On the way

As of today all 39 DL2000 parts are either in the warehouses or loaded in a FedEx cargo plane and in transit, scheduled to arrive within 24 hours - except for part of the batteries (receiver ones to the US) that need some extra paperwork and are being held captive at the origin airport. We're now negotiating with the local authorities trying to get our guys released.

Shouldn't delay us - we will keep you updated on this breaking story as events unfold.

Launch imminent

We currently have a 10 - 12 days ETA for launch.
Pricing, warranty and terms will be announced by that time.

We will be making security improvements to our users database in preparation for people logging in for remote management. The system may ask you to choose a new password and enforce a minimum length. If you experience any trouble logging in, it's because we're working on the database.

We also have word from Escrow.com, they do not accept credit card or paypal payments for wearable products. They will accept bank transfers to their account.

News and payments

Good morning dreamlover land!

It's another day. And what do you do? Open your newspaper only to read about murders, killings, bombings and rapes? Or, do you fire up mozilla and get ready for your daily cup of DreamLover and all the juicy Male Management surprises?

For those who need their fix, we got something for you (don't we always).

"Just assembled" cabling from our plastic CEO (click to enlarge). This guy is the only Chinese vendors who'll arrange parts geometrically to take a picture. Good find.







Here's our latest hand-assembled supplemental batch, all tested. We had a zero component waste rate this time, though the time expenditure is massive with so many components.









And lastly... our bags/foam packaging finally reached the united kingdom in one piece! We just video skyped with this really cool CEO guy (friendly, professional, funny) at our warehouse in the UK, he said he looked our website up right away when he received the manuals. He's *very* anxious to send these off and get rid of all of the units before his wife spots them and becomes too interested!







Alright... so much to cover and so little time.

ANXIETIES RELATED TO BANK REMITTANCES

For those of you who are concerned about this transaction, and since we're starting to have stuff on the shelves, get this: if anyone lives in western Michigan or the region of Leicestershire in central England and wishes to drive to our warehouses to check out our stock we will inform our guys that we're having an inspection, and let you check out that they've got product on the shelves, on the condition that you film what you see and post it on youtube for everyone to see. Deal? We'll let you open the box and verify the contents. We realize most of you don't live there, but if you want to elect an envoy, that's fine too.

There's also an interesting service we've found called escrow.com - provided they have nothing against this product in particular, we agree to a 24 hour review period before funds are released to us. You pay to them using whatever method they support. Saves you the international transfer fee, but the service has a price so adding this layer will evidently cost more. The fees are on their page. Europeans can use them too but there seem to be further charges. If you find a cheaper reliable alternative or a European counterpart let us know.

And we're still shopping for card processors and making some progress but all rests - other than approval of course - on timing, how fast we could get to access the money, fees, any minimum monthly volumes and so forth.

CREDIBILITY FACTOIDS

Related to our credibility, we realize we've given you little background about ourselves and that's because just like you we value our privacy, but we've put together a few factoids that should be of interest in assessing who you're dealing with in this transaction.

1. We are an electronic hardware manufacturer and there's a lot that goes with that. The so called "barrier to entry" is fairly high. Almost 3 years full time for R&D, manufacturing, financial, legal, incorporation, corporate bank account, lab tests for two different jurisdictions. 1 home sold. 1 year in mainland China. Tens of suppliers to manage, making our batteries, connecting the wires to the batteries, making (and remaking) our overlays in Taiwan, lawyers, shipping agents, steel injection molds, rubber molds, consultants, warehouses in both the US and UK, people assembling our cabling, doing our board assembly, component lead times, and so on. We've got a lot invested in this. We're not Sony but we're also not an ebay reseller or part time affiliate that's going to stick you with a broken printer. We've got a lot to lose if we make big mistakes.

2. This may sound racist but it's not meant to at all especially given our gratitude to the good people we've met like our plastic guy who's totally saved the day a number of times and we deeply respect... but we know what people think when they hear China so... if you landed here recently, we're not from China. Hence our impossible rants while we were over there trying to set up our manufacturing. Miss Kim is from South Korea and has a background in finance and trading not to mention one of the world's highest ranking World of Warcraft and Everyone's Golf: Out of Bounds character, yours truly is evidently a thoroughly deranged westerner who's held a CTO position in Silicon Valley and several VC firms in Asia before figuring out those stock options were a fraud after all. You are most definitely NOT buying from an Alibaba vendor! The people who work with us: the radio modules (important part, since they should never create false positives) are designed, built and lab-tested in the west. The plastic guy is the supplier for the most famous prototyping and injection molding middleman on google. Big name, they go to the same guy we go to. Their rep looked at our arousal inducer and said with a funny look on his face: how did you do that? As if seeing a monolith for the first time. The lithium ion battery manufacturer (sensitive part) is part of the TCL group the biggest electronics company in China sponsor of the Asian Games, their version of the olympics. The plastic guy knows their CEO who's a Bill Gates type figure there which is why they even talk to us. A senior manager has to put the batteries together by hand because of the small quantities which is why they keep complaining - we've got sheets full of voltage and current measurements and discharge times - one cell at a time - signed by him. Our testing labs, well the first one was unprofessional with us because we out-negotiated them on the fees and they hated us, the LVD one was a lot better, they're not wizards but but you'd find them mentioned on declarations of conformity and compliance documents on common brands for wireless routers, TV screens you may have in your home from Samsung or LG. Who else have we got that's cool... that's about it the rest are complete idiots :) No, ok, didn't really mean that, we still appreciate their help with our low quantities, but the point is, you've got some valid people backing this operation aside from ourselves.

