wakemate
Somehow, July is already here! I’m sure time isn’t going so quickly for those of you patiently (or dejectedly) waiting for your WakeMate, but it has certainly flown by for us! Given that our adjusted ship dates called for many more pre-order units to go out by the end of this month, we figured it’s about time for an update (okay, a bit on the late side even).
A lot has happened since April, besides what we’ve shown on the blog. To highlight, we’ve:
- Lined up a local manufacturing partner for faster turnaround
- Designed and implemented a new board layout that gives vastly improved Bluetooth performance as well as battery life
- Sourced all parts for said board
- Designed and prototyped a new wristband, currently in its final production revision
- Expanded and improved phone support
- Iterated on the Analytics site, making it more useful and eye-catching
- Dealt with regulation, Apple approval, packaging, etc.
So where does this leave us in terms of shipping by the end of July? We remain optimistic—if we don’t make it by month’s end, we’ll definitely get close. We’re addressing a couple minor snags but the hard problems have been solved and it’s now a matter of urging the gears of industry to turn more quickly; something they’re not accustomed to doing. In April, we felt it extremely conservative to say we’d be shipping by July 30th; as any new company can tell you, things never happen the way you think they will and we were no exception.
We’ve overcome a lot this year and learned a ton in the process. Many mistakes have been made, to be sure (I’m considering writing a book)—but through them we’ve been working tirelessly to ship the product we’ve promised and couldn’t be more psyched to finally see the finish line.
I have been with WakeMate for about seven months now, but Arun and Greg have been toiling on this idea for over two years. Although no money was ever collected from those who have pre-ordered Although only a small amount of money was collected (but not touched) from the pre-orders*, we’ve received many emails from people who reasonably thought they’d be getting their WakeMate in a timely fashion (or worse, thought we stole from them). Trust me when I tell you, nobody wants this product in your hands more than we do and we wanted it in them much sooner.
Finally, a special thanks to our Beta testers who have helped iron out bugs in the product these past few months; you’ve ensured we appear far less incompetent to everybody else 
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew
*the majority of pre-orders (> 80%), which were through Google Checkout, were never charged; the Paypal pre-orders, however, were.