First thing’s first: we remain waiting with bated breath for the first mass produced units that you saw in the last update to make their way to our team in Slovenia.

There was a customs export issue at TSA that we needed to resolve before we could start shipping commercial units from our distribution center in the US internationally. Unfortunately, this means we will have lost about 2 weeks on top of the 10 day delay we saw from the Covid factory shutdown in China in March, which will very likely push the first deliveries by a few weeks either to the very end of May or into June. As those units arrive we’ll revise our schedule accordingly and share it with you, but our estimation is that we are in the range of a few weeks behind our plan.

You can also refer to our dedicated (and continually updated) article here at any point before our next backer update. We’re in the process of opening our very own US headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and while we’re excited about bringing part of the Bird Buddy production closer to home, it was actually the registering of a new address that threw the wrench in the bureaucracy of logistics and getting the first units shipped to us.This is now pending resolution and we are expecting the units to be shipped to us in the coming days.

‍It’s important to us that this first batch of Bird Buddies go through the same production as well as shipping and fulfillment process to make sure every step of the way works as expected and that we won’t have any surprises as we start scaling that to thousands of international shipments per week.

It is the last, but crucial step we want to complete before we finally ramp up production as intended.In the meantime, we keep polishing the integration between our app and the Bird Buddy device, making improvements on both, to make sure we deliver a great day one experience for everyone.

In an additional effort to streamline collaboration, members of our Slovenian software development team will be flying to San Diego, California to work alongside our hardware contract manufacturing partners there; as we’re now entering a stage of development where we get to focus on “how things work” as opposed to “if they work”, it’s a much more engaging process between the two teams that is otherwise hindered by the 9 hour time zone difference.With all that said, we encourage you to stay tuned for an unboxing video from us soon. The finish line is well and truly in sight now, even with the minor setbacks. We hope to have more good news for you in the coming weeks. Until then, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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With warm wishes,

The Bird Buddy team