We at Flow strongly believe in the need of a fair approach, open communication and a mutual respect. What has happened to us regarding the contract work for Leap Motion was a strong impulse to share our experience with you as well as other developers. I personally hope this will save you time and effort. For us, recently big evangelists of the Leap Motion controller, this is even a more unpleasant experience.
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Dear Michael and David,
I feel an urgent need to react to your decision to cancel the selection process regarding “Request for proposal: V2 Apps.” It’s for the third time in the last 10 months that my company, Flow Studio, was asked by your representatives to offer a proposal including a concept, a production plan and a budget (in a very short time, but we don’t mind). However, for the third time, the selection process was canceled or the brief has dramatically changed after several iterations.
I’ve won and lost hundreds of tenders during my career. The defeat by other teams is always unpleasant but usually fair because of stronger ideas, better execution or simply lower prices from other competitors. What I consider unprofessional is asking multiple companies to solve the client’s brief and then to change the strategy completely without any remuneration for the time invested from the teams involved. This clearly shows two things:
1) Lack of a strategy. If the company urgently requests concepts to be done in few days, then waits for the feedback for weeks and finally completely changes the brief, it’s a signal that the strategy is missing. Jumping from one idea to another one shows there is no long-term plan and a clear vision of the purpose of the device.
2) Disrespect to the time of developers. Asking for other’s work without being 100% about the intention is wasting time, effort and money of people, who give life to the Leap Motion Controller.
Not only that, but Airspace is dead in terms of downloads for the last half a year and we developers don’t see any support and effort to change this. Also, this self-centered approach to “work-per-hire” is the reason why we’ve lost our belief your company can change the world as we thought the first time we saw the Leap Motion Controller. First and foremost, you have to set the right priorities.
I hope you understand why we don’t want to be contacted anymore about other cooperation proposals in the future.
Best Regards,
Petr Fodor
Co-Founder at Flow Studio
Update: 10 days after we sent this open letter to Leap Motion we still haven’t received any response. Another strange thing, don’t you think?
