No good news yet.
over 9 years ago – Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 11:05:49 PM

Hey Backers,

This project is long overdue for an update. Thank-you to those who asked for one kindly!

Unfortunately there isn’t much in the form of good news…

The Police have yet to press charges. Although David admitted to everything on camera, he is not talking to or cooperating with the police. Kickstarter is being responsive to the Police and has advised that they obtain a warrant through MLAT (mutual legal assistance treaty) so that Kickstarter can give the police information without breaking their privacy policy. This is the best kickstarter can do, and I find it very respectable that Kickstarter sticks to their privacy policy. After all, the world would be a scarier place if companies volunteered such sensitive information to any police force on earth without due diligence. I dont think its Kickstarter’s place to do any more... Can you Imagine how much more of a cut they would have to take if they started fighting legal battles every time a campaign went sour? In this case I believe a crime has been committed, and therefore it is the police that have the budget and the authority to do something about it.

Since the last update we’ve had to shut down operations almost entirely. Shortly after I broke the news I was working on multiple investment deals, none of which panned out. The company was no longer able to afford rent at the headquarters, so everything has been moved to storage. All of the employees have been let go, and my brother and I have both had to find other work to make ends meet. That being said, I am still working on Peachy Printer in my spare time. I have tried all kinds of things to get this company back on its feet. I’m not going to quit. I still want to bring this project to a better end than this, although right now I’m not sure how I will do that.

Until next time,

Rylan Grayston.

Inventory Video, Survey Results, and More...
about 10 years ago – Fri, May 27, 2016 at 12:29:27 AM

Dear Backers,

Some of you have asked to see proof of our inventory, so the other day we grabbed the camera and rummaged through all of the parts we have here in the Peachy house. Of course, we got talking and it turned into a fairly in depth look at manufacturing processes and other behind the scenes tidbits, so it’s a very long video…

FCAA Investigation

We have since met with the investigators from the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority - Consumer Protection Division. They spent most of last Wednesday with us at the Peachy house hearing the story, checking out the shop and packaging facility, and seeing the printer work. We also provided them with documents relevant to their investigation.

Survey Results

Since we came forward with the news, nearly 1000 of you have responded to the survey. Here are the results:

While many of you showed interest in the idea of running additional campaigns to raise funds for a lawsuit or reward delivery, the majority of responders feel that I should wait and let the police do their thing. As a result, I will not attempt to crowdfund a lawsuit or the delivery of rewards at this time. I’ll go with the majority vote, let’s see what the police do. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Of course, I’m continuing to explore other avenues, and I’m currently in talks with some investors. Unfortunately I don’t have the funds to pay for a lawsuit, but if there’s a lawyer out there who’s willing to take the case pro-bono, I’d love to talk. One thing is certain, I will continue to respond to your questions and concerns, and do my best to bring this to the most satisfying end with the resources I currently have. Hopefully the future will bring about a more fortunate situation…

Many of you have offered to put in a little more money to get your printer. If we were past laser and CE certification this would be a fairly easy and low cost solution for the first 600 printers. Unfortunately this is not the case, but there may be some options… We are considering a number of plans in this area and if we determine them to be viable we may come forward with another survey. I can see that this may be a way for a small portion of backers to receive their kits.

Lastly I'd just like to thank you guys for all the comments, whether you have said supportive things or not, the comments play a major role in where I decide to steer this ship next.

That’s all for today,

Rylan Grayston.

Uncut Print Demo and More...
about 10 years ago – Tue, May 17, 2016 at 12:38:32 AM

Dear Backers,

We’ve taken note of your desire for us to drop the fancy videos and take a raw, off-the-cuff approach, so that’s exactly what we did. Many of you have asked for a full, start to finish, uncut print demonstration, nothing fancy… Here it is:

We’ve never done a video like that before simply because we didn’t think anyone would be interested in watching long, rather uneventful videos. In this case, we completely understand it’s value. I appreciate that it’s important to think critically. If you have doubts about the printer being real, then it’s our job to prove the work we’ve done. I hope that this along with our recent move to publish our work helps remove some of the skepticism around the project.  Also not that using pop bottles is simply the cheapest way to make a peachy printer, you can certainly make yours look much nicer. 

