You and me both lol – the shelves at Inovelli are filled with bulbs and bulbs only – I’m eating Ramen and Potatoes for dinner, standing on the street corner begging for change over here to keep things afloat!
Maybe $50k? I’ll throw in a free Inovelli polo!
Main reason is time + money. I know it’s embarrassing to say, but after seeing the Insteon announcement, I know we’re not alone in the struggling, so I’ll just put it out there.
This has been a very difficult couple years with supply chain, with late 2021 and early 2022 being extremely crushing. We still don’t have any leads from our Z-Wave manufacturer on when they can expect to get us enough chips. We managed to get some for our B2B customer, but none for ourselves. We’ve been sold out on Z-Wave switches for 6+ months, which means no income.
We’ve had to cut the team down to 4 of us, most of us working 60-80+ hours just to keep this ship afloat with the hope that ZigBee comes through. Every month that goes by with no switches means we keep cutting into our cash reserves, which luckily we’ve managed to keep along with some of our larger B2B clients PO’s.
But our bread and butter – you guys – we have nothing to provide other than bulbs, which no one really buys.
So, when the choice came up to pay an additional $25-30k and delay the project an additional 6-8wks, we made the decision not to pursue it right now as ultimately that’s like $80-100k worth of expenses (overhead + UL costs) and a potential miss of maybe $400-500k of revenue (I know pre-orders are open, but most people are more confident when there’s actual product in stock). Meanwhile, UL has been backed up and while they tell us an additional 6-8 weeks, I don’t trust them bc they’re shutting down entire cities in China (where UL is testing).
We expect the first batch to sell out in a few months and depending on how pre-orders go, we can get the second order before the first one runs out. I’m hoping that if we have a strong pre-order, we can use those profits to pay for the second UL listing and get that off the ground. Who knows, if you guys rally, and UL somehow pulls off the 6-8 week window, it may hit the first batch, but I didn’t want to promise it.
Hope that gives more context?
Trust me when I say from a marketing perspective (my background) it sucks to have to remove a feature and as someone who has a smart switch on an exhaust fan, I’d be semi-upset I couldn’t use it and would have to wait for a dedicated one, so I get it.
Yes, I’ve been using the 2-1 on my ceiling fan for a while now (just replaced it with the fan switch unit).
That’s the kicker – I’m kind of pissed about this bc they keep saying it’s a dimmer switch that can, “act” like an on/off switch, but the fact is we built in a hard, “on/off” that physically cuts the relay. On top of that, they’re making us get a fan speed UL rating? We aren’t even using it for fan speed.
I’ve explained this so many times, but I just don’t think they get it and/or have any prior examples of a switch like this, so they’re just trying to play it safe. I’m not sure.