5 ms·
The only reason I bought this initially is because the YC team made a comment like "we've been using this for a while and it's awesome". It made me believe they
by mrchess 12y ago
The only reason I bought this initially is because the YC team made a comment like "we've been using this for a while and it's awesome". It made me believe they had already done a lot of testing on the product, and that it was in production use.
After the first year it became clear the Lockitron was just an idea. I have no idea why the YC team made a testimonial for it as if it were a finished product.
The second year the e-mail updates were constantly "X is wrong and we are fixing it. We want to make the best product possible." Blah blah. Yeah, whatever.
What it comes down to is that Lockitrons entire campaign was misleading, from their website, to the YouTube videos, to the Kickstarter -- the entire company is smoke and mirrors. The company is really good at explaining why things are wrong, but is terrible at actually fixing them. My frustration stems from them constantly promising things, but missing their deadlines by months, and in this case, years. Not once, but several times.
I cancelled my order a while ago, the Lockitron brand is destroyed in my mind, and I have been hesitant to back any hardware projects ever since.
I really wanted to believe.
- sheetjs 12y agoOut of curiosity: if they weren't YC, would you be more or less skeptical of the claim? I'm wondering whether you bought it because you believed the team (based on your understanding of the problem and solution) or because you believed in YC
- goldenkey 12y agoI bought it because of YC comments. I was sorely disappointed when the wifi unlock did not work like it was stated because of the battery drain. I returned it and have just made my own with a wired arduino. Faster, instant unlock, and no batteries to worry about :)
- JacobAldridge 12y agoQuestion for you for goldenkey below: Do you mean YC or HN? The YC team, while growing, is still a fairly small collective of amazingly brilliant people. The HN team is, at the end of the day, largely anonymous people on the internet. (Albeit the most amazingly brilliant collective of largely anonymous people on the internet I've ever come across.)
- sbisker 12y agoProbably referring to this comment from pg, linked to elsewhere here in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4602821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4602821
- mrchess 12y agoYep, this was the comment. It made it sound like the product was in use for a long time and functioning well.
- JacobAldridge 12y agoThanks both for clarifying. I hadn't seen that link.
- maxerickson 12y agoIt likely was. The video here (linked below the pg comment) shows the more substantial hardware they had been using: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/lockitron-lets-you-unlock-your-door-with-your-phone/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/lockitron-lets-you-unlock-y... It would be nice if pg had said something closer to "I hope this new product works as well as the version we are using", but it's difficult to go back and try to figure out the context he would have been commenting in. The preorder page from that time does paint the picture of a well developed product, making declarations about all the things Lockitron does: https://web.archive.org/web/20121004125521/https://lockitron.com/preorder https://web.archive.org/web/20121004125521/https://lockitron...
- defen 12y agoThe whole thing sounds a lot like the WakeMate fiasco.