Shipping 


Blue clip manufacturing hurdle is finally sorted, and we are working on scaling blue clips, assembling them and fulfilling them to you as new batches come back to us. Judging from the backlog of blues, this would likely take some time, but we will start shipping them out next week. 

Etching production has been slow, as the factory is not used to customization, and we have even written scripts to assist them and reduce room for mistakes, have been working out the process with them many times, with smaller batches, and should come to a scalable solution soon. 

 

Software update

 

Thanks to our testers' kind and patient feedback, for 4th update this week, it is a minor release focusing on stability issues and fixing crashes, as we prepare for a major algorithm upgrade in the 5th update next week.

Download link for IOS | Android, there will be an automatic push when the review has gone through

 

Reflection & What’s Next

 

Since the main manufacturing hurdle is almost over, I would like to share a reflection.  There are many things we did wrong, and thank you for putting up with us. The problem hardware startups face is much like that of independent filmmakers & Hollywood. As industry resources coalesce, (apart from a handful) most big players become contented with the safety of their bread & butter, leaving the innovation to 'nobody', at least until that ‘nobody' proves to them that there is a market for it. We are the ‘nobodies’ working with the spare capacity of the supply chain, the millennials speaking with the factory bosses and persuading them small volume production defects actually matter. The countless hardware startups that were liquidated in the past few years just dampen the interest from these factory bosses.

 

We are doing our best - for backers who received FOCI, you might have noticed a round little sticker. That little sticker is the real testament of the pain being “nobody” and wanting to deliver to you a quality product, as we have technically little control over these factories, other than 'gentle persuasion’ so each and every piece of the FOCI has been reviewed by a member of our team, and put a sticker to that we have reviewed each piece! This never happens anywhere else, because this degree of QC is the job of the factory, but as a ‘nobody’, this is the only thing we can do to ensure you can receive the quality matching up with big players. 

We are greatly indebted to you who have experienced significant delays and supported us, what we can promise is that there will be a few fold improvements lined up for the next half year, as we transit from hardware to algorithm & software focus. Together we can turn this little device into the best focus boosting technology the world has ever seen. And we have already seen promise from the feedback from some of our users. It is not perfect yet, and we can and will make it many times better in the next 6 months.

 

Best wishes,

Mick & The FOCI Team