An open letter to all of our supporters.
almost 5 years ago
– Fri, May 10, 2019 at 01:51:28 AM
Heya, cutie pies!
My name is El, and I've had the privilege of being Deep Water Games' director of sales for the last three months. Some of you might recognize me as the goober with colorful hair running our booth at conventions, and I'm the smiling face that takes most of our interviews with lovely companies like GTM and BGG!
Now that y'all know who you're chatting with, we're long overdue to sit down and have a real talk on some important subjects: the Welcome To Kickstarter, customer service, and communication.
For starters, I just want to straight-up apologize. We've dealt with some "growing pains" over the course of the last few months, which have honestly been painful for our supporters and the Deep Water Games family itself. We, as a company, are made up of a bunch of dopey little optimists, and we're typically believers in keeping things nice and cheerful. In attempts to stay exclusively positive, though, we've done many of you (and ourselves) a huge disservice. We've remained silent on a lot of our obstacles in the name of keeping things bright and perky, but that's not always the right answer.
Here's the truth: the Welcome To Kickstarter has been an absolute monster. When we launched that bad boy back in November, we expected $50k to maaaaaaybe $75k. When we broke a hundred thousand dollars, we were vibrating with excitement. Then it kept going... and going... and going... all the way up to $224,325. Awesome, right?
........yes and no.
See, we were only nine months old as a company when that Kickstarter ended. We had a grand total of zero employees, just the founders and the amazing people willing to volunteer their time and only one of whom even lived in the same state as our warehouse (which is a tiny little spot about the size of my one-bedroom apartment, for context.) All of a sudden, Deep Water Games was racing to work out the logistics of how to fit that much product in an impossibly small amount of square feet, much less package and ship thousands of orders in an acceptable amount of time. A singular successful Kickstarter isn't enough to merit hiring more employees or signing the lease on a new warehouse, so we were resigned to making due with what we had.
Some of you have heard me talk about the situation and smile, chiming, "As far as problems go, Welcome To's success is a good one to have!" The truth of the matter is that it's been trying, educating, and exhausting. I got brought onto the team a few weeks before our promised fulfillment, and thankfully, I'm only an hour away from our warehouse. We posted updates, saying that we'd be shipping domestic orders throughout March and early April, excited to get Welcome To into the hands of clearly adoring backers. We cleaned up the warehouse, we ordered our packing materials, we buckled down and prepared for the storm!
And then everything that could go wrong, went wrong. We lost close friends to suicide. Chunks of our product arrived late, whereas other items came in ahead of schedule, overwhelming our limited warehouse space. Packaging so many different add-ons took much more time than anything we'd previously dealt with, and our current shipping systems had limitations we weren't aware of beforehand because we'd simply never seen anything of this scope before. Some of us were putting 40 hours into the warehouse and 40 hours into conventions in the same week and still drowning, so what did we do?
We let our customer service emails fall behind. We kept Kickstarter updates optimistic and over-promised. We got short and frustrated and exhausted, and honestly, that's not okay.
If there's one thing I've realized over the course of this Kickstarter, it's that our supporters aren't demanding perfection; all you sweethearts want are communication and honesty. It's hard, putting in 80+ hour weeks and having 1% of your backers send you scathing reviews, unforgiving emails, and surface judgement calls, but at the same time, what have we given you to work with in return? When we make promises (that we sincerely want and try to keep, I truly mean that) and consistently fall short, it's only right for backers to call us out. When we fail to offer you proper explanations, of course you're going to be frustrated. More importantly, we /want/ you all to feel comfortable pointing out our shortcomings, as critique and feedback are vital for growing as a company. If we fail to communicate to our supporters the struggles we're facing, you have every right to make decisions and form opinions with the information you're given. We kept you in the dark in the name of positivity, and it's hurt all of us.
The truth of the matter is that if I were in many of your shoes, I'd be phenomenally frustrated. As a gamer myself for the last twenty five years and a gaming retail manager for almost a decade, I'm happy to forgive plenty of things... if they're communicated to me. We've fallen short in that department, and I'm here to say that (a) we're sorry for that shortcoming, (b) we're going to try our best not to repeat it, and (c) we appreciate each and every one of you that have continued to support us through this process. None of you owe us a gosh darn thing, at the end of the day, and every customer who's decided Deep Water Games isn't a good fit for them is entirely justified. We must earn a place on your shelves, with both our titles and our demeanor as a company.
That being said, I do ask you all to remember that the companies you choose to support are ran by human beings, and they will absolutely make mistakes. When communicating with a publisher or distributor or customer (or other human being in general,) you'll always catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but more importantly, we just need to be kind as hell to each other. Aggressively understanding. Defiantly compassionate. The tabletop community has honestly saved both my and Nolan's lives, literally, and I can't name any other community that has given me so much. We truly are here to grow it and give back even a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what we've received, and we're gonna fight tooth and nail to grow through this process to achieve that goal. We've made mistakes throughout this Kickstarter, and we're truly sorry.
The most important thing we can do is learn, rather than repeat, a mantra I use often with the rest of my Deep Water Games family. We can't wait to prove this mission to you all, and more importantly, we are so very, very grateful many of you are giving us the opportunity to do so.
Deepest apologies and sincerely,
-El
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Nolan here, I’m the co-founder and CEO of DWG. We wanted to put the frustration and animosity behind us. I wanted to echo everything El said a million times over. You don’t need to hear it all from me again, but I wanted to reiterate we’re sorry for the delays, for the frustration, for the miscommunication, for the snapping on our part. You don’t deserve that. However, like El said, we’re only human. We’ve gone through hell this year at Deep Water and we’re all still working every day... all week... sometimes upwards of 100 hours to ensure we still deliver on this to the best of our ability. Beyond that, scaling a company is brutally hard work, but we all believe in Deep Water with every fiber of our being. That’s why we’re out there every day trying to make it better, and that’s why we’re here now explaining the situation. We’re all sorry and we’re all very grateful for your continued support and understanding. If you made it this far with us, this is exactly what you can expect from us forever: radical honesty, understanding, and transparency.
