Mindstream

[RCeiver]

All of your concerns were directly communicated to the CEO via phone. He tried to use the explanation that any communication on their part could be used by competitors so was better to keep quiet. He insinuated that they were concerned that they had already been sabotaged by a competitor.

Just about all of us that have owned them have had issues that have yet to be resolved even after almost 3 months. I returned mine and sadly, suggest anyone else get their money back while they can.
If it turns out they actually are able to fix their issues or sell to another company I will be a potential customer because when it works, it's a great tool.

Sounds more like they are being sabotaged by their selves. If this is going to be the culture of their company, then anyone that purchases from them is going to constantly have to worry about things that might go wrong in the future where the company just goes into hush mode and you’ll never know when/if things will be resolved.

Seems like this company is more interested with protecting their patents than they are with providing service to their customers.

 

[robbyg]

I decided a few days ago it was best I kept my mouth shut about Mindstream. It seems like the more I say is the more some people like to twist it into ammunition to go after them. I have had several conversations with one of the employees before and after the silence started two plus weeks ago.

Most of it was confidential so I am not going discuss any of that with anybody. The only reason he talked to me was that he could see I was also from the industry and was not judgmental because I understood the problems a startup goes through. There are other people on this forum who know more than I do, but they have been silent which is probably what I should have done at the start. Instead I felt that offering some communication of the bits I could talk about would ease peoples anxiety.

I can tell you that what one person on here said about water testing companies going after them is absolutely true. I had heard that from the same employee before the long silence. He said they had been under constant attack by certain companies who saw the MS as a major long term threat to their business. I can also say that all the Blame people are heaping on the CEO and Employees of Mindstream is completely misplaced. All of the people who work for the company have been trying their hardest to fulfill the promises made. The main problem I am told was that when you have something that was viewed skeptically for years and thought to be a loss by nervous investors and is then launched and on the day of the launch it brings in a couple of thousand orders, suddenly people start to see dollar signs and chaos soon develops amongst the Titans.

The last communication I got was that something wonderful was probably going to be announce last week Tuesday. They stated that it was not a done deal and it could fall apart and if so it would need to be started again.

I have had former colleagues of mine who left secure jobs at our company and went to work for startup companies. Many of them ended up in this same kind of position and I know one of the root causes is that there is a sickness among a small group of people on social media who all seem to rooting for failure and feel personal satisfaction in seeing something other people built get burned to the ground just so they can say they were right!

I am not into that kind of thinking as I have known people who worked for these startups I know how devastated they get when people like us make our little jokes and they in turn loose their jobs and have an uncertain futures going forward. Like so many of you on this forum I have just stayed on point and tried to be only critical of their lack of communication and tried to give them time to work this out.

I am only making this post because I have seen how these kinds of caustic threads will typically kill everything in there path. My feeling is that any deal or ideas that have come up to solve the problems are most likely going to be gutted due to the damage done to the products reputation. Even though I would personally stick it out if something positive was announced, I have become doubtful it will.

I am not saying that MS is blameless in all of this. I am saying that the people who actually did the work and ran the company can only do what they are allowed to do by those people holding the strings. So given all of this I thought that the Ethical thing to do is come out and say to you guys that I am personally getting out of this one on Monday. It will truly suck if something changes and I have to join the back of the line but my gut feeling based on my last conversation is that things did not go as planned.

I am truly saddened by this. Not only for all the staff at SAI who put seven years of their lives into this but I am also sad to see one of the most innovative and useful products that I have seen released in my 35 years of reef keeping probably get boxed away for years before someone is able to get the patents and then resurrect it again. Yes we will have reagent and probe systems with pumps and calibration fluids etc. but the concept of just clicking in one disk every month and your done, was IMO the perfect solution.

Unlike some other buyers I had no illusions that the first, second or even third version of the disks would be perfect. I did know that if they just got a proper start and had some reasonable success they would have nailed the problem in a matter of months. I can tell you that they did have a few tanks that behaved like @OLDREEFER44 and they identified the problem and had a solution that was being tested with very promising results just before things started to go to hell.

 

[Silver14SS]

There are other people on this forum who know more than I do, but they have been silent which is probably what I should have done at the start.

Agreed, MS would be best served being their own messenger.

I can also say that all the Blame people are heaping on the CEO and Employees of Mindstream is completely misplaced.

