Recently we have come across many people asking us why our shipping is so long. As a company who pride ourselves in taking building-in-public seriously, we think it makes sense to summarize a whole development process and delivery timeline of Spectrum monitors on our blog.
Overview of our history
With the right tools and parts at your disposal, making a working display monitor is relatively simple. However, the complexity increases when you try to make a gaming monitor with premium features, custom designs and functions like the Spectrum gaming monitor. The biggest hurdle of them all is scaling it all across the world and making a significant change for our users amidst the traditional industry standards.
We are Dough, formerly known as Eve, that began as a crowd-funded project a few years ago. Naturally, after asking our community, we decided to journey on the biggest passion project for us – Project Eve Spectrum, or now Dough Spectrum. We wanted to make the best gaming monitor your money can buy. No-nonsense design, high-end features, capable gaming and nothing but the essentials. Exactly what our community wanted. Looking back at 2020, there was nothing like the Spectrum monitor. Shortly after the final product and design was announced to the world, it became a viral hit amongst the industry and tech enthusiasts alike. And just like that, Project Spectrum began.
A glimpse on our development process
For those unfamiliar with our development process, it works like this.
- Concept,
- Engineering validation testing,
- Design validation testing,
- Production validation testing,
and finally, 5. Mass production.
You can learn more details here.
Before the product becomes ready to ship, it goes through months and months of designing, assembling, testing, getting certifications and many other challenges. It takes time, investment and human resources to put it all together successfully - an even bigger challenge for a small team like us. It goes without saying that only because of our early pre-orders were we able to begin the development of a certain model. And as a business, we can only focus development on one model at a time.
It didn’t take long until we finished development of the Spectrum 4K 144Hz model. Within a year after mass production of the first Spectrum model, we have delivered more than six thousands of Spectrum monitors to our early pre-orders and customers all across the globe. It really makes us proud and pushes us to work harder every time we see more cool setups with the Spectrum monitor or we hear great feedback directly from our users. Building hand in hand with our end-users, it only makes sense we continue to focus on the essentials that our customers want. We hope this gives you a glimpse into our story.
Development and shipping status of each Spectrum models
As for the development and shipping statuses of our models, we have been updating everyone in our community as well as via emails. Here’s a recap.
Sprectrum 4K 144Hz, Matte - ES07D03 and Glossy - ES07DC9
Development completed.
Shipping the orders is an ongoing process, and once stock has been allocated to your order you will receive an address confirmation email which then shipping of your order will commence shortly after.
Spectrum 4K 144Hz,
1st mass production run completed. We are waiting for issues to be resolved on our manufacturing side to increase our accepted yield rate when going through QC. Once resolved, mass production will commence and shipping will be arranged again.
Spectrum QHD 280Hz, Matte ES07D02
Development is in the production validation testing (PVT) phase, in preparation for our 1st mass production run. Materials are being prepared for the upcoming mass production being ready for Q3 2022 shipping estimate.
On the firmware, we are still debugging and refining the firmware to fulfill Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certifications. We are also working with Blur Busters for our backlight strobe tuning.
Spectrum QHD 144Hz, Matte - ES07D01 & QHD 280Hz, Glossy - ES07DCA
Due to our efforts currently focused on getting ES07DC9 & ES07D02 properly up and available, information about the development of ES07DCA will be confirmed not long after ES07D02 enters mass production, and the same goes for ES07D01.
This year, we are accelerating our growth as a startup. Along with it, unexpected challenges arise, which includes logistics issues that are out of our control. Without the resources like a major manufacturer, it may appear that it takes a long time for us to solve these issues. Regardless, we continue to push through and continue to assemble a great team that has the capabilities to achieve our goal of scaling and reaching mass market adoption to compete with the bigger players in the industry.
We will continue to regularly update our development progress in this topic. And we hope that this can explain why our shipping is taking for so long. However, we strongly believe that good products take time and great products take years!