Mesh Shortage Update from the CEO

[Ari]

Dear Mesh Community –

As you are well aware, the goTenna Mesh product has been on backorder for 5 months. This backorder has been driven primarily by the disruption in the global supply chain, particularly the impacts to chip manufacturing and availability. Some of our critical components to build goTenna products are also utilized in the manufacture of automobiles, we have been particularly challenged to obtain the required parts. These critical components are also shared between the goTenna Mesh and the goTenna Pro X.

Despite the shortage, we had initially allocated a subset of chip parts towards building new Mesh products this year. While goTenna has primarily focused our business on our professional market and enabling public safety, law enforcement, military and humanitarian groups to carry out dangerous missions more safely and effectively – Mesh is an incredible product with an incredible community, and we wanted to keep the product line active, specifically with a new build ready in April.

Global events disrupted this plan. We have numerous organizations who are using our capabilities in Ukraine for a variety of extremely worthwhile missions. Given the uncertainty of that conflict and its broader impact on European regional security, I have made the decision to divert the critical shared components to our goTenna Pro X product for the time being as the work that our end users are doing over in that region is our highest priority. I will not lie and say this was a hard decision – the activities by a wide variety of organizations in Ukraine is heroic