We Won't Make it to Transworld This Year

I first want to say that the entire team is absolutely gutted we aren't going to make it to the show this year. It was one of the toughest decisions I had to make.

It's been amazing year for us here at Rising Orchards and IgorBox. Last year we made our debut with a preview of what we had in development at the Transworld Halloween and Attraction Show in St. Louis and it was a huge hit. We got some people on our early access program and were very hopeful we would be able to bring our products for general availability to the show this year. That's not what happened...

So what happened? The short answer is "a lot" with some being good and some not so good.

First let's start with the good.

We shipped real products to real haunts for testing in our early access program! We saw real usage and fixed a ton of bugs along the way. A huge shout out goes to the development team for the absolute stellar job they did to support these early access users. During this time we shipped two major firmware changes based on feedback and tweaked the web application countless times. The Halloween season was blur for us here.

Beyond all of this, we made a huge effort to get organized and ready for a major launch at Transworld this year. We got our online store ready, our backend payments systems, our support systems, and even our accounting. It was all coming together for Februrary 27th... But something wasn't right.

So what's not so good?

During the Halloween season, we identified some hardware flaws that needed to be addressed. We also realized that our firmware strategy wasn't going to be scalable to the product line we had in development. Something needed to be done.

We had a company meeting and discussed our options and after quite a lot of debate, it was clear the right thing to do was to redesign the hardware and make huge changes to the firmware to support what we had planned.

The tech team spent all of November and December blasting 12-14 hour days to design all new PCBs. They worked through huge firmware changes and refactored large amounts of the codebase. They even made some pretty deep changes in the web application. All with the goal of having the new version testable by the end of the year. Afterall, we needed to test and stress these new designs before we made them available to everyone at Transworld.

Well, the amount of stress and working through nights and weekends caught up to us. Mike and I both got pretty sick at the end of December. So much so, we couldn't meet our hard deadline of having prototypes ready. We were devastated. Mike even tried to make hail mary it the first week of January but his "sick" was different than mine and he was just not able to really function (It took him a full month to recover). Therefore, I called it. Our health is more important. We tried and we just didn't make it. There is no point in continuing to run ourselves into the ground because we simply don't have enough time to properly stress test the new systems and hunt out all the significant bugs. I'm still upset about having to make the hard decision to call Rich and pull the plug on our booth this year.

Why not go anyway with the new prototypes?

We had considered this, but we had nothing to really sell last year, and to come back in the same position a year later didn't seem like we would be making our position in the industry any better. Besides, just going to the tradeshow is stressful. The booth setup, the costs for all the venue things like power, air, internet, etc. It just distracts us from continuing to improve our new devices. We are committed to your success with our system. Our time is better spent laser focused on our products right now.

I can tell you what we have on the stress-test bench right now is an absolute dream product and I have been so incredibly excited to show everyone and get them in your hands, but rushing it to make the tradeshow would do everyone, from our technology team to our customers, a disservice.

What's the plan?

So the plan is simple, deliver the best products that enable our users to make absolute magic.

• We will continue to work towards our dream system. We have been making a huge amount of changes to reduce overall cost which we intend to pass on to our users. With everything going up in cost right now, we are working as hard as possible to curtail as much of that as we can.
• We are re-evaluating our online social media presence and communication strategy right now to figure out the best way to get information out to everyone (not just our early adopters).
• We plan on doing another full round of no-cost early adopter testing and we also plan to expand this to more haunts (keep an eye out for information on how you can get some test units yourself).
• We will abolutely be back to Transworld next year, and I'm sure you will see IgorBox available on our online store well before then.

But most importantly, I want to make it clear that we are not stopping and we're doubling down to build the best system on the market. It's just taking more time than we all realized here.