I've been told by a few people that the previous post was a little too tl;dr-ish -- so I'll summarize the biggest points as best I can (while the timeline and all the nitty-gritty details are still fresh in my head).
Jaxx, please correct me if I am wrong on any of this:-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-You
quit your job in late 2019 (that
wasn't paying enough) in order to switch gears to Mint Autumn full-time - your wife later
quit her job as well, at some point in 2020. So you're already down two incomes during this GB from early on.
-Shortly after the R2 GB ended in May 2020,
you paid an overseas manufacturer for 500 boards with the crowdfunded money for R2 and was quoted a delivery time of August/September 2020. In the meantime, you had taken out
two business loans so you could finance an UHMWPE injection molding setup for a planned
R3 run in
January 2021 right after R2 was expected to finish.
-The R2 GB itself was priced on the assumption of using this overseas manu, which was
not priced high enough to leave any overhead or profit as-it-was.
-And yet, in response to a boat-shipping delay from that overseas manu involving a partial batch of 150 keyboards,
on 12/12/2020 you opted to take on an even more difficult and costly option of making the boards yourself without any kind of stated refund or halted/stopped production from the manu -- with your reason for this shift being that you wanted to get people their boards sooner.
-You mentioned that the in-house Rukia R2 production was financed via those
business loans (which you still have to pay back - with interest - using additional funding outside of R2), but again those had been already slated/allocated for making products out of UHMWPE for R3 which was no longer running and therefore not bringing in revenue.
-You claim to be
taking on extra contract work (creating stuff using the same machines you're using for Rukia) in order to pay for the equipment leases, building leases, electricity, and material costs involved in the in-house production of these boards - in other words, you are claiming to be financing all the production of all these boards yourself out of pocket.
-At some point after March 2021, you opted to
get a lawyer involved to take on the
herculean, expensive, and effectively impossible task of pursuing legal action against an overseas manufacturer to
seek compensation for
"money lost while waiting" for the boat shipment. You also say this meant no more production from the manufacturer, but didn't mention if there was any kind of partial refund for units not yet produced. It also calls into question why you didn't ask to stop production months prior.
-You also claim that the overseas shipment was
damaged by box-cutters at customs. But you
won't share any pics or talk about what happened.
-And you claim to be making and storing these keyboards
in a SCIF where you can barely even take pictures - a SCIF that slipped your mind
when you moved in and when you were talking about
streaming your in-house CNC process previously.
-Back in
May 2021 you had quoted a 2 week ETA to begin shipping. Things were apparently very close to completion, implying that somehow there were tons of boards + PCBs ready to go.
-But as it turns out, you never actually got around to prototyping/ordering PCBs as of
June 2021 - even later as of
August 2021 (which calls into question the
numerous ETAs you released over time prior to that, stretching way back to late 2020).
-As of today (10/27/2021), roughly 1.5 years into this GB, there's been no real or substantial physical evidence that anything exists as-claimed. Overseas boards, in-house boards, PCBs, the
kits supposedly sent to a few customers, etc.
