i blinked and now im a high schooler and its been as long as having a baby since i started this thing wtf

it's a blog post and a status update wrapped in one! (this is so stream of consciousness i apologize 😭)

hi everyone!

so first things first - this is more of a life blog than a framedlabs update blog - but it’s coming soon i promise. we ran into an issue with the wifi chips not behaving the way we want to so because we can’t change the wifi chips we’re working on a workaround. hope to have it out by christmas. maybe it’ll be under the tree for some people

this post is basically from this tweet so most of this is just a transcript of a video i made myself so i didn't forget what i wanted to say so here goes!!

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soooo looking back today (im writing this on 11/2/23) it's been 9 months since n&w in san francisco!! it seems like it's been forever (it has) and so much has happened. i'm a high schooler now, life's been busy, i got covid for the first time in all three years (which is part of why im writing this the boredom got to me)

i was thinking back about framedlabs and how the idea came around. it's really a funny story:

it all started in summer 2019 when my dad has a customer who was talking to him about this idea. he told me and we purchased the domain framedlabs.io while on vacation in hilton head. at that moment, framedlabs was only a mongodb atlas instance in the cloud that stayed that way for two years. i never really touched it (or most likely would have touched it) until i saw buildspace in early 2021 (back when they had the unicorn logo and only had light mode).

i went through almost all the projects that thanksgiving and was excited for what they had in stock. they started offering these little co-work sessions (back when I was 12 mind you so not old enough to be on Discord but no one had to know that) on Zoom and I attended every one of them. there's more to this story but just a little silly fact here - ando thought i was in nights and weekends s1 the way i kept showing up to everything they did lol. so anyways, i'm working on framedlabs, and get into n&w s2 the weekend of my birthday, so it was like a little birthday treat! i got in to s2, worked my ass off for six weeks improving framedlabs and I'm able to go to san francisco for n&w irl!!

i was super excited because it was my first time going across the country, and it was for a tech conference I was a part of! i went, had fun, shipped stuff, and turned framedlabs into a physical product!! this was super crazy, and it definitely added motivation to working on framedlabs because "omg someone wants what i was working on? that's so crazy!" i came back to charlotte with $1.2k in preorders and my pride level high.

that week i spent researching the parts i would need to make the display - i can do it under $1200 right? WRONG. the displays alone ended up costing that much, and i needed (and obtained) additional funding (from my parents - thx guys ur the best <3) got the displays, got the other parts, and - nothing. for about a month they sat in my room while i worked on software slowly but surely. i did some tinkering here and there with the board and the display, broke a ribbon cable or two, and ran into a pretty big issue that we're working on a roundabout for.

i kept thinking, "oh it'll be done by june! august! september!” and here we are, in november. and it should definitely not have taken over 9 months to make something like this, but maybe it does in the real world (i've never preordered something so i don't know a normal timeline for this kind of thing) and i just don't know it. but i feel bad that it's taken this long to create the frame and i'm really sorry about it.

it's easy to get a big head about something and feel great about something for a short period of time but eventually you have to come back down to earth and realize there are still problems you have to focus on, like how you're gonna build a digital picture frame with about half the budget you actually needed, and those little problems and the lack of motivation eventually turns into the project going stale for weeks or even months at a time. you have accountability because "oh my gosh, people put money down on this i need to deliver this product to them" but then it also turns in to "oh, i don't want to work on this" or "oh, i want to have a life" and then you end up losing the motivation about it. you still have the thought of "i have these people's money in hardware" in the back of your head, but then you think "they don't know when to expect the product, they can wait, they can be patient." you lose the motivation by something you think takes too long, or you get bored and lose interest, but you still have the accountability in the back of your head.

i was originally thinking "oh this frame will be done by april, i'll do my research better, price it correctly, and release gen 2 of the frame!" boy was i wrong

even though this took a while, i think i learned a lot from this experience, and i know how to make the experience better for myself and customers, and how i would release generation 2 of the frame.

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i'm not entirely sure how i was gonna end this but i know i want to end with this:

thank you so much for being with me on this TOO LONG ride of FramedLabs and this 9 months. i don't think i was planning on it taking this long (at all - didn't think framedlabs would even exist past s2 tbh lol) to make the frames when the original date i had was mid march / early april

i'm finishing up the wifi tool and then the software, then a little bit of QA testing before we send them out to ensure that we don't have any big issues with the frames. i'll send out emails to preorder customers with an address collecting form :)

thank you again so much for staying with me for this journey, and i'll be back soon!