July Update
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 11:31:39 PM

Hey Backers! 

Montreal’s hot and humid summer has contributed to a productive month of June at Mindset. We’ve got a lot to cover with this update, so let’s dive right in!

You can check out the full update on our blog. 

The last month has been dedicated to the DMF/DFA process – below we describe in more detail what that entails. In particular, we made some major changes to the upperband and cabling solution that will ensure a reliable, scalable production. The DV batch will be ready in late August as a result, instead of July as intended. Once we validate these changes, the next step is mass production all the way.

In addition, we’ve received our first mass batches of electrodes, which look amazing. We’ll be ordering a batch of 1,000 next week, which will enable environmental testing and the production of our first mass manufactured batches (DV and beyond). 

We’ve started making high-resolution renders of the final industrial design for marketing purposes, and they look stunning – scroll down to check it out! We’ll be sure to share more as we continue the process.

Finally, the app is running the new UI skin, and it looks gorgeous. We’ll be prioritizing robustness over the next months, gearing up towards the launch. We answer a few questions below that we got from backers last update.

You can follow this link to check out the rest of the update. 

As always, feel free to follow up with any questions in the comments, and we’ll be happy to answers them. 

Likewise, I’m going to be doing another round of interviews to get a better sense of our backers’ needs and wants over the next weeks. If you’re interested in being part of this research, leave a note in your comment, and I’ll follow up with you! 

Lots of love,

- The Mindset Team

May Update
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 01:37:24 AM

Hey Backers! 

This past month has been busy on both fronts, with the hardware team working on getting the tooling going and the software team working on our new UI. We’re really excited to share with you our progress. 

You can follow this link to get to the update on our blog. 

The hardware team spent this month finalizing a few electronics changes, and negotiating the mass production terms with our factory. This negotiation is the necessary evil, to make sure that we’re spending your money wisely. This took longer than expected unfortunately – as a result we’re current expecting to receive the DV batch in July. 

In parallel the software team has done some incredible work with the latest UX overhaul, bringing all the features together in a very seamless package. We also started 4 more neuro-adaptive music tracks, which will ship with the app. We’ve described the app UI thoroughly below for your enjoyment! 

You can check out the full update on our blog. 

Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments, and let us know what you think about the app. We’re working on implementing these changes into the alpha version as we speak, so any feedback to guide our developers is appreciated! 

We’ll keep you posted with pictures of the hardware production as it moves along on social media and here on our blog. Until next time! 

Lots of love,

- The Mindset Team

April Update
almost 5 years ago – Wed, May 08, 2019 at 07:33:28 PM

Hey backers! 

The last 6 weeks have been full of surprises and progress for us. With the hardware team back in Montreal this month, we’re excited to share our latest prototype batch with you – with pictures, explanations, and videos this time. 

You can check out our update on our blog. Enjoy!

We’ve received our latest batch of headphones in Montreal, and they’re looking great. We’ve posted several pictures and videos of the product in action below. 

We found several minor issues with this batch, which we’ve since fixed. With this successful batch, our next iteration will be a mass production batch. If this batch is successful, we’ll start shipping each subsequent batch, with a ~6 week lead time each – we’re very excited about this. 

Our audio and ANC tests came back with very positive results. Due to a supplier issue, we had to change (read: upgrade) ANC chip providers – with the new system, our preliminary ANC tuning shows a 30dB attenuation, which is on-par with other high-end ANC headphones available today. 

Finally, we made some tweaks to the industrial design. Next update we’ll be sharing our new app design as well. We’re in the home stretch! 

That’s all folks! You can find our update on our blog. 

Next month we’ll be mid-batch, so we’ll take the opportunity to share pictures of our new app UI, and describe some of the functionality that will be available at launch. Thanks again to those that helped out with the UX interviews and surveys - we’re excited to share what came of it!

If there’s anything you didn’t see in this update that you’d like more info about, please share it in the comments! 

Lots of love, 

- The Mindset Team

February Update
about 5 years ago – Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 11:40:03 PM

Hey Backers! 

February bled into march as we pushed this update a few extra days in order to show you pictures of our latest prototype batch. This batch looks incredible so far - we’re really excited to show you all the pictures we took while assembling them. 

You can find our latest update on our blog. 

Enjoy! 

The latest prototype batch’s assembly went well – you can read about the specifics, and see tons of great pictures below. We’re not quite done the assembly, so we’ll continue to update this post next week with more pictures of the final units. 

So far, the parts look great and assemble well. We had a few issues with the upper band being too stiff (which we temporarily fixed), and with our electronics software (which we hacked together a solution for). Neither of these will affect our mass production units. We’re waiting to receive a few more parts (namely the electrode band) to assemble the final units. 

We’ll post more pictures, and videos of the product in-use once the assembly is done and shipped to the Montreal office! In the meantime, we’ll continue working towards our next batch, which should arrive late April/early May. This will be our last pre-shipping batch. 

We need your help designing our app! 

In parallel to the hardware developments below, we’re taking this month to undergo a UX design process: consolidating what we’ve learned building and testing the app, to create the final ship-ready user interface for the software. 

In order to make sure the product fits your needs, we met with several backers last week to dive into questions about work habits, focus environments, and general expectations for the product. 

We also put together a survey that we’d like all of you to fill out. Please take the time to fill out our short (~3min) survey, to help us design the product to fit your needs: https://goo.gl/forms/yLB8mvzOJYZ5tyIr1

Thank you so much for your help! 

You can access the latest update here. We’ll continue updating this post with pictures as we finish the assembly. 

Upon request, we’ll also share videos of the headphones in-use once we finish this batch. We’re excited to show you the fruits of our labor, so stay tuned for that! 

Lastly, please take the time to fill out our UX survey to help us optimize our app for your work habits: https://goo.gl/forms/yLB8mvzOJYZ5tyIr1. We really appreciate your effort! 

Lots of love, 

- The Mindset Team

January Update
about 5 years ago – Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 06:39:47 PM

Hey Backers,

Happy 2019! We’ve been off to a great start, working towards getting our tooling ready and our DV batch manufactured. 

Since we’re mid-milestone (prepping for DV batch), January was a heads-down-working kind of month. This update will be much shorter than usual, as last month was spent preparing for manufacturing our next batch of engineering units. In this update, we’ll share a few decisions we have made recently to accelerate the schedule and ship as soon as possible, as well providing a deeper timeline about the steps to getting there. 

You can check out the blog post here. Enjoy! 

January was an in-between month for us, where we focused on prepping the supplies and requirements for our next prototypes. On the hardware side, we managed to send in the purchase order for our prototypes before Chinese New Year, which keeps us on schedule to receive the prototypes in early march, and the DV batch end of march. These prototypes will enable us to validate full-functionality, to tune the ANC in Taiwan, and to test the software UX. 

On software, we’re bringing on more help on neuro-adaptive music composition and user experience design. Together, this new expertise will enable us to take a new look at the software app and ensure that the experience is designed from the ground up to add tangible value, while integrating seamlessly into your life. We’ll share app images as we work through the next months of design and testing. 

We detailed our timeline more thoroughly below. We’re still on schedule to produce our DV batch in March, with PV and shipping shortly after. 

February 4th was Mindset’s 3rd birthday! We’re incredibly humbled, and excited by all the next steps on the horizon. Thank you again for all of your support, and for making Mindset possible!  

You can check out our monthly update on our blog. As always, please post any comments or questions , and we’ll be happy to continue the conversation! 

As a reminder, if you’re interested in being part of our user research calls, please send an email to [email protected]. Thanks in advance for your support in making Mindset as great as it can be! 

Lots of love, 

- The Mindset Team