Exactly, 170+ of us stupidly dropped $1000 on this vaporware, which was at the time of funding in Nov 2019 “ready for production” Mind you this was 3 months before Covid shut everything down. Why were parts not sourced? Why is the PCB still not finished?
It’s been years now of inconsistent communication and still no space bee! 
Erm, I think they do. The KS faq says:
When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers.
(Emphasis present in the KS faq)
If a creator is unable to complete their project and fulfill rewards, they’ve failed to live up to the basic obligations of this agreement.
The creator is solely responsible for fulfilling the promises made in their project. If they’re unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may be subject to legal action by backers.
There’s no guarantee that backers will receive exactly what they paid for, but it’s not true that the creator owes them nothing.
That people have dropped their money on a project which yes, was a risk, but it’s exactly because someone may fail that the risk exists.
That liminal state of no money and no promise of anything to show for it does suck. I cant say what degree of update is entitled, but persons should probably err on the side of more honestly communicating schedules when others have faith in them.
I’d forgotten about the kickstarter / money people had paid.
If I had paid money I’d be very frustrated too.
thanks Re5et
that’s been our main gripe, I’ve certainly entertained and purchased other synths during this ridiculous three year+ wait…
Please let this be a lesson to all, do some research on the team behind every KS project before committing fundage$. Do they have a history of on time delivery? Have they run multiple campaigns and fulfilled them previously? Etc.
back to waiting for superbooth and the invisible Bee
Yeah, I figured that was your angle in the pushback. I agree that there are indeed some projects that take time to get right that people find themselves emotionally invested in (performative GAS?)
But yeah, this one needed money up front and while I’m uninvested and may be missing the greater narrative, updates seem to have included some odd bikeshedding details that don’t explain how primary functionality is any more final for production, or why those are being prioritized over head-down focus on timelines.
A hopeful sign, i think.
I see that Superlative is exhibiting at the New England Synth Fest coming up.
And then after that they are scheduled. to show at Superbooth in May.
Yeah apparently there’s some good news coming here & at Superbooth, with Superlative poised to announce they’ll have the Space Bee ready for shipping by early 2027. 
I admire your optimism.
Will their Monolab ship first ?
ADDED : I guess they’ve burned their crowdfunding bridge, so with this new one they will need to self fund ?
New thread for Monolab.
This is quite exciting. SB-1 is apparently shipping soon, which is great news.
I tried it at SB today and found it very cool.
Build quality is top notch and even the small keys where surprisingly playable. I’m normally not too fond of mini or slim keys.
He said shipping in the fall and 1800 euros!
Their last Kickstarter update – one that was very encouraging – was on July 31st. Since then Superlative has been silent.
The last status was that they were done with the SB01, and that they were ready to manufacture and then ship it to the 200 backers in the Fall. They had shown the final prototypes at Superbooth and another show, along with a very finished looking and interesting new second product, the Monolab 1210.
And now … ?
Baffling.
Or completely consistent with the theory that they have zero expertise in any part of the process of designing, manufacturing, selling, and fulfilling an electronic instrument and simply assumed, looking in from the outside, that it would all be really easy.
Then the very first thing they try to do turns out to be really hard because turns out circuit design and testing is complicated (who knew?). But surely that was the only difficult part and it will be smooth sailing from here on out and we can write a reassuring post about how we’re back on track—
What? Firmware is complicated too?! Well, everything else will be smooth sailing and we can write a—
Wait. Is sourcing and assembly hard as well? Geeze, it’s like every part of this is a tricky process companies spend countless dollars building up institutional knowledge of through decades of experience. When does the easy part start? Surely manufacturing, packaging, shipping and fulfillment will be cake. Time to write a reassuring post…
I mean, I don’t know if any of this is true. So far as I know there’s been little explanation from within the project. But if one were looking for a theory to fit the pattern of behavior (using Hanlon’s razor as a guide), one could do worse.
And if it’s true, it kind of sucks that they seem to be learning all this in real time at backers’ expense. But that’s hardly unusual for Kickstarter, I suppose. And hopefully they’ll be able to take all these learnings and pour them right into their next project and make it less rocky.
Wow, this still isn’t out? I remember one of their reps(?) announcing to me at SuperBooth that this was (/would be?) the “world’s slimmest synthesizer”
I guess if it’s vaporware then…?
It’s not vaporware. ( At least by my definition of that. ) It was clearly there at Superbooth. Where it is now, is the question.
And while there have been worse on Kickstarter – outright swindles – the record there is mostly on the good side.
( Reference : The Crowdfunding – The Good the Bad & the Ugly thread )
There is still a better than snowballs chance with this though.
Ah true, I was more joking than serious, but I guess it does exist - I even played it with my own hands lol.
I learnt a lesson from somewhere I briefly worked - as soon as you allow for pre-orders, make sure there’s stock ready to start moving, the thinking here being that you want to capitalise on the initial buzz/hype of the announcement. I wonder what the state of play will be once the SB1 does actually start shipping. Din-Sync have done their 101 clone kit now, and there are more recently announced alternatives that achieve that 101 sound/feel on the market too.
Especially now with the significant bump in the SB01 price.
when you start a design, you need to design for what the competition will be when you ship, and that is a moving target. So you need to move as fast as you can while still having a very good product.
Superlative gave an update on January 3rd.
The plan is to begin manufacture in the spring. They do give some detail on specific changes.
It sounds like the non-volatile RAM change is to fix a design goof made much earlier. But the manufacturing test jig modification is much more the sort of unanticipated late problem that is part of design. The tiny circuit board photos at the bottom show both changes.
My feeling is this is actually going to complete, though we’ll see how close to spring this actually lands.