3. Unless you're one of those who still pretend to believe that it is all a hoax, that we faked the fish and possibly even the warehouse, you have to admit we've got our deterrents against screwing up our pilot run, in the form of the thousands of people whose demand we cannot yet fulfill, who represent our future viability in a small market, and who will most definitely be watching us. We've got to sell a LOT of these things to break even. We don't know for sure that we can. That's part of the thrill. But we don't think we can screw our pilot run users with impunity and we wouldn't want to do it even if we could - we love you!

4. The lucky ladies and gentlemen who will participate in our pilot run will be ordering directly from a manufacturer, us. We'll be particularly accountable and offer one to one support. We're proud of what we've made and our name is on the line big time (our name does count for something already, more than 60% of our traffic comes from people specifically googling "dreamlover labs"). That doesn't change, no matter how you send us the funds.

ON PROCESSORS

Now to clarify about our difficulties with the processors, we're new at this but from what we've been told, when card processors say that they turn down some merchants due to risk, they are not referring to "risk of the merchant delivering crap" or "risk of the merchant not sending the package". Sure, there may be some fools out there who think they can run a business selling mediocre goods, but what the processors are really concerned about is that users will put fraudulent charges through. Turns out adult sites (and gambling, and pharmacies, and so forth) do not command the same degree of respect from their audiences (regrettably, since visiting them is a recognition that they provide a service valuable to the end user) and so people feel it's OK to commit card fraud. That's why adult processing costs more than twice as much for physical goods and up to 5 times as much for digital content. These processors aren't asking us where we ship from, where the warehouses are located, and so forth. They're not saying hey you guys are shady we won't take you. No, they look at the product and say Nah, that's not the audience we want to process for. They specifically said it's the product. Now the bank on the other hand... we've got a corporate account with HSBC. They wanted to know EVERYTHING, our business partners names, our suppliers' phone numbers, the business plan in anal detail, we almost had to introduce our moms! Let's just say we've had an "enhanced pat down" by those guys. We've been checked out.

PILOT RUN TARGET

Another disclaimer which becomes more urgent as we approach the launch date - we also take risk in this sale. This first run is not for people who discovered us recently and are wondering if the product is for them and want to check it out but be able to reverse the charge after they're done playing with it. It's not for people who want to try installing the product on some unsupported devices and return it if they can't get it to work. We're not officially in "mass" production, we're not advertising, we're too vulnerable to take risks with casual sales for now (though we'll definitely appreciate those too afterwards because just like already bootstrapped businesses in the aggregate it will help us sell more). The first run is for those who've been following for a while, who know what the product does, what it doesn't do, and are sure about owning it, and if any issues arise, working with us until they are resolved. We'll have another comprehensive feature overview video before launch and the manual will be available for download just so that if there's any doubt as to whether this is for you or not, it will become apparent before money is exchanged.

What we need now is a clean block of cash to immediately put back into components, into getting more of our arousal inducer motors, or we risk encountering months of delays after our first run (talk about a ruined orgasm!)

PILOT RUN PREPARATIONS CONTINUE...

For pilot run customers we guarantee a maximum level of after service and customer care. First buyers will get extensive direct support from us the inventors, assistance trying to install the DL2000 on whatever chastity devices they may have in addition to the CBx000 (though please, be owners of CBx000 and willing to use the DL2000 in conjunction with these devices if your beloved metal cage can't be used), the possibility to suggest modifications to our firmware, free hardware updates in case we improve something crucial in the short term (such as electrodes and what not), and more.

You should also know that anything that could possibly go wrong with this device has been the subject of scrutiny for a long time, due to the fact we've been more worried than you about problems after the sale which would result in shipping and logistics nightmares.

We spent more than a month coding the firmware upgrade features on all the components including a double USB driver for firmware download, this way if any bug is discovered post-sale, we can fix it without hassles.

