January 22, 2010: "We've tentatively planned for the first batch of WakeMates to be shipped as early as next month."
March 11, 2010: "the first run of units will go out on March!"
March 31, 2010: "This is the last day of Q1 and we will be shipping out the first units today." (Maybe they did ship out a few? but I was a very early pre-order and didn't get one...)
April 1, 2010: "The next batch of units will ship no later [sic] July 30, 2010. Based on your pre-order date, you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner. This is a conservative estimate; we want to provide you with a firm date. We are confident we can deliver many orders sooner and will continue working night and day to ship yours as soon as possible."
July 20, 2010: "We may not hit the July 31st date at this point, but we’ll come close. We’ll post an updated ship date (measured in days or weeks at worst, not months) when we have a better idea of when it will be"
I believe they did ship a few dozen units out in Q1. I don't believe they lied in any of those quotes- at worst it looks like they'll miss their July 30 ship date by a week or so. That's not all that bad.
I haven't ordered a wakemate. I'm not the target market but I'm always amazed at the level of vitriol that follows their posts here on HN.
There is no doubt that their overall communication strategy is a bit "rough".
I'm always surprised and bit disappointed at the beating people give these guys here. This is a community of tech entrepreneurs who know how unbelievably difficult it is to ship product and a run a start up. I'm not suggesting everyone should get a free pass. I'm all for pointed thoughtful criticism but the verbal beatings seem unwarranted.
I agree that the community could be gentler with WakeMate, but my guess is the frustration comes because the pattern isn't changing. This community seems very forgiving of mistakes, but also expects you to learn from 'em.
If WakeMate is any good, it will end up being mission-critical for me. I've lost control of my sleep schedule and I can't move it backward because I just end up wasting a day due to tiredness and unable to keep it from slipping forward again.
I've wrapped on several occasions by pulling an all-nighter. It just keeps slipping forward to equilibrium. For concreteness, this has resulted in instances where I will awaken at 3 PM one day and 3 AM the next (36 hours later). Staying up extra-late so as to go to bed at a normal time and re-adjust just doesn't do it for me.
> But when you choose to use language like that, live up to it.
You've probably never built a product before. It's not that Wakemate is "not living up to it", it's that they're thinking, "My God, this was supposed to be out two months ago. Okay, what's the worst case scenario? Four months? No way it can take more than four months. Okay, let's tell people four months and plan to get it out in two months."
All kinds of shit goes wrong when you're building a new product. Now, if you'd said "be more realistic" or "be more pessimistic" or "get better at estimating", I guess I'd agree with you sort of. But one thing they can't do is "live up to it" by willpower - these are young entrepreneurs trying to get their product out and it's a parade of trivial things are stopping them from doing so. At least, that's what I'm guessing, having built stuff before. I promise, they're trying and feeling about 10,000 times more neurotic and disappointed than any cool exterior would show.
> But when you choose to use language like that, live up to it.
Nobody stood over them and forced them to make strongly-worded promises about firm shipping dates. They chose to use those words.
They had missed multiple ship dates in the past; they were certainly well aware of the gravity and customer backlash of making promises they couldn't keep. They were also certainly aware that this would take an order of magnitude longer than they thought. Instead of saying "We're sorry, we have no idea when we will ship these", they decided to make an announcement that they would absolutely positively ship me my product by that date, if not sooner.
The lesson here is that you don't give definitive dates unless you are the one controlling those dates (for instance, waiting for a particular event to ship the product that is sitting in your warehouse).
WakeMate wasn't, so they shouldn't have worded things that strongly. Never underestimate the number of things that can go wrong.
After spending 8 months wading through the MFI program myself, I concur that it's messy and poorly managed - I'm not surprised that this is part of the reason for the delay. Keep at it, I look forward to mine!
Hey thank for the encouragement! IMO the authentication chip has some details that are very poorly documented (and as a result gave me months of headaches). if you want to talk shop anytime please feel free to drop me a line at: craig <at> wakemate <dot> com. would love to have another hardware developer working on apple auth to chat with...
Wakemate: I could design you a silicone bracelet and have renderings today, a rapid prototype tmrw, a prototype silicone part made off a cast of the RP in a few days, make changes as desired, then get them tooled and start shipping parts by next month. Just, you know, if your into that sort of thing :)
Haha thanks for the offer! We've been thinking about offering different models of wristbands down the line. If you could send me an email (contact[at]wakemate[dot]com) we'd love to talk.
Yep, 50-70 durometer silicone, any color. Cost varies widely depending on how many you want to make, how complicated the tooling is, the number of parts per tool, cycle time, how much material the parts use, how detailed your logo/features are, mold finish... From $1500-$75,000 for tooling and $.05-$1 pp.
Sometimes I'll forget to turn the A/C on in the summer and I'll wake up drenched in sweat. The new wristband looks like it will soak up an awful lot of sweat and probably start to smell rather funky after a while. Is it washable?
