Why We Cancelled Our Kickstarter Campaign (& Moving Forward)
To Our Community,
First off, we want to thank you for supporting us and believing in us. Whether you have been involved for the past week or the past year, we are eternally grateful for all you have done. You have been part of something that has changed the future of Augmented Reality. This is not an ending, in fact, it is just the beginning. We hope that you will stick with us as we progress on this journey together.
Your Account Has Not Been Charged
Kickstarter does not charge any Credit or Debit Cards until the end of a successful campaign. Since this campaign was canceled before it officially ended, your account has not been charged.
Why We Pulled Our Campaign
Cancelling the Kickstarter may come as a surprise to many of you. In the end, it was a tough decision, but it was a conclusion that we came to for three main reasons
- Even though we hit our monetary goal, we did not sell enough units to begin manufacturing. Realistically, four-hundred units is too many to make by hand, and too few to build in a factory. In retrospect we should have set our goal much higher to adequately reflect the quantity of products needed to begin manufacturing. Moving forward with OAK as it stands now would not be sustainable or responsible.
- We respect you. Too many crowdfunding campaigns ship late and too many are disappointing upon release. We want to give you the best possible experience for your money. To do so, we need to take what we learned and go back to the drawing board. In the end, this has been a challenging yet necessary step of our process.
- We have recognized our errors and heard your feedback. We have learned that we need to create deeper, more focused experiences and concentrate on a single app at a time. We now know that we need to release in smaller parts and iterate based on your feedback. We know that to be scalable, cross-platform and affordable we need to greatly simplify our hardware. We hope to keep building the future of mobile Augmented Reality, so we need your support.
Moving Forward Together
We love hearing from you, whether you backed OAK or not. Please keep giving us feedback. You can use this anonymous survey, post a comment on our Kickstarter page or email us at info@tonetree.co. Please continue to engage with our community and follow our progress on our Mailing List, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
This was extremely difficult for us. If you are upset, please know that you can reach out to us at any time. We know how you feel.
We have learned so much from OAK and from you. We would like to use this knowledge to build a better future and we hope you join us!
Rock On,
Brian Cook, Ronald Sardarian and Max Escaler, The ToneTree Team
