There have been some sensible questions in the comments and via email since our last post. One comment (which was deleted—we are profusely sorry for this; your feedback—good and bad—means a great deal to us, and it will be preserved and responded to publicly) did a nice job of summarizing them. First, the comment reproduced (abridged, to highlight key points):

…Units have shipped to mysterious people who bought it before you even had a website?….If you really had a production product that has already been shipped, you’d be completely moronic to not send it to Gizmodo/Engadget/etc…Logically this tells that says you don’t really have a product that has actually shipped – or at “best” you’ve shipped a crappy product…

The product used to be known as the “Wakesmart” (thewakesmart.com); this explains the issues relating to young domain age of wakemate.com. There was, in fact, an even older sign-up page prior to the creation of the current wakemate.com.

Addressing the rest of the points requires a bit of history.

As previously stated, we misjudged demand for this product. Having too many people wanting to buy your product is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Our original method for assembling and shipping devices simply wasn’t scalable in terms of cost and time. It was no longer good enough to get easily accessible parts, buy a few hundred or a thousand of them, and pay somebody to assemble them; time and expense would be too much.

So, we had to make a choice:

1. Plow through and use the old method anyway or,
2. Push back the first round to allow for a better, sustainable solution or,
3. Send out what we can now and focus our efforts on a long-term solution

We chose to get out what units we could at the time, and shift focus to swapping parts and getting bids and all the myriad other things that go into larger-scale manufacturing. Ultimately, the third option allowed for a best-of-both-worlds approach, but also made it easy for users to question our truthfulness, especially because we haven’t been transparent enough about our processes up until this point.

So, we could have sent units out to bloggers and reviewers, but it’s far more likely that a visitor referred by that site will buy a product that’s immediately available than one that’s on back-order for months. Most sites are only going to review us once; we’d rather wait until we’re shipping.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to be more active on the blog, publishing photos, screenshots, and videos of what we’ve been working on. Hopefully this will help assuage some fears that the product is “vaporware” and get our pre-order customers as excited for the next wave of shipments as we are.

I’m pretty new to the WakeMate team but I know our past reticence hasn’t done us much good; Wakemate will strive to be more open about its workings, and accessible to address your concerns. If you have further questions, please ask them in the comments. Thanks!