Just A Casual Reminder That We Can All Get Along, Or At The Very Least We Can Try

I dont know what exactly spiked this but it seemed to start around the time I saw the VESC X post show up. There has been an unprecedented level of hate and aggressive posts on here in the past few day mostly if not entirely aimed at @onloop. I dont know how to but this any better that none of us are without faults, you get the good with the bad and thats true of any one of us on here. Its very easy to point the finger at someone else without stopping to reflect on the quality of your own being. This large scale attack on him and his company isnt helping him or you out in the long run, I feel.

I am trying to stay neutral, I do not meet to say you, the members of the forum, or he is right on any one issue or how it was handled but I am asking that you consider one thing. Every minute he has to be on here and defend the integrity of his work and company, which he has to once someone says something with a negative connotation because simply put it’s his lively hood your talking about, is another minute that he cannot put towards focusing on improving his business and operations. How excited would you be to go do what you love to do after you had 10,15,20 people tell you you’re doing it wrong or that its not how they would do it. I know it would take the piss out of me and I truthfully would probably walk away for a few hours or a day before I had the desire and drive to go at it again with a fresh mind.

How many of us have emailed or called Hobby King or Turnigy directly and complained relentlessly about their brushless motor shortages? I know I havent. My order from Ollin happened to be delayed by almost a month, I ordered in July and didnt get my VESCs until early September. There had been quality issues and a new batch had to be rushed to ensure that good quality products were being delivered and it took some extra time. And thats just for a couple VESC’s. Can you imagine trying to ship something with LiPo batteries right now? the delays that have probably been created due to this whole Note 7 fiasco Samsung unleashed. Your lucky if you live somewhere where ground shipping of a complete battery pack is an option. Everyone is even LUCKIER that @onloop has gone through the pain of getting the the proper certifications to be able to ship his spacecell CERTIFIED battery packs internationally because there are many on here who will make you a battery pack and only ship it within the states because this is a huge frontier to overcome.

Look, I’m not saying praise the guy ever minute of every day either. If he’s doing a good job or brings forward a new idea/product to the market give the man some credit. Let’s be able to have an open discussion about it without intentionally trying to entice one another. If you feel that there is a valid and honest opinion that you wish to share write it out and walk away. I did. My original post was going to be about how the other post got locked and we arent allowed to express our opinions and it was hateful but it didnt add value to the majority of the people on here and all it was really accomplishing was making me feel good. I stepped back and I reflected on what I had written vs what I wanted to say and they did not match. When you let emotions rule your judgement you will make decisions you will regret and that is true on here and in life.

I will say my personal opinion is that the past few days could have been handled better, by BOTH sides but that is my opinion and at the end of the day, I will never know how I would have reacted in @onloop’s position. His business has taken off at unpredictable rates and is in all likelihood still growing for a few more years before his capacity will naturally be able to keep up with demand. As someone who is doing a double major, one of them being in management, just because Enertion is making a profit does not mean they have the capital investments needed to meet market demand. The bulk of his sales likely go towards covering costs, and then his profits have to support both his family, home and personal endeavors and his growing business, you can only spread that so thin. Anyway I’ve ranted and this is much longer than I originally wanted. If you made it this far then congratulations, that was probably all over the place and it probably doesnt flow very well but I just wanted to share my thoughts on the past few days on here. I’ve written too much to not post this at this point. If you dont agree or do agree thats cool. If you want to tell me I’m an idiot thats cool too, you’re entitled to your opinion as well. But if you’re going to tell me I’m an idiot do me and everyone else the favor of explaining why in a clear and concise manner so that I can learn from this and others can too.

TLDR: No one’s perfect, if you are, then you can start up and run the perfect eSK8 company in this economy. It’s a growing industry, you might very well be as big as Enertion is one day.

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But how many of us had to argue with the owners or Hobby King or Turnigy on the forums afterwards?

I think everybody understands that Enertion is growing exponentially and they are struggling to keep up with orders. People are forgiving. But if the owner is going to come on the forum and argue with you and call you names, its really bad for business, and that is nobody else’s fault but Jason’s.

