Some news about the leaderboard

This week we’ve launched a shiny new GFC website, and the transition to a new website meant it was a good time to reevaluate the leaderboard. With growth comes competition, and within that we found a problem that was coming from within: our leaderboard was reporting our sales metrics and production data in such a way that our competitors had it in a nice, neat, consumable package. But growth also yields improved reliability as a company. Our support team keeps everyone informed and our production staff keeps knocking out campers.

The history of the leaderboard
Our leaderboard was born during a time when we were new and running super behind schedule. The main purpose of the leaderboard was to provide some accountability through extreme transparency. As we’ve grown into the company that we are today, we’ve beaten our lead times by months, rolled back start dates twice, and we’ve kept our customers up-to-date on their builds’ progression with email and phone communication tailored specifically to their needs.

What’s taking its place?
We’re building a feature on our new site that will include a live “camper’s built” tally, in order to maintain the extreme level of transparency that we’ve always given y’all, and as always our customer support team will continue to send out production updates as campers make it to different milestones while they’re being built. We’ve also made a huge push to increase our phone call bandwidth, and have been actively taking to the phones more often than in the past. You may note that our “phone call request” button has been replaced with a real life phone number with a real human person on the other end. It is our hope that increased customer communication combined with more consistent and accurate production estimates will eliminate the need for the leaderboard as it was.

Moving forward
The leaderboard, as it exists now, is actually a redundant echo of the update emails that we send out throughout the production process. There’s a thread on this forum that outlines our production timelines, and if everyone wants to keep reporting their updates on that thread you’ll still be able to compare “standings” while your campers are being built. Alternatively, if somebody wants to take on the task of building a leaderboard-esque portal for our new website that would display production statuses specific to each individual customer, I’d be happy to discuss details with them.

TLDR: The leaderboard isn’t going away, it’s within you(r inbox).

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I’m sad there’s no leaderboard. Exactly how long has the leaderboard been around? I’m guessing since inception? Make it private for us waiting. Thanks amigos…

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Where is the " live “camper’s built” tally"? Or has that feature still not been launched?

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We’re working on adding that to the new site.

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Good question. As Taylor said, the Leaderboard began as early production dates began to slip (think first 50-100 units, in particular), and GFC needed a way to reassure people that they weren’t going to be another Kickstarter-ish failure. Allowing private access for customers wouldn’t truly lock the data down, as is common practice. The Leaderboard served its purpose well, but I can understand the business need to pull such detailed data from public consumption at this point in the company’s history.

I don’t think many people realize just how many unknowns there are to building a production facility from scratch, populating it with trained & trustworthy staff, to produce a newly designed product from scratch, all while trying to keep the whole enterprise on stable financial footing. I followed GFC’s progress very closely in the early days, and I have some experience with large scale production of complicated assemblies. I liked what I saw from the start, and the company continues to impress as they overcome obstacles that would put a lesser team down for the count. To my eyes, the move away from the Leaderboard concept to more personalized updates is another positive sign of growth.

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