We've confronted all possible failure modes. What if people use the arousal inducer too much and the battery runs out quicker than they expected? Made a battery calculator. What if water goes in through the cable by capillary action? Added dual layer heat shrink tubing bit. Checked screws against rust just in case. Monitored the new RF chips for over a year, there was not one false positive (activation from spurious interference). Not one missed packet (missed reception while within range).

We also plan to make an extensive "known issues" list and make people read it before they can order. Small stuff, mostly points of warning... for instance due to the miniaturization you have to be very careful when mounting the small pieces. Don't drop the PCB when opening the enclosure on the receiver, or it might break. The battery pack is somewhat fragile due to the connector's size. The rubber O-ring must fit in real nicely in order to ensure waterproofing... this is all on the manual. We could have made these things more user friendly but it would have meant adding a battery compartment, and 1cm in thickness and more plastic and rubber parts. Mostly we've created something we'd want to use ourselves, we prefer being a bit careful with the parts and having a miniaturized product you can put on and forget about.

There really isn't much else, except perhaps too many features and remote control buttons (that's why we have the simplified mode on by default).

There will be another comprehensive feature outline video before launch, we're now preparing for it... (just in case you were wondering what the seemingly gratuitous Miss Kim pictures were for).

Final result

However, we probably won't color the images for the courses at least initially - it's too time consuming, we prefer to focus on getting the character just right, and creating lots of content.

Card processing status and misc update

All our stuff is scheduled to arrive at the warehouses shortly after Chinese New Year, or within a couple of weeks from now.

Due to rolling reserve requirements, which would interrupt our supply for 3 months or more, we will not accept credit card payments for our pilot run. Payments will have to be made via an international bank transfer. Some may be unfamiliar with this so just in case you haven't done it before, you just head out to your bank, ask for a "foreign remittance form" and they help you fill it out with information we will provide.

Update: to protect your privacy, both on the remittance form and and in the future on the card statement, we will not be using "DreamLover Laboratories" name in full. So the bank staff and whoever gets a hold of your credit card statement will not know what you're purchasing. On the reason for payment you can write "electronic product".

If you wish to use internet banking to do this, there may be a process to go through before international remittances are allowed from your online panel. Depending on the bank you may need to receive a snail mail letter with a code, other times you just show up at your local branch and request the service to be enabled. This activation could take a few days.

MISC UPDATE

The packaging guys used more than 25% heavier materials for production, this makes the packaging look and feel sturdier and more durable, however the weight was massive when trying to ship, which would have been a problem if there wasn't such thing as weight by volume. In this case the volume is so big it takes over and weight no longer matters. This is probably why most product pouches (such as the one the CB6000 itself is shipped in) are made of thin, light fabric which can be flattened. We didn't consider this volume issue at all - our packaging is similar to what's sometimes used for razors or semi-hard eyeglass cases.

There was some panic as usual due to the unforeseen costs, and we had our local guy make tens of phone calls to freight forwarders, eventually we settled for a method where the merchandise is sent partially by air and partially by sea (don't ask...)

Our shipping cost for the bags ended up being identical to production cost. With air freight, shipping would have cost more than twice as much as the packaging itself.

By going through this mini adventure and having local guys make tens of phone calls we managed to figure out the whole spectrum of shipping options from China, the price breakdowns, possible discounts, weight and volume rules - this is going to be essential knowledge moving forward.

Our product has tens of components so it's not being easy nor cheap to coordinate shipments, some parts come from Japan, some from Canada, some from the UK, some from China. There were a few returned bank transfers and misc trouble along the way, but all's fine now.

We are using this waiting time productively by creating even more boards by hand. We've gotten so good at hand soldering these boards when we reworked our very problematic first assembly batch that now hand soldering them from scratch seems like child's play (though it's still massively time consuming due to the sheer number of components).

We're also gathering course materials from the web and corresponding with a couple of associates regarding our bootstrapping strategy which is really the biggest thing on the radar presently... how big is the chastity market? how many people interested in chastity will also want a male training system? how many units can we set as a target for our next production batch? how many people will purchase at what price? at what point can we automate production instead of running after suppliers 16 hours a day in 3 time zones trying to coordinate everything? do we want/need distributors? do we need to immediately change tooling to make production easier or save money to buy components? and there are a whole range of top secret strategic issues that we need to figure out before launch.

But everything's looking up and as soon as the product's on the shelves we won't want to nor be able to brainstorm for long, so do look forward to an imminent release which will be accompanied by detailed ordering information and instructions.

Illustration completed

*UPDATE*

Our illustrator has agreed to greet the crowd right on our blog... and she will also be joining the Education Committee advising on practical matters such as cooking, something she says she's really good at. Plus, she says her female friends have told her that these courses are a great idea and have become interested in the product!

Have we unleashed something that cannot be reined in?

Stay tuned...