In our next update I will do a video of me going through our inventory of parts.

In other news, today I was pleased to learn that the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority will be conducting an investigation! I spoke with Eric Greene, Director - Consumer Protection Division, and we are arranging for an investigator to come and meet with us. This is extremely good news.

Now let’s talk about some of your other questions and concerns...

What about all the other money you raised?

Peachy Printer continued to raise funds at various times after the original KS & IGG campaigns.  To date the total amount of received funds - less the various fees and the stolen funds - are just shy of $1,150,000.00

So, where did all of that money go? Largely to the development of the various rewards offered during our campaign. As we mentioned before, getting the Peachy Printer to work as well as it does now took a long time - a lot of man hours.

We also spent a portion of those funds on ordering components for printer delivery, setting up our manufacturing & packaging facilities, actually manufacturing printers, and finally, certification. As mentioned in the Report of Received Funds section in the Executive Summary, we have yet to finish our books for the 2014/2015 Fiscal Year. An expense chart for that period is not available yet, but we will certainly provide that when we can.

Many of you may think that it’s absurd or unnecessary to have spent so much on developing this product. I once had that same naivety, which is part of why we consistently missed our delivery estimates. The fact is that hardware development is a long, hard road with many unexpected twists and turns - especially when dealing with difficult design constraints - we had to get this thing working while maintaining our $100 price point. The goal of creating a $100 3D printer, not only for our backers, but for the world was central to the campaign. We’ve done that work. I think any veteran of hardware R&D would look at our spending and development time and say this is normal.

I did not intend to shy away from the fact that we’ve raised a lot more money. Rather, I felt that it would simplify an already complex story if I just focused on the Kickstarter funds. That is the pool of money that the theft occurred within, so I focused on that while telling the story.

I apologize if that has caused additional confusion concern.

Based on the files you released, it looks like there was a fair bit of feature creep and dead ends.

Dead ends? Certainly. Most notably, we spent a lot of resources pursuing the audio approach. In the end, digital turned out to be the right choice. While it’s unfortunate that we didn’t realize that sooner, that is the natural course of hardware R&D. You put resources into design directions and some of them turn out to be dead ends. Although, that doesn’t mean that no value was gained from those efforts. We’ve learned valuable lessons from our failures.

Feature creep? Not really. The amount of time and effort that was put into additional features or products is very minimal in comparison to the Peachy Kit. It was by far our main focus. Things like the z-axis print base system may seem like feature creep on the surface, however it proved to be a valuable tool in troubleshooting. By eliminating the drip system from the equation, we were able to determine that it was the true source of many issues.

What’s with the video?

It’s become staggeringly clear that we took the wrong approach with the main video that introduced this problem. Unfortunately, many people found it to be unbelievable, disingenuous, and downright cheesy. There have also been concerns about the high quality of production. I can assure you that just like all of our update videos in the past, this was a very low budget, in house production. We have never outsourced that work to a production company.

Lastly I would like to apologize for something...

I am extremely sorry that I ever let my Kickstarter campaign be set up in such a way that this problem could occur. Although I didn’t steal the money, I’m still accountable for this project. I don't expect anyone to let me off the hook. I still think it is my responsibility to do everything I can to deliver printers and bring this project to the best possible outcome. I’m not sure how this will turn out but I will be here to play my part.

Rylan Grayston.

Addressing Your First Questions & Concerns
about 10 years ago – Thu, May 12, 2016 at 12:04:01 AM

Dear Backers,

I have been reading your comments. This update is a response to the questions and concerns that have been raised about our previous update. If you have not yet read Update #64, I recommend doing so thoroughly before reading this one.