Who else should be blamed but the captain of the ship if it sinks?

I have had former colleagues of mine who left secure jobs at our company and went to work for startup companies. Many of them ended up in this same kind of position and I know one of the root causes is that there is a sickness among a small group of people on social media who all seem to rooting for failure and feel personal satisfaction in seeing something other people built get burned to the ground just so they can say they were right!

I don't think anyone critical of how MS conducts business wants anyone to suffer, including customers. Perhaps all the criticism could have been taken into consideration and the organization could have changed it's behavior as a result of the feedback? Maybe the people "rooting for failure" were trying to point out red flags that the supporters were trying to get people to ignore? It's possible to support a product, want it to be successful, and still be critical of how things are going.

Sickness indeed...

The one thing I am looking forward to is when the Dust settles is to see how many of the people who keep on bashing MS are going to end up being MS owners. We got a lot of material to Quote back to them later on.

How late is your MindStream Monitor

Im confused - Daniel posted that the Mindstream would start fulfilling orders 'soon' on June 27 (hadn't started yet) - lets assume they started July 1 - with an estimated date of 6-8 weeks. 8 weeks from July 1 is September 1. How can anyone have a mindstream that is '2 months late' - what am I...

www.reef2reef.com

I am not saying that MS is blameless in all of this.

Who should be blamed for ANY of this except them?

 

[Hair Algae Wizard]

I hate to point blame in situations like this, as none of us, with the exception of @robbyg truly knows what the internal factors are, that this company is facing. Having said that, the CEO should have done a much better job making sure his leadership team communicated better with his customers and the community.

I am an airline captain, and fly primarily to Europe from the United States. As the captain, every single thing that happens during the duration of that flight is my responsibility. Things like how much additional fuel, our route of flight, diversions if we have an in-flight issue, weather, crew, passengers, ATC,, all fall on me to manage successfully... Typically I have two other pilots with me, to assist with these things, but ultimately, I'm the CEO of that flight. I'm the dude with the 4 stripes, and any screw-ups are my fault. The same applies to Brian Degen at Mindstream. He's the captain of his ship, and it's his job to apply all his skills and knowledge to ensure the company thrives.

Trust once lost, is VERY hard to win back, and I suspect the reefing community has lost a good measure of it with this company, regardless of how compelling the product is.

The tone of this thread is suggestive that Mindstream is about to collapse. I certainly hope not, and hope they can pull out of this nose dive. Sadly, in this case, all they had to do was send out a simple email, and explain where things stand, and that probably would have been sufficient, but now I suspect it may be to late...

 

[Sharis100]

I don’t want this company to fail: 1. The product is needed and according to industry experts great. 2. They have my money. 3. I want them to deliver as I want the product.
All I want is communication, not silence .

 

[kzp]

[ Instead I felt that offering some communication of the bits I could talk about would ease peoples anxiety.

the Ethical thing to do is come out and say to you guys that I am personally getting out of this one on Monday.

Will someone please explain to me how you (perhaps the biggest advocate for MS on-line) saying that you are going to be "personally getting out of this one on Monday" could possibly "ease peoples anxeity". Quite the opposite, in fact. For, if you are getting out, then most everyone else who is somewhat on the fence (such as myself) should be running for the hills!

As for the insinuation that social media criticism can destroy an impending deal, that sounds illogical to me in this case. If anything, if I were a prospective MS buyer, investor, or partner, I'd be jumping all over this once I see that: 1. apparently 2000 orders came in on the 1st day of release; and, 2. most importantly, that reefers are such a driven, cult-like, and obsessive (like myself!) group of people when it comes to reefing, that they'd still be willing to keep $1000.00 of their hard-earned money in a company's coffers for so long even though they've been treated so badly by that company and even though there's been nothing but bad news for weeks and months straight. In fact, most posters (including myself) have indicated that even if SAI goes down temporarily, we will get right back in the cue once we feel that there is hope for a re-boot. This should re-assure any prospective buyer--unless there is something more fundamentally wrong with the technology.

For this reason, if some prospective deal that was to be announced last Tuesday fell through, there are only several possible explanations as to why that is the case--and none have anything to do with social media negative posting. The most likely reason is that too many units were having problems with accuracy (as I've been reading in threads from the few who actually own units), and therefore there is no way that any even big company (a Neptune or Red Sea, for instance) could staff enough IT support people to handle the huge volume of incoming calls and complaints that would ensue about devices not working.

