UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom – Ship date is now JULY! Ha!
As you know I love reading Facebook ADs, I love seeing what everyone is advertising now and then seeing the comments back and forth between the company and the customer and what they promised.
The Barracuda started out on KickStarter (surprise-surprise).
The first thing that struck me as odd, was their broken english, and their idea of spelling everything out or capitalizing letters that shouldn’t have been capitalized.
The second thing was their price comments and how different comments were listing different prices, $400 USD, $280 USD, $325 USD, these were kinda all over the place, however the second thing I noticed was their ‘estimated ship date’, It was already May 12th when they were commenting and saying that “Barracuda’s estimated ship date worldwide is May 2016. Surely since it’s halfway through May already you would have a better idea on your shipping date?
Looks like I was wrong, even though they were saying May in the Facebook comments their website was updated only 8 days later to say June 2016.
And just a couple of days ago, suddenly they have had a product delay, they seem still insistent that even with a product delay they can still ship “this month” even though there was only one day left of May?
Barracuda will be shipping this month. We ran into a few delays with product development. We want to ensure that we ship a very high quality product and so when we find an issue we have to take the time to address it.
And now for the research fun, Curiously in their logo they are called “Barracuda San Francisco”. And they list their address as “Idea Potent Inc. 101 California Street, Suite 2710, San Francisco, CA”.
Well guess what, “101 California Street, Suite 2710, San Francisco, CA”
Is actually a virtual office address, which means they don’t work out of there. That’s only where your mail goes.
http://www.servcorp.com/en/locations/san-francisco/101-california-street/
They already went through a trademark Law Suit late last year (2015), over the Barracuda name, however it was dismissed.
However it looks like the company Idea Potent, Inc. was founded by Boban Jose who studied at the University of Pune in India?
Here’s his oddly sounding LinkedIn profile. It would appear one of his former co-founders in this was Kiran Bhogadi who studied at the Project Management Institute. It would appear that he left the company after 1 year in August 2015. Somewhere in this timeframe.
All in all, it seems some very shady things are happening with this company, and this might be the latest kickstarter to completely fail. They still seem to be soliciting pre-orders for an item that may or may not ship in June.
But a bigger red flag might be their past failed kickstarter the SkyPod.
If I were you, before I promised to pay $300+ for an item, wait for the reviews, I have a feeling with this company, you’ll be glad you did. Already have an existing pre-order? Cancel it.
Remember they promised to ship by Nov 2015, and it’s now 8 months later in June 2016.
UPDATE 06/06: No more than a few days later… and they have already shifted their ship date yet another month into JULY.