As requested by many of you I have published all 26 of Peachy Printer’s Git repositories which includes all of the source code and design files associated with the project.  Our Bill of Materials will be added to Peachy's Github shortly, we're taking some time to double check the information and ensure that it's accurate and up to date. There are a few more repositories available on my personal Github account as well, many of which are relevant to Peachy Printer.  Having said that, please note that much of our work - such as the software that runs the printer - has been publicly available for a long time.  I hope others are able to get value out of the work we have done.

I have began updating the FAQ section on our website, which I will continue to update as comments roll in. I’ve also posted what I’ve written so far below:

Frequently Asked Questions and Comments

You should’ve contacted the police immediately

After finding out, I immediately sought legal counsel and followed their advice to pursue repayment. After losing faith that David would repay in time, I found new legal counsel. I then received different advice - go to the police - and that’s what I did. We reached out to the police in October of 2015.

Unfortunately, the sergeant that was initially assigned the case retired just a couple months afterwards.  This resulted in a sizeable delay in progress due to the turn over process.

You should’ve told backers immediately

Telling backers about this right away would have ruined any chance of you getting your printer. It would have started a war between me and David while he still had power in the company. I wish I could have found a way to talk about it sooner and personally, I wanted to, but I put my personal feelings aside and did what I thought would get you a printer. Not talking about this publicly undoubtedly got us much closer to shipping printers. Given what I knew at the time I think I did the right thing. At the end of the day if you never get your printer then perhaps I did the wrong thing, but one thing is for sure... I did my best.

You need to open source all of the code, design files, etc.

We have published our entire git repository which is home to all of the design files and iterations of those files. Our official build instructions did not get finished, however we did publish a rough instructional video months ago. Much of this work has been available for a long time.

Why isn’t David in jail, why hasn’t his house been sold, etc.

These potential outcomes are not ones that can be accomplished quickly, nor are they enforceable by me. I have reported this to the police, and have acted within the recommendations of my legal counsel up until this point.

You need to sue David

I currently don’t have any funds to pay for a lawsuit.

Can’t you just ship us the parts that you do have?

There are 3 reasons we cannot do that:

- Much of what we have purchased are raw materials like 4’x8’ ABS plastic sheets. Even though some of these materials are stocked in full quantity, they still need to go through manufacturing processes that involve manual labour - that costs money that we don’t have. In fact, we’ve had to lay all of our employees off.

- We are required to get a licence from various governments to ship lasers or any laser related products to the vast majority of our backers. Since the circuit is a laser power supply and controller we cannot ship it or the lasers until we finish laser certification.

- We don’t have the money to cover the labour and overhead costs of manufacturing and packaging printers, nor do we have the money to cover the shipping costs.

Even though you’re missing a lot of money, you’ve spent much more since the end of the campaign. Where is my printer?

Yes, we spent a lot of money on R&D. I’ve had between 4-8 employees on payroll for the majority of the time post-campaign. Most of them being technical employees - Developers, Engineers, etc. We were hard at work, and over 2.5 years that adds up to a large sum of money. Peachy had to raise additional funds after the Kickstarter campaign to accomplish this.  It was simply an immense amount of work to get from the prototype in the campaign, to the V1 kit.

Where are you at with laser certification?

We have written about this subject at length, you can read about that here.

What happened to the money raised on Indiegogo?

This money was received by Rylan’s Paypal account, and it was spent on legitimate company expenses. The pie chart below is inclusive of those funds.

I pre-ordered the printer from your website… Where does this leave me?

Whether you paid for your printer on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or through Backerkit pre-order, I consider you all to be my backers. The funds that were stolen affect all the people that are expecting a peachy printer.

In terms of manufacturing and delivery, how far did you get?

We made it to nearly 70% completion on our first run of 600 printers before we halted operations. In terms of inventory, we need to purchase additional components that were added to meet laser certification in order to finish that production run. The majority of parts are only stocked in quantities of 600.

Can I still get a refund?