For these reasons, I suspect that even after 7 years of so-called Beta-testing, the technology is simply not reliable enough to allow people such as myself to trust the testing results coming from these units. Question: after reading above posts about multiple people (OldReefer, for instance) having inconsistent Alk readings, would anyone on this forum feel comfortable dosing more or less Alk as a result of these readings? I know I wouldn't. I'd still end up feeling that I have to double check any results with my old Hannah Checker before making ANY alk dosing change--which puts me in the exact same position that I am in now--which is relying on my Hannah Checker for dosing changes! I'd like to hear from anyone who disagrees with this assessment.

Common sense dictates that if MS could truly produce accurate and continually reproducible test results with NO waste water, NO home calibration, NO large footprint, NO usage of aquarium water, NO reagents, and NO hassle of manual testing, then big companies would be lining up to partner with or outright buy this company--regardless of peoples' negative social media postings. I'll tell you this. If some other company buys MS and actually makes it reliably work and can deliver the units, then I'm getting right back in!

 

[Dj City]

The tone of this thread is suggestive that Mindstream is about to collapse. I certainly hope not, and hope they can pull out of this nose dive. Sadly, in this case, all they had to do was send out a simple email, and explain where things stand, and that probably would have been sufficient, but now I suspect it may be to late...

If they produce an email tomorrow saying they apologize for the delays and that they expect production and delivery to resume in 4 weeks...
All would be forgiven by a large amount of people who are desperately waiting, wishing and hoping for this product to materialize.

To me, this is like the 4am "As Seen On TV" commercial that addresses your wants and needs.
You desperately want it to work but...

 

[Dj City]

Real talk

If you forked over $1000 of your hard earned money 3 or 4 months ago...

If you have not received what you paid for 3 or 4 months ago...

If you can't get any kind of response or communication from the company you gave $1000 of your hard earned money to 3 or 4 months ago...

It might be time to man up and take the "Sucker" badge off.
Go ahead and get your money back if you can. Call your credit card company or bank or PayPal and stop being a "Sucker".

If your money is just plain flat out "Gone" take it as a lesson learned and move on but....

Stop playing the "Sucker"

 

[TheHarold]

Real talk

If you forked over $1000 of your hard earned money 3 or 4 months ago...

If you have not received what you paid for 3 or 4 months ago...

If you can't get any kind of response or communication from the company you gave $1000 of your hard earned money to 3 or 4 months ago...

It might be time to man up and take the "Sucker" badge off.
Go ahead and get your money back if you can. Call your credit card company or bank or PayPal and stop being a "Sucker".

If your money is just plain flat out "Gone" take it as a lesson learned and move on but....

Stop playing the "Sucker"

agreed

 

[adamsfour]

agreed

I can’t MS basically posted an ad on their FB page.

 

[TheHarold]

I can’t MS basically posted an ad on their FB page.

Look at all the comments though- people are finally getting smarter. Took a while haha

 

[User1]

I decided a few days ago it was best I kept my mouth shut about Mindstream.

That is a mistake on your part. Suppression isn't an option. We have an ignore button for a reason. And if someone is hostile then we address it. I know I don't agree with a few things you and I have discussed but I've not ignored you
Heck, there are days that I stalk you to see what you are thinking on the board.

Yes we will have reagent and probe systems with pumps and calibration fluids etc. but the concept of just clicking in one disk every month and your done, was IMO the perfect solution.

Revolutionary? I think not. Seneye was already using a disc / slide concept although for ph and nh3. Who came first I know not and it probably doesn't matter. I was just saying conceptually this has already been done and MS was just trying to enhance it. Try, doing, whatever.

Here is my take on it. The product doesn't bother me one way or another. You already know what does. Taking money up front. What bothers me even more are a few posts here and there that seem to follow the same pattern of ignoring communication. My posts about taking action by cancelation is simple. Losing money will force a hand.

It is your only option. Well, that and waiting.

 

[kzp]

I’ll assume MS has very good lawyers already, but if not, I would imagine they’ve been advised to lawyer up because they may very well need to. I’m not a lawyer, but this whole escapade strikes me as fraud-like. at the very least. Taking people’s’ money while knowing dang well that you can’t deliver as promised is fraud in my book. Even when units were not being delivered from 7/1 orders, they were still taking orders! I wonder if it is prosecutable.

