing in. We'll have them all shipped by next week.

That will put us at 150 out of 1000 packages shipped, or 15% of remaining rewards.

I want to be clear... This is going to take some time. We've got a lot of packages to ship and my process is still pretty manual. I want this to be faster and I'm sure you do too. We are increasing our volume. We went from 15 packages in two weeks to 45 packages in two weeks and we'll do 90 packages in this two week block.

I'm automating bits here and there, and that's helping. On our first batch of shipments, I manually copied and pasted a bunch of stuff to confirm addresses. Now I've written a small python script that dramatically improves the time that takes, so I sent 100 confirmations last night in about 20 minutes.

So when I look at the numbers, it does feel like I am getting the shipping experience I need to keep ramping up orders. I'm pretty comfortable with the process as it is now. It could be automated more but perhaps I just need to brute force it. I've had a bunch of friends offer to help pack boxes so I think we'll have a shipping party soon.

A note to backers of high value rewards: previously I said I would ship your rewards first. As I looked at the numbers, it was clear that I could chip away at a large number of shipments more easily if I hit Adventure Time first. Moving forward we will alternate between high value and high volume rewards. I appreciate your patience as I learn this process.

In other news, I've been thinking about how to improve customer management. Right now when an email comes in, it just chills in my inbox. I'm not responding to everything as promptly as I would like, in part because I lack the process on my end to actually handle certain requests. Some people ask for refunds, some people offer to help, and I just lack any process to handle that. I have some thoughts on how to improve this, but they will take some time to implement. For now I hope you can bear with me on this, and know that I'm mindful of the need to better handle your requests.

I'm also working on setting up Amazon fulfillment. It's my goal to get Flutter shipping from stock in 2017, and that means two things. One, we will crowd fund another production run after existing backers get their shipments. The funding goal will be small and the campaign won't promise anything not already completed. The other thing I am working on is incorporating Flutter so we can use Amazon fulfillment. When that process is complete orders placed on the Flutter website will ship immediately from Amazon without my involvement in any way. That is critical to Flutter's future success as I cannot sustain the business manually shipping things. It does mean I spend some of my time on annoying administrative work (incorporating a business is a nightmare of paperwork, and I hate paperwork), but on the off chance you all like Flutter and want to order it again, it's super important that I do this.

So that's where Flutter is at right now. We're shipping. It feels slow. It's improving. It feels crazy but we have a clear path to fulfilling all of your rewards. I can't wait to get Flutter in your hands.

Love, Taylor

Also, I've become interested in factories as of late, and where our goods come from. Do you know where your clothes come from? Do you know anything about the people who produce the $5 shirts at H&M and WalMart? This video about efforts to implement a minimum wage for garment workers across 14 countries is super informative (warning, contains graphic imagery): https://youtu.be/PxFwA-jw3X4