All Jason has to do in these situations is say, “Hey, I’m sorry you had a bad experience with Enertion. Shoot me and pm and let me see if I can resolve this issue for you.” Instead he likes to engage in full fledged arguments, and often results to name calling. Not to mention they guy comes across as a know-it-all and a hypocrite, especially when he accused Ollin Board Company of violating open source laws with the VESC.

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The truth is we dont know the whole story behind other’s comments. For all we know Jason did message them privately if they had messaged him first. This is why I said dont let your emotions get in the way, if someone else is experiencing issues with any vendor dont just hop on the band wagon because you too had issues, try to aid or contribute to the solution than the problem is all I’m saying. If you have gone through the same situation, how did it get resolved/what did you do?

Again, I said I did not agree with the way the situation was handled by Jason but I also said I did not agree with how the community responded as whole. It was like 20 against one, of course it’s going to get heated. If it was 20 against you dont you feel like it was a personal attack on your character? I would probably get defensive and say whatever came to mind without thinking about the consequences.

This isn’t necessary man. You dont want to order from him, great. Dont order.

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If I had a company as successful as Enertion, I wouldn’t be arguing with anybody on the forum.

I can’t speak for everyone, but that is not how it played out for me. He resolved my issue, and then began to argue with me afterwards when there was nothing left to say.

I’m not trying to be malicious, I think we are all a little curious to how much potential business Enertion has lost just because Jason doesn’t know when to keep quiet.

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It comes across as malicious though. You make some good points though that I too agree with. I too dont believe you should argue openly or privately with customers. But you make several different points in your first post actually so people may be inclined to like your comment for more than just that.

It would in fact be an interesting number to know but if we’re going to ask that, do it as a poll and give an alternative. “I dont care how he runs it, the products are what I’m here for” or “I’m undecided but still interested despite the posts”. You get what I mean? That would be something Jason himself might want to know as if it is affecting his business, maybe that can help steer him in the right direction on how to deal with situations. That would be a value add. If there’s something wrong lets also address how to make things better. or at least try. He may say yeah thats a great idea or he may say thats not how I run my shop but thats his call to make at the end of the day.

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I don’t know how to do polls on this forum lol. I think the results would be interesting, but I don’t want to be accused of trying to run Jason’s company’s name through the mud, which he has already accused me of doing. Regardless of what Jason thinks, I want to see his company succeed. Like I said, people are forgiving. So Ill just delete that comment.

Cheers mate.

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Lol, a getting along thread turned into an argument.

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I wouldn’t say it was an argument. More like a civilized discussion that we both agree on.

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I dont think @flashnova and were arguing. There was a difference of opinions which is healthy. We discussed and found common ground to agree on, that was the point of this thread. If everyone thought the same things and did the same stuff think about how incredibly boring life would be.

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True words. Thank you for speaking out.

Ok we will call it a “heated discussion”

Someone do the polls thing i would like to see those numbers i feel your pain @FlashNova been there, dobe that and im never going back to enertion untill i see a change in the way they do business, i told jason once and said it in different posts i feel jason is enertion worst enemy

I haven’t bought anything from enertion yet, and I can’t say much about their quality or shipping times/problems. I know there are some big flaws in their production, that is obvious because this market is still growing and developing, so problems have to be expected. All I can say is I contacted onloop here on the forum, asking some questions that he probably heard a million times here, about shipping, taxes and so on. He was very polite and pretty quick to reply, even if he surely had many other things to do, and my many messages probably bothered him. The only thing he did wrong is the vescx thing and the argument with chaka. Chaka didn’t make public his vesc improvements, but that was just a matter of asking him privately and he would have told anyone who wanted to know (just happened with a “group buy”, we asked, he replied, our vescs should now be better than before). The vesc x is a good thing for the community. We could argue about the price, and that’s ok. It should at least have a warranty like chaka’s ones (and really everything should have a warranty, just check European laws, 2 years of cover for anything you buy from a shop), at that price, but if you think it costs too much just don’t buy it, until they’ll lower the price. We could also argue about the release of the details, and that’s the main point: he should just give all the infos to the public. Yes, because it’s an open source project, but also cause people are going to buy from him in any case, even if competitors know his secrets: he’s the biggest one, the prices are good and when they’ll set up their warehouses around the world they are going to grow insanely. If the European one was already established I would have bought anything there instead of searching around the forum looking for group buys. Competition helps the market. Open sourceness helps the community. Give us both and everybody will be happy. Stop being little children and just help us spread this market. Thank you, have a nice day :slight_smile:

