by brian m » Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:19 am
Just let me jump on this landmine for a minute...
So I don't remember offering or selling a Quasar DLX for $340. I know I said that in my youtube message. I think the most we asked for one was $325, and that was for the last brand new unblemished one. I understand that the $ difference is only $15, but I just don't remember this conversation. We had it on ebay and after it didn't sell I decided we would hang onto it. I still had and ugly one around, but wanted to keep a nice looking one too. As far as I've seen people are asking over $300 for the purple ones when they come up for sale.
I'll admit that when it comes to new pedals we've had some negative experiences that have led me to sometimes holding those cards close to the vest. Perhaps to the point of mild paranoia. The worst case was the original Quasar DLX when we let the cat out of the bag months in advance without having any solid ETA let alone an idea when it would be finished. We got inquiries from dealers trying to order them. I told them we'd let them know when they were ready. When it was ready we went out emails to all of our dealers at the same time. Some had taken our earlier informal conversations and emails as being first in line. We filled the orders in the order they were received just like we always had. It stirred up a stupid amount of drama. There were canceled orders, and we even lost a couple of dealers over it. Similar, although not as extreme things happened with the Noisebox and the original Prometheus, but since the Quasar incident we've been hesitant to let cats out of bags if I think there is a chance of things getting too hyped up before a pedal is released.
Another part of this story-
On the new Quasar DLX, our original plan made over the summer was to make a pedal with similar formfactor to the starlight V2. 9 waveforms, 2 envelope functions, but no tap tempo and really no intention of being a DLX replacement. Tom (who does most of our MCU coding) and I had been talking about it for a couple of years, and we'd solidified plans for what was supposed to be an early December release date.
In order to make it all work I had to stuff a ridiculous amount of parts into a 1590B enclosure. Some of the IC's we planned to use were fine pitch SMD and we couldn't solder them by hand. We'd have to outsource that. We were looking at getting rectangular holes milled for slide switches. We were way behind because I'd not given Tom the green light on finishing up the code, and I'd had to redraw the PCB several times. After stepping back a bit I realized this was going to end up being a $250ish pedal rather than the $180-200ish I'd intended. I'd already made some compromises to make it all fit in the small case and I wasn't super happy with the tone. I thought the envelop function sounded stupid. This was when I started to think to my self -Why in the hell don't we make the DLX anymore?- We'd previously invested a year and stupid amounts of money in developing the MCU code and we weren't using it at all. I ended up staying late one night and drawing up a DLX PCB design with the non-simplified phaser circuit I'd intended to use in the smaller case. I ordered prototype PCBs, but I wasn't really committed to the DLX until I played the two side by side. It just made the smaller phaser sound like a toy. I don't know the exact date, but I think that was early/mid December.
Anyway, Comesect2.0, I'm glad you got my message. I'm never sure if anyone on youtube actually reads their PMs. It wasn't clear to me from your YT comment if you'd bought the pedal or not.
Also I'm going to delete the comment on youtube now that I know you've heard back from me. I know you edited it to not be as bad, but I still don't think it's appropriate.
To anyone else regarding emails - We've had some times in the past when we've been very prompt and others when we've been less responsive. This was especially true when I had other people handling support. That's not to blame them. Usually they'd have to come to me for anything requiring deeper explanations or information that they just didn't know. Since summer of 2015 I've been handling all support. 95% of the time I answer emails within a day or two. For the last week or so I've been neck deep in wrapping up the new proteus design, helping brandon work on a new fuzz. I've been sick and slept on the couch in the front office most of Thursday. Sometimes in a week we'll get 5-10 emails. No big deal to catch up on those usually, but from this last week I have about 40 emails in the backlog. I'm still at work and I'm staying until I'm caught up. It's not something I don't take seriously, but I will admit when I'm overwhelmed it's something I'll put off for a few days. This happens rarely, but it does happen.
I've come to realize I can teach people about electronics. I can show people how to use software. I can kind of instill some workflow habits, and show people how to build stuff, but I've not been able to teach anyone to handle product support properly.
There have been a few other problems in the past-
Our website- Our email form generates an email through our website that is then sent to us via wordpress. I don't remember the exact dates, but there was a time last year when a some of the emails would get stuck as unpublished posts in wordpress and never show up in our inbox. It took us a few months to realize this was happening. Once we noticed the problem I went back through the posts and replied to all of them. It took a while longer to actually fix it. It's still kind of a bandaid plugin fix, but as far as I can tell nothing is getting stuck anymore. Currently working on a revamped website that should alleviate the problem entirely.
I can't use IMAP at home. I've solved this simply by only replying to emails at work. We have comcast at work and at home, but for some reason IMAP just doesn't work correctly at home. When I sent replies from home they wouldn't show up as 'replied to' on my computer at work. Drafts and sent emails wouldn't save either. This left me going by memory whether or not I'd replied. It also didn't leave me with a record of what I'd said either, which was also a problem, but mostly for dealers, not support.