If not, is the monitoring device removable so I can fasten it to my own elastic wristband? I'm thinking along the lines of a FitBit style component that I can clip to my LiveStrong bracelet?
I am very, very curious about this as well. It is something I hadn't thought about until you mentioned this, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they haven't though of it either. At the very least, giving early adopters a free upgrade to the washable version when it is available would be good.
Luckily, there probably won't be a significant amount of summer left once we get the thing.
I would say its a multiple of degrees less 'designed' or 'professional' ...
I still want my pre-order as long as it will ship working with android.
p.s. You need to use your current iteration on your homepage photo; cause the one you have on there now and your current iteration have very very low correlation imho.
Original wristband: too big, too heavy, not something I want to wear to bed and the electronics bulge out too far.
New wristband:much smaller, much lighter, made of "pillowy" material and hides the electronics.
Overall it is a much more comfortable wristband and a much better user experience.
While the original may have been a little "flashier" we did not want to sacrifice UX for looks, especially when you are only going to be wearing this to bed.
As for our homepage - we need to get the final version of the wristband photographed and then we will be implementing a full design change of our homepage.
Good point, post edited. We've learned during the industrial design process that concept drawings can be difficult to realize. The wristband is close to being something we are very happy with.
I'm not one of the pre-order customers, but I'm curious if the bracelets are washable, or how they can be cleaned. It seems like it'd need to be laundered just like sheets if you're wearing it every night.
So, you're reasonably confident that you'll hit your deadline or come close to it, but your shipping schedule depends entirely on the actions of another company (Apple) who is known for being slow to approve things like this? How does that work?
Correct. If it's really true that 75% of the dev time has gone into the Apple chip (i.e., iPhone compatibility if I understand it correctly), they could've shipped... what, in March? Screw iPhone then for the first version.
They asked pre-orders what phone they wanted to use the device with, so it's not out of the question that they knew that "screw iPhone" was out of the question.
When WakeMate is finally released, I'd be interested in reading a retrospective by the founders on what they learned, and on what checks/changes to their development approach they have made for version 2. As they are discovering, development with a physical, hardware component can be very different from pure internet startup development. Hopefully any other YC startups with a hardware component are taking note.
I'd still like to buy a WakeMate, once it's proven itself, but I'm rather glad I didn't pre-order.
"As far as we’re aware, no commercial product has made use of Apple’s authentication 2.0B coprocessor chip over Bluetooth yet so we’re not surprised by the number of strange issues we’ve encountered."
Is this why there is a dearth of iPhone/iPad accessories? How much can they talk about their experiences given the fact that the protocol is under an NDA?
Yes! I'm interested in developing i* accesories too. There doesn't seem to be much out there about it. (I have seen the Microchip and Cypress dev kits; probably going to pick up a few.)
I (and many other HN readers, I'm sure) have had this idea plenty of times. If you wake up in one of those bad regions, you really are so much less productive. I'm glad someone is building this. Once it looks like the kinks are out, I'm ordering one for sure.
not exactly similar. Our product uses Actigraphy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy), which is a different method (and in our opinion much less obtrusive) for measuring sleep phases than the Zeo which uses a headband. Also, our unit is wireless and automatically uploads your data to our web server with very little user input (besides setting the alarm before going to bed).
Is there some specific reason they worked so hard to make it sync with the iPhone over bluetooth? as opposed to, say, syncing with your laptop over bluetooth, or just make the thing log data and then sync to a computer via USB. Is it purely the sex-appeal of having an iPhone related product?
when iphone users make up the majority of your preorders (and supposedly market), then yes it does matter. if we had just launched for Blackberry and Android, we would not be having these delays...
Congratulations WakeMate on making it this far. I fully understand how very hard it is to create a hardware product, it takes much longer than you expect to get to the great quality level that hardware requires.
Unlike the ship dates, that aspect of the product has been very consistent for months, yes. (It's not entirely clear whether you have to keep the app running, but you probably do, and the bracelet is the whole point.)
Hmm, it just occurred to me that my iPod touch battery is not in the greatest shape, so Wakemate might cause me to have to leave a computer on during the night to power the iPod, which seems counterproductive to sleeping well. Might have to buy a wall charger. (got it refurb, so it didn't come with one)
January 22, 2010: "We've tentatively planned for the first batch of WakeMates to be shipped as early as next month."
March 11, 2010: "the first run of units will go out on March!"
March 31, 2010: "This is the last day of Q1 and we will be shipping out the first units today." (Maybe they did ship out a few? but I was a very early pre-order and didn't get one...)
April 1, 2010: "The next batch of units will ship no later [sic] July 30, 2010. Based on your pre-order date, you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner. This is a conservative estimate; we want to provide you with a firm date. We are confident we can deliver many orders sooner and will continue working night and day to ship yours as soon as possible."
July 20, 2010: "We may not hit the July 31st date at this point, but we’ll come close. We’ll post an updated ship date (measured in days or weeks at worst, not months) when we have a better idea of when it will be"