 

[Dj City]

I can’t MS basically posted an ad on their FB page.

What did they say on Facebook?

 

[Ebslinger]

@kzp The problem is proving intent... without intent to defraud someone it gets dicey... Without intent it would likely fall under business law.

 

[Silver14SS]

Look at all the comments though- people are finally getting smarter. Took a while haha

All those people must have some kind of nefarious agenda...

 

[kzp]

@kzp The problem is proving intent... without intent to defraud someone it gets dicey... Without intent it would likely fall under business law.

Thanks for info. We will likely never know if there was intent. However, subpoenaed e-mails and other internal documents, if unearthed, may show a pattern of nefarious behavior, including taking peoples' money with 6-8 wk. guarantees in shipping while using the money to pay for operations, while knowing full-well at the time of collecting peoples' money that a 6-8 wk. delivery will never actually happen. If so, it would work like a Ponzi scheme.

 

[RCeiver]

I decided a few days ago it was best I kept my mouth shut about Mindstream. It seems like the more I say is the more some people like to twist it into ammunition to go after them. I have had several conversations with one of the employees before and after the silence started two plus weeks ago.

Most of it was confidential so I am not going discuss any of that with anybody. The only reason he talked to me was that he could see I was also from the industry and was not judgmental because I understood the problems a startup goes through. There are other people on this forum who know more than I do, but they have been silent which is probably what I should have done at the start. Instead I felt that offering some communication of the bits I could talk about would ease peoples anxiety.

I can tell you that what one person on here said about water testing companies going after them is absolutely true. I had heard that from the same employee before the long silence. He said they had been under constant attack by certain companies who saw the MS as a major long term threat to their business. I can also say that all the Blame people are heaping on the CEO and Employees of Mindstream is completely misplaced. All of the people who work for the company have been trying their hardest to fulfill the promises made. The main problem I am told was that when you have something that was viewed skeptically for years and thought to be a loss by nervous investors and is then launched and on the day of the launch it brings in a couple of thousand orders, suddenly people start to see dollar signs and chaos soon develops amongst the Titans.

The last communication I got was that something wonderful was probably going to be announce last week Tuesday. They stated that it was not a done deal and it could fall apart and if so it would need to be started again.

I have had former colleagues of mine who left secure jobs at our company and went to work for startup companies. Many of them ended up in this same kind of position and I know one of the root causes is that there is a sickness among a small group of people on social media who all seem to rooting for failure and feel personal satisfaction in seeing something other people built get burned to the ground just so they can say they were right!

I am not into that kind of thinking as I have known people who worked for these startups I know how devastated they get when people like us make our little jokes and they in turn loose their jobs and have an uncertain futures going forward. Like so many of you on this forum I have just stayed on point and tried to be only critical of their lack of communication and tried to give them time to work this out.

I am only making this post because I have seen how these kinds of caustic threads will typically kill everything in there path. My feeling is that any deal or ideas that have come up to solve the problems are most likely going to be gutted due to the damage done to the products reputation. Even though I would personally stick it out if something positive was announced, I have become doubtful it will.

I am not saying that MS is blameless in all of this. I am saying that the people who actually did the work and ran the company can only do what they are allowed to do by those people holding the strings. So given all of this I thought that the Ethical thing to do is come out and say to you guys that I am personally getting out of this one on Monday. It will truly suck if something changes and I have to join the back of the line but my gut feeling based on my last conversation is that things did not go as planned.

I am truly saddened by this. Not only for all the staff at SAI who put seven years of their lives into this but I am also sad to see one of the most innovative and useful products that I have seen released in my 35 years of reef keeping probably get boxed away for years before someone is able to get the patents and then resurrect it again. Yes we will have reagent and probe systems with pumps and calibration fluids etc. but the concept of just clicking in one disk every month and your done, was IMO the perfect solution.

Unlike some other buyers I had no illusions that the first, second or even third version of the disks would be perfect. I did know that if they just got a proper start and had some reasonable success they would have nailed the problem in a matter of months. I can tell you that they did have a few tanks that behaved like @OLDREEFER44 and they identified the problem and had a solution that was being tested with very promising results just before things started to go to hell.

