Hi backers,

I know that our silence for the past few weeks have generated lots of questions and I owe you an explanation. And by now, most of you would have seen our website had gone down which has added fuel to the rumour mill (understandably so) and as a result, there’s been a lot of accusations and vitriol targeted at myself and the team.

So please let me give you some news and clarifications first-hand as I have tried to be as transparent as possible throughout the campaign, and even though we may have missed giving a few updates I have been working incredibly hard in the background on our journey since day 1 of the campaign, designing and developing the TimeChi to send out to our backers.

Firstly, and this is one of the most painful things I have to share, is that TimeChi has been put into liquidation. Because of this process, I cannot give you the full story at this stage. What I can tell you is that Notice was given on 5 June that the company be put into liquidation.

Why? On the 27 May 2022, we received a legal threat by an ex-team member. I can’t get into full details at this stage, but essentially, if we didn’t agree to their terms and demands, we will lose all control of the company. What I can tell you is that there is an Australian law that says that if someone believes that they are owed money by a company they can send a statutory demand to the company of the debt, and if the company doesn’t contest it within the 21 days it defaults into giving the supposed claimant the power to liquidate the company. Sadly we never received this letter and because of the Australian corporate laws there needs to be no proof of the delivery of this type of demand apart from a “prepaid envelope that had been sent”. But because this process requires no proof that the addressee actually received the letter, this meant we were instantly put in default, to which this claimant’s lawyers emailed us in our first communication with them.

Although my first instinct was to contest this (our lawyers told us that if we had responded within the 21 days we would have a high likelihood of winning), we had very, very slim chances of winning as we would need to contest the service of the letter as we were outside the 21 day window. This meant that to contest with a low likelihood of winning we’d be risking ~$35k in legal fees AND if we lost, we would need to pay this amount PLUS pay the opposition’s legal team, which for estimates sake would almost certainly double this number if not more. This would have literally brought the company to its knees. After much discussion, the decision was made to put TimeChi into Liquidation and so we appointed the a 3rd party insolvency company

Secondly, we are an incredibly lean team working on the project, with many members coming in at different points in its lifetime. People who have been in our videos, people who are still members of this group. To try to save on costs so we had more money to dedicate to development and production I asked my wife Liz to help out, especially as she is a much better writer and communicator than I am. She has been doing this as a favour to me and not been paid for her time, in fact she has been the sole bread winner for us over the past years while I hadn’t been taking an income at all from TimeChi. We also enlisted her sister Izzie to help with customer support as well. Under my direction as CEO, we rely on contractors to support product development. During this project, we had a team of around 5-10 people at any one given time. These include software developers, as well as hardware engineers and front-end designers.

Thirdly, there’s a narrative out there painting us as scam artists who created the Indiegogo project to steal money. Let me tell you more about the financials behind a crowdfunding project. We bootstrapped the company until 2020, with the only money that had been put into the business being my savings from previous employment and other side projects I had worked on. In 2020 we received ~$50,000 in Angel investment, and $20,000 from the University of New South Wales thanks to getting into their accelerator program, and used the funds to kick off our Indiegogo campaign to help get our product into the market. We raised AU$270,480 through crowdfunding. We paid 5% of that of platform fees to Indiegogo (AU$13,524), as well as processing fees of 3%*+$0.20 to stripe (AU$8,745) and over AU$52,000 of marketing fees on paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. as well as had a marketing company help out which cost us USD$24,124.63. We had around $161,028.51 left to operate this project. On top of that, you add the hardware costs: modifying a mold design, pre-production, board & firmware design, testing, sourcing, packaging, etc… as well as software development. On top of all of this during the pandemic the prices we had originally quoted had gone up significantly which only further added to the challenges we were facing and made already slim margins even slimmer - and this not even mentioning when I travelled overseas for a 6-week trip only to be banned from re-entering Australia because of their (at the time) insanely strict quarantine boarder controls that cancelled fights and limited re-entry causing 6-weeks to become 6-months before I could travel home.

Liz and I have been personally replying to hundreds of messages since the beginning of the project, including criticism mails. Since the website went down, we started receiving so many negative mails that it became mentally difficult for us to function. There were accusations of fraud, scams, personal insults and harassment on FB/LinkedIn.  While these messages come from just a few of our backers, it’s still incredibly hurtful as we’ve been trying desperately to keep afloat. I know it’s something you’ve heard time and time again and again, but the fact is that the pandemic has wreaked havoc on our plans and caused a lot of unpredictable costs. Having to re-do our design our hardware to accommodate for new materials and look for new suppliers takes time and resources. As mentioned in previous updates we’ve been chasing our tail in a horrible cycle of build-test-’realise parts are out of stock’-redesign-build again. This is a horrible side effect from the ongoing supply chain issues so the team has also been trying to apply for government grants in the hope that the cash injection will hopefully get us out of this cycle and speed up production. The time it takes to do all this, and costs associated with it, add up.

Finally, I know that I deserve some of the blame. I’ve tried to be as transparent as I possibly can, balancing my time on production and communications.  I’m sorry to all the backers who asked us legitimate questions that we didn’t respond to. However we’re only human, and yes - we will learn from this experience. And while I can’t promise how things will look like after the Liquidation process, please understand that I won’t be able to keep my head on straight, let alone even think about finishing this product waking up every morning to an inbox of accusations and insults.

All the money from this campaign went into TimeChi’s development. We might be "bad" project managers but we didn’t scam you. On my side, I had to invest personal money and ask Liz to step in as the breadwinner for our family to keep the project afloat. We’re making no profits out of TimeChi development to our backers, but were hoping that you would have been the trailblazers that helped be the first people to use it and help show everyone in the world how much more productive they have been with TimeChi. But as you can see in my updates, we’ve been working hard to develop both software and hardware, and choosing to put the business into liquidation never crossed my mind until my hand was forced.

Because I still believe in the product and I know it can help so many people out there.

I may not be the best with regular communications, but I am not a bad person nor did we run this campaign to scam people. It would also be foolish for us to try to get all the publicity for TimeChi, including a feature in TIME magazine if we wanted to take your money and run. I hate scammers and I’ve always tried to be a good human and stick to my morals. When the dust has all settled with the Liquidation, I’d be happy to answer more questions as I think it is a good learning experience for everyone involved, and hopefully give us the closure that we all deserve.

As you can imagine, whilst this liquidation is in process, I need to abide by the rules. But I truly believe this route forward is the best way forward.

I know there are still some supporters out there - even if only a handful - and I thank you for your support during this difficult time.

In good faith,
Sean