Up until recently I have always given refunds to those who ask. I can no longer do so because I have no more money. As much as I’d like to say yes, I simply don't have the ability to refund you.

More to come soon…

Rylan Grayston.

Big Bad News
about 10 years ago – Wed, May 11, 2016 at 12:05:24 AM

 Dear Backers,

Today I come to you with some incredibly difficult news. What I’m about to disclose has plagued this company for over a year, but I’ve always had a plan that ends with printers in your hands. Recently it became clear that our latest strategy to deliver rewards was no longer viable. It’s under these circumstances that I felt you must know what we’ve been facing…

I wanted to give some backers the opportunity to talk with me personally about this issue, so a few days ago I called up 3 backers who live here in Saskatoon and invited them over to the Peachy house. We sat down, turned the cameras on, and I told them about this problem for the first time, face to face. Here is what happened:

I can’t begin to explain how relieved I am to finally speak about this issue. I’ve been wanting to share this story with you since the day I found out, and it’s been very difficult to live with it in darkness. That being said, there are still many more questions to answer…

What Can I do about This?

The Police would like to hear from you. They have asked me if there are any backers that they can talk to. It is very important that the police and policy makers of Canada hear directly from you, that this is a problem you want them to take seriously. I have written an open letter to the police, and I hope you will too. Here is the open letter that I wrote, and here is a list of emails which you can address your letter to:

[email protected] - Sargent Gulka is the Police Officer heading this Investigation. 

[email protected] - email of our local police department.

 [email protected] - Justice Minister of Saskatchewan

[email protected] - National Crowdfunding Association of Canada.

Please CC [email protected] to your letter, and put ‘Letter of Concern from a Peachy Printer Backer’ in the subject line. This will allow us to collect each letter, and ensure that they are brought to proper attention.

You can also help us decide what to do next by answering the survey at the end of the update.

What if this whole thing is a scam?

I fully expect that some people will think this is just a big conspiracy, but if that were true do you really think I’d be asking you to write to my local police? After looking at all the evidence, if you still think this is a scam - I encourage you to report that to my city police: 

http://saskatoonpolice.ca/contact/

I know I’ve done my best to act in the interest of the backers, and I’m confident the investigation will find that to be true.

What actions have you taken?

At this point in time I have done the following things:

- Removed David’s access to company accounts

- Asked for and received David’s resignation from the company

- Collected incriminating evidence against David including bank statements, phone call recordings, and camera footage

- Filmed an admission interview with David for release to you, my backers

- Peachy's lawyers created a contract with David including an admission-repayment agreement (with interest on late payments).  David signed this agreement, and defaulted on 2 of the 3 payments.

- Absorbed David’s shares back into the company

- Conducted an internal audit to determine the true amount of funds stolen

- Raised funds from other sources to continue development, and move towards shipping

- Tried many ways to fix the problem before it affected our ability to ship such as a repayment agreement, investors, loans, blanket orders, etc.

- Reported the crime to the police

- Worked extremely hard to provide you with this detailed, and honest look at what happened with your money.

How about some Evidence?

I’ve prepared an Executive Summary and posted it on our website. This is a comprehensive write-up detailing the events that took place, including a timeline, a series of graphs and charts, and an overview of important documents. I highly recommend that you read the entire thing so you can gain a well informed perspective on what happened. At the end of the summary, you will also find a download link to an evidence package containing video clips, phone call recordings, and documents.

Here’s a picture of the house David has built with your money:

What were your plans to ship and why did they fail?

The short answer is that I expected, and still do expect David to pay us back. This was a reasonable expectation, and he has actually repaid $111,000 to date. You can see why I thought that this was a viable solution, he got over a 3rd of the way there. To this day I still think it’s a little crazy that he hasn't paid us back in full…

I also attempted 3 other plans in an effort to develop and deliver backers rewards. I was quite confident in some of these plans, and made shipping estimates based on their success. I truly believed that I would be able to deliver under one or a combination of these plans, which is why I maintained that things were on track, and that I would still be able to deliver rewards… I didn’t publicize this situation out of fear that doing so would have jeopardized our chances to fix the problem.