There’s a couple of people on this board posting details of pretty specific conversations they supposedly had with mindstream. If these conversations were true, it would explain the radio silence from the company since the they are apparently spending hours on the phone with customers divulging their hopes, fears, and challenges. Perhaps they should consider therapy.

Mindstream claims that their competitors are sabotaging them on the boards? They are the ones that required payment in advance and then didn’t deliver the product on time (or at all). These conspiracy theories are pretty ridiculous.

If you want a good conspiracy theory, perhaps the person whose first post on a board is “ I just joined this forum officially because I just bought a Mindstream yesterday.” isn’t really a customer and is instead someone from the company trying to swing things in their favor. It seems to make more sense than to believe that a company that doesn’t return phone calls or emails is sharing all this information with one or more of their customers.

 

[kzp]

I decided a few days ago it was best I kept my mouth shut about Mindstream. It seems like the more I say is the more some people like to twist it into ammunition to go after them. I have had several conversations with one of the employees before and after the silence started two plus weeks ago.

Most of it was confidential so I am not going discuss any of that with anybody. The only reason he talked to me was that he could see I was also from the industry and was not judgmental because I understood the problems a startup goes through. There are other people on this forum who know more than I do, but they have been silent which is probably what I should have done at the start. Instead I felt that offering some communication of the bits I could talk about would ease peoples anxiety.

I can tell you that what one person on here said about water testing companies going after them is absolutely true. I had heard that from the same employee before the long silence. He said they had been under constant attack by certain companies who saw the MS as a major long term threat to their business. I can also say that all the Blame people are heaping on the CEO and Employees of Mindstream is completely misplaced. All of the people who work for the company have been trying their hardest to fulfill the promises made. The main problem I am told was that when you have something that was viewed skeptically for years and thought to be a loss by nervous investors and is then launched and on the day of the launch it brings in a couple of thousand orders, suddenly people start to see dollar signs and chaos soon develops amongst the Titans.

The last communication I got was that something wonderful was probably going to be announce last week Tuesday. They stated that it was not a done deal and it could fall apart and if so it would need to be started again.

I have had former colleagues of mine who left secure jobs at our company and went to work for startup companies. Many of them ended up in this same kind of position and I know one of the root causes is that there is a sickness among a small group of people on social media who all seem to rooting for failure and feel personal satisfaction in seeing something other people built get burned to the ground just so they can say they were right!

I am not into that kind of thinking as I have known people who worked for these startups I know how devastated they get when people like us make our little jokes and they in turn loose their jobs and have an uncertain futures going forward. Like so many of you on this forum I have just stayed on point and tried to be only critical of their lack of communication and tried to give them time to work this out.

I am only making this post because I have seen how these kinds of caustic threads will typically kill everything in there path. My feeling is that any deal or ideas that have come up to solve the problems are most likely going to be gutted due to the damage done to the products reputation. Even though I would personally stick it out if something positive was announced, I have become doubtful it will.

I am not saying that MS is blameless in all of this. I am saying that the people who actually did the work and ran the company can only do what they are allowed to do by those people holding the strings. So given all of this I thought that the Ethical thing to do is come out and say to you guys that I am personally getting out of this one on Monday. It will truly suck if something changes and I have to join the back of the line but my gut feeling based on my last conversation is that things did not go as planned.

I am truly saddened by this. Not only for all the staff at SAI who put seven years of their lives into this but I am also sad to see one of the most innovative and useful products that I have seen released in my 35 years of reef keeping probably get boxed away for years before someone is able to get the patents and then resurrect it again. Yes we will have reagent and probe systems with pumps and calibration fluids etc. but the concept of just clicking in one disk every month and your done, was IMO the perfect solution.

Unlike some other buyers I had no illusions that the first, second or even third version of the disks would be perfect. I did know that if they just got a proper start and had some reasonable success they would have nailed the problem in a matter of months. I can tell you that they did have a few tanks that behaved like @OLDREEFER44 and they identified the problem and had a solution that was being tested with very promising results just before things started to go to hell.

To RobbyG. Did you officially Bail?

 

[robbyg]

Wow I have moved from sabotaging them by saying I am out of here and getting a refund to now being an employee trying to drum up business. Which one is it? And yes I am out.