Chaka and Onloop hold each other to high standards on open source, the morality of benefitting of vedder’s work and their respective business practices. Really a lot of their conflict comes from having differing core values, Onloop wants to bring DIY eskating to everyone which means investing in reducing the cost of supply chain, cost of production, and increasing his sales volumes by investing in marketing and quality - he’s spread. Chaka’s singular focus looks like quality above all else (I don’t mean to speak for either of them, this is just the sense I get from their comments). Having both vendors is healthy and they occupy different segments however it’s easy to see how their differing philosophies can give rise to friction.

What’s odd is this community doesn’t hold others that are outside this community to the same high standards regarding open source. Sure, there’s the occasional poking fun at the Chinese manufacturer, but no where near the level of anger that we’ve seen at Enertion. Mellowboards have talked about VESC in a way that indicates they’ve clearly learned a lot from vedder’s work although I doubt they’ll ever compensate vedder for benefiting from his work. ArcBoards have mentioned profit sharing at some unknown future date after profitability. And these are just the folks that talk on this forum, I’m sure there are plenty of others that don’t even talk on this forum and have used vedder’s work for their own gains and contribute absolutely nothing. No one is sharpening their pitchfork for these folks.

In the small way I do understand the anger around the vesc-x I think it’s about familiarity, their prior interactions with Enertion and due to how onloop is marketing his compensation to vedder. The compensation feels like an empty gesture (since vedder is not a sales person) even if this plan does actually turn out to be very generous - it’s certainly more substantial than Arc Board’s promise to compensate Vedder after profitability. To be clear, compensating someone on revenue is much riskier than compensating someone on profit.

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The first half of 2017 will be very interesting. The context of Enertion’s explosive growth in Q2/Q3 of 2016 was the two biggest manufacturers of completes, boosted and evolve, being closed to the market. Evolve was hinting about a new release and their existing board was very low specced and boosted was doing the same and even had a sales freeze for a couple of months before V2. This was also right before summer, which I imagine is high-season for eboarding sales since no one wants to eboard in the snow. Vacuums in the market don’t come very often and it’s easy for a new player to capitalize on those moments. 2017 will be very competitive and I can see everyone having to work together sooner than later.

I’m going to chime in here a little.

First: everyone calm the fuck down. :nerd_face:

Second: Jason is running a business and is big enough, ugly enough and Aussie enough to roll the dice and take the rough with the smooth. That’s his journey.

Third: Don’t be a dick. Ever. Just be nice. There is always someone better and worse off than you, all the time. Everyone has shit days and good days. We are all on our own journeys. Make your journey count.

Last: Don’t be a dick. Ever. If you think anyone, not just Jason, is doing a crap job, make your money talk. That’s how open markets work: the money flows to the least resistance. If whoever keeps doing a crap job, then they will go out of business.

Uber last: Don’t get into arguments. Just walk away. When you look back in 5 years and read your posts you’ll regret them. Trust me on this. I’m old enough to go :scream::scream: when I read some of my early shit. Just walk away and focus on something positive.

Uber uber uber last: Be nice to each other. This is a nice place. Let’s keep it that way. Let’s defend it from trolls and haters who don’t add but only subtract. Always be positive. It goes a long way in life.

And lastly: everyone calm the fuck down. We might not have Trump as President!!!

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Also. We need a Troll Hunter. Who volunteers??

I apologise if anything I said looked like an attack. It was more a warning that many others do for other consumers in regards to other companies that do similar or the same. With that said when you talk about other companies you don’t get your posts hidden, your topics closed and renamed, and you surely don’t get threatened.

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How do we PM?