Hi All,
first time post in this forum, just thought I’ll chime in and cover it from our perspective, so you can have a Rashomon-type overview 
I started birdkids as a sole-proprietorship back in 2012, as a label first, 2015 with our first hardware product (TheBateleur VCO), and in 2021 finally as a properly incorporated GmbH (think LLC).
We’ve introduced OffGrid at the end of 2019 based on an early nRF Evalboard mockup playing “Bladerunner Blues” to get some resonance from people we were pitching the concept to. In fact I wrote the code myself in a giant Arduinoish Loop.
We had no idea whatsoever if a MIDI controller over BLE can be a thing, nor, as someone pointed out here, there’s a demographic for it. Truth be told, birdkids was never about market research, demographics studies, or the like… we engineer, design, manufacture locally and hand-assemble 200 VCOs, test them, ship them, talk to each client, shake their hand at exhibitions, have a beer … you get the idea, Mom & Pop style.
This was new, and the feedback we got was very encouraging. So my Partner (co-founder too) and I canceled any holiday plans we had for the year and like naive morons decided to run a crowdfunding campaign. It bombed. We had no clue that KS is all about 3rd party marketing companies boosting ads etc… ask Roli and Aritophone how they do theirs, it’s all paid advertising, very little magic or community euphoria as one would make you believe.
I guess you get the gist, we’re not really big business planners, we’re engineers, designers, and artists. But we do, dare I say, killer hardware (prove me wrong). Fast forward to Campaign 2, the one that ran successfully with 30% of the funds going to cover the platform, ad spend, and a consultant agency running newsletters.
The 70% leftover went into in-house developed Hardware/Firmware fully, the rest we financed ourselves to procure 2000 pcs of parts to cover 1400 (roughly, bit less) units pledged for with some error margin and a couple hundred to sell. Then the supply-chain meltdown meltdowned. It started slipping by a month, then three then 6 … you’ve read all about it, not gonna bore you.
Meanwhile, we’re sitting with 90k (eur) of functional Firmware, and north of 150k (eur) of committed supplies in production.
rough timeline:
We’ve closed the campaign in July 2020, components were ordered in April as a rough estimate.
August/September was supposed to be the first pilot run, October the 2nd batch, November first assemblies, December shipping, February 2021 first sales.
Fast forward to November 2021, the first complete set of components arrive, we jump to assemble and ship the first hundred units to backers.
Mind you, it’s all hand-assembled, every unit hand-calibrated and every sensor (and there’s plenty) actuated before a PASS from the testrig.
With roughly 9 months without any sales and just investments (mostly from our own pocket) - you can imagine generating income through sales is no longer something that is optional. It’s pure survival to stay afloat. And honestly if y’all gonna pull the “do the honorable thing” shtick, let me tell you it’s my partner, our only employee, and I that do all the work. With our kid growing up in the office just so we can assemble the units and ship one at a time. Not happy? Request a refund, we were offering those as early as November 2020. No questions asked.
So before a bunch of, what I’m assuming, guys behind an anonymous alias gather round in a forum and start judging us for desperately trying to survive this hell of two years, spend 10minutes, and read through our public updates which we take time to write and address what we’re going through.
We’ve reached out multiple times for consent from backers that we’re gonna open up a retail availability of some meager quantity of OffGrids to pay rent and bills. And we’ve always offered easy ways to exit with a full refund.
None of this was supposed to happen, and we hate the fact that we need to sell while fulfilling the campaign dues, but we have to. Sincerely hope none of you have to ever depend on others’ patience, because, honestly this is a nightmare reading through some of those entries.
If we’ve learned one thing from the pandemic, is that being kind and understanding of people’s challenges and what they might be going through, without judgement is a good skill. We’re learning, we’re listening, we’re working our butts off for love, for music and for something we commit our entire lives to. Every day for the past two years, no off days, no holidays, no salaries. And I’ve never been more proud of what we’ve achieved.
Remember, behind every company there are people. Reach out to us, and talk to us.
Sincerely,
Mike Beim
. But I think it’s worth remembering that they’re just a little misguided, a little upset, and probably lashing out due to a zillion other things the pandemic has forced us to feel out of control on. It sucks that you (and other folks working on projects they truly love) have to deal with that kind of shit.
No joke! I can imagine it’s probably hard since your company is small enough that you personally have to respond to and read customer correspondence, but have faith that you’re working on something that is really unique in the market and that there are many folks out there who aren’t screaming on the internet, but are just excited to make music with this thing.
Using it with Koala and Drambo on iOS has been a dream so far, and the latency is crazy! I never really thought I’d be able to play live unquantized input from a bluetooth midi controller.