Many of you may think I should’ve done things differently, and maybe you’re right… It’s easy to criticize after all the cards have been played. However one thing is for certain, my intentions were always in the right place: Delivering a good product to you.

When it comes to this subject there is a lot more to say. You can read our full explanation in the ‘Pursuing Repayment’ and ‘Finding Other Solutions’ sections of the Executive Summary.

Why Would David agree to film an admission Interview?

I realize that this is mind-boggling, and honestly hard to believe. While it was no easy feat to capture, keep in mind that David knows exactly what he did, he lives with it every day, and he knows you deserve an apology straight from him. I told him I’d only release the video if he failed to pay us back before we were ready to ship. I think he was actually so confident in his ability to repay, that he didn’t think the video would ever see the light of day. David was also cooperative and remorseful at this point in time. He had a very clear understanding of our duty to keep backers informed throughout the process, and I think he felt bad about the difficult situation he might be putting us in if he didn’t film the video. Finally, I asked him if he was the kind of man that would take responsibility for his actions. I offered him a chance to speak for himself, and he took it.

Is there any money left?

No, we’re broke. In fact, I wasn’t even able to pay rent at the house/headquarters this month. Have a look at Peachy’s corporate and my personal account balances:

How did Peachy Printer spend the money that it did receive?

I can assure you that all the Kickstarter money I did receive was spent towards the goal of developing and delivering your rewards. Here is a breakdown of how that money was spent:

You can read more about this in the ‘Report of Received Funds’ section of the Executive Summary. 

Is funding the only issue holding you back from shipping?

When it comes down to it, this missing money is the reason that I'm not able to deliver printers... That being said, in the case that I do receive full repayment from David, or raise funds from some other avenue, there are a few things that will need to be dealt with before we can continue manufacturing and shipping.

The only major hurdles we have yet to overcome are achieving laser classification and CE certifications. Unfortunately, we came to a screeching halt right in the middle of preparing our laser certification report and turned our focus to preparing this update. We will have to achieve these certifications before we can begin to ship. To read more about this topic, click here.

Due to our difficult financial position, I had to lay off the entire team. At the moment me and my brother Nathan are the only people working on the project. There will be some time required to spin operations back up, and it may take even longer if I'm not able to hire everyone back.

In terms of the Peachy Kit and Assembled, those are the only known issues before we can continue manufacturing and shipping. All other rewards still require further development...

In Closing…

While I’ve done my best to answer the big questions, I know that you probably have many more questions, so I’ve started an FAQ section and I will be adding to it as your questions roll in. Keep in mind that at this point, we are a very small team faced with what will likely be an immense amount of communication, so please look in the FAQ before asking your question in the comments section.

I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate the support and patience you’ve shown me so far. I know it’s already been a very long wait, and I’m sorry to say that it’s just gotten longer. I understand that you are probably pissed off, and rightfully so. What David did was a disgusting abuse of a good-hearted community. You deserve nothing but respect and gratitude. I’m pissed off too.

I want to know how you’d like Peachy Printer to move forward from here, so please take a minute to let me know by filling out this survey. No matter the outcome, I will continue to keep you informed as things unfold by way of regular updates...

It has been an exhaustingly difficult and stressful 18 months, but despite everything that’s happened, know this - I am still here, and I am still doing everything I can to deliver your rewards.

Until next time,

Rylan Grayston.

P.S.

Hopefully by now this is obvious, but I must say - Peachy Printer Inc. completely absolves Kickstarter Inc. of any wrongdoing. In no way is Kickstarter to blame for what has happened. Kickstarter, you are great. Thanks for everything.

Finally, I want everyone to act in a civil manner, we have a justice system that is fully responsible for responding to this. Please do not bring harm, or threaten to bring harm to David.