Recently we have come across many people asking us why our shipping takes so long. As a company that prides ourselves on taking building-in-public seriously, we think it makes sense to summarize the 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 just like our 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 our biggest, most passionate project yet – 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 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, acquiring 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 ours. Because of this, as a business, we can only focus on development one model at a time.
It did not take long for us to finish the development of the Spectrum 4K 144Hz model, and we would like to thank all of our community and customers for being involved with us throughout the entire process.
In less than a year after mass production started for our first Spectrum model, we have delivered more than six thousand 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 that we continue to focus on the essentials that our customers want. We hope this gives you a little 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.
Note – Now you can order your Spectrum 4K 144Hz at its product page. The estimated shipping date is listed under the Buy Now button. We are in the process of improving all our logistics processes, which in the near future will drastically reduce our current lead times.
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 side, we are still debugging and refining the firmware to fulfill Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro certifications. On top of that, we are also working directly with the Chief Blur Buster himself for Spectrum’s backlight strobe tuning.
Spectrum QHD 144Hz, Matte - ES07D01 & QHD 280Hz, Glossy - ES07DCA
Due to our efforts currently focused on getting ES07DC9 & ES07D02 ready for production, 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 complications that simply put, are beyond our control. That being said, we are doing everything we possibly can behind the scenes to mitigate these complications as much as possible.
Without the resources of a major manufacturer, it may appear that it takes a long time for us to solve these issues. Regardless, we continue to push forward 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 on this topic. And we hope that this helps explain why our shipping is taking so long. However, we strongly believe that good products take time, and great products take years!