from Hacker News

Keyboardio Kickstarter Day 1278: A startling discovery

by paulannesley on 12/16/18, 8:12 AM with 85 comments

  • by stevewillows on 12/17/18, 6:55 AM

    A few years ago I was going to start a line of thick notebooks, 5mm lines on the right, and 5mm grid on the right. There were some other simple features --- and if all went to plan it would have been nice.

    After a few months of chatting with different manufacturers it became clear that I had to be on-site to properly verify the materials used. Something as simple as 'light grey linen' would yield completely unpredictable results from the various agents.

    The run I was going to do was fairly small -- about 3000 or so --- so it didn't make sense for me to travel. Instead I shelved the project.

    Regardless, for items with any sort of customization, I can only imagine that its nightmare after nightmare as the client (me) aims to get the ideal product, while the manufacturer tries to maximize profit (etc.)

    Prior to this experience I never considered backing a Kickstarter project, but now that I've gone through the most basic level, I'm not surprised with the amount of projects that fail due to location and language barriers.

  • by kreetx on 12/17/18, 6:32 AM

    Quite a few negative comments in this thread. Shouldn't the attitude be: very good job on the transparency front!! Everything else doesn't matter -- or rather, it does (filling all tge orders, etc.), but the high morals I find most interesting in this case.

  • by milani on 12/17/18, 5:18 AM

    I have a similar experience manufacturing a kickstarter hardware in China. Although we could ship with a few months of delay, we lost $9k.

    Our story was a bit different. We first got to know about factories through a hardware service provider and consultant firm. We decided to continue with two well-known factories, one for molding and the other for pcb and assembly. At some point, we paid $9k to start the final injection. Our project manager in the molding factory made up a story that their email were hacked and someone had intercepted the invoices and that we had paid to a wrong account! He knew we could not follow up the story as we were under pressure and investigating the issue could delay the production for at least a year.

    We paid again, this time with a lot of double confirmations in each step. A lot more problems occurred after that. The final quality of the product was different from what we expected and from what we controlled in the factory. So we did not continue with them.

    These factories have no control over their staff. There should be multiple points of contact to avoid these problems. Overall, hardware is hard and manufacturing in china is even harder.

  • by jimpudar on 12/17/18, 4:19 AM

    I backed Keyboardio in the initial round of funding, and now use the Model 01 every day. It is truly an incredible product!

    I've been extremely impressed with Jesse and Kaia's transparency throughout the whole process. I'm sure they will come out on top of this.

  • by shiftpgdn on 12/17/18, 3:34 AM

    Honestly this should be required reading for anyone who's motto is "just source it from Alibaba."

    There is a good reason most companies who choose to manufacture in China tend to co-locate a person within the manufacturer's facility.

  • by teraflop on 12/17/18, 4:05 AM

    My takeaway from this article: anyone who's planning to manufacture products in China should have at least a few employees who are fluent in Chinese.

    You can outsource many things, but you can't reliably outsource communication.

  • by starky on 12/17/18, 4:24 AM

    Most of these problems read as someone that didn't do their due diligence when it came to auditing the factory and getting all the required information about the business before engaging with them in business.

    As soon as there were any issues with the payments and shipping, the owner of the factory should have been involved, even if he doesn't speak English, a translated email or WeChat message will be good enough to get the ball rolling.

    This is another example of why I would never support a hardware project on Kickstarter, building stuff in China is hard, and it is nearly impossible to know whether the company you are "pre-ordering" from has any experience in Chinese manufacturing. They got lucky that it was all able to be sorted out, but it shouldn't have ever gotten to this point.

  • by megablast on 12/17/18, 10:00 AM

    > When Jesse told him a bit about what was going on, he revealed that a couple months back, our account manager had called him up to say that she was travelling internationally, had lost her wallet and needed him to loan her some money so that she could get a flight home. When Jesse asked if he’d paid, the wood supplier said that he told her that it was wildly inappropriate to be asking a suppliers for personal loans, and that she ought to ask a close friend or family member instead. He may be the only person in this whole story who didn’t get conned by our account manager.

    Is this a cultural thing? Why were people in the factory lending her money? So weird.

  • by stirlo on 12/17/18, 5:51 AM

    I find it amazing that they visited the factory multiple times and didn't notice this. They never spoke to anyone/took a meeting with the owner who hadn't been paid? They never noticed anything unusual in the way they were treated as "broke/deadbeats"?

    None of their drivers/guides/factory workers with high school english were able to tell them something was wrong? They never offered to take the owner out to lunch and discuss the issues?

    They say day 1278 that's an over 3 year relationship, it boggles the mind they were no naive and dependent on one person.

  • by baybal2 on 12/17/18, 10:22 AM

    I'm working in an engineering consultancy in Shenzhen, feel free to have a mini-AMA with me.

  • by lgleason on 12/17/18, 6:26 AM

    Here's a thought. Manufacture in the US. Given the losses that they are having this would have saved a lot of hassle and it probably would have cost the same for the size of runs that they are doing. Kinesis makes the Advantage in the US because the volumes are not high enough to produce them overseas.

  • by cellularmitosis on 12/17/18, 9:34 AM

  • by sdan on 12/17/18, 4:52 AM

    Good lesson for all. Sad that you found out through first-hand experience.

  • by philliphaydon on 12/17/18, 8:10 AM

    Does anyone here on HN have the keyboard? Did you go from a traditional keyboard to the split one? How is it?

    I've never seen this KS project but it looks interesting.

  • by catacombs on 12/17/18, 2:36 PM

    What's the disadvantage of using an American factory? Too expensive?

  • by egypturnash on 12/17/18, 4:47 AM

    Holy crap.

  • by potatofarmer45 on 12/17/18, 10:43 AM

    If you're going to build a business around selling a hardware keyboard, finding a middle-man account manager for your primary manufacturer is just plain lazy.

    The real takeaway is that these founders seemed happy to simply have an account manager "who had influence within the company", "spoke english"... A good scammer gives you what you want. If you are building hardware, you should not want to be able to outsource such an important aspect of your business.

    Take for example "we sent 20 defective units back so they could study and improve xyz". It turned out they were in an unopened box. I don't get how they didn't follow up to work on why they were defective, what is being done, and the lessons learnt. Just saying "nobody speaks chinese" is just a plain lazy out.

    The founders seem genuinely nice and passionate, but they have to get their heads out of their aes. They really should NOT be looking for a middle person because there is so much to learn by directly working with relevant people in a factory. It's a really bad sign for people who buy these keyboards to know that the actual manufacturing part- where quality control is done etc, is not a priority.

  • by thenewewb on 12/17/18, 4:39 AM

    This reads to me like Keyboardio is lying and blaming it on “business overseas.”

  • by appleiigs on 12/17/18, 5:17 AM

    That was a bit too detailed and rambling, so I skimmed it. Some missing info: 1) Will all the backers receive the products they paid for? 2) Losing $100K seems large in comparison to their kickstarter revenue of $650K. Are new customers safe to order?

    I also don't get this logic: "On the other hand, Kaia pointed out to Jesse the other night that this actually makes her more confident about our ability to manufacture products in China in the future."

    Nevertheless, running a small business is hard. I don't judge them too harshly. When you are small potatoes, you also deal with other small potatoes who could be incompetent (the factory owner is also blame here). You also don't have the resources to micro-manage (ie. have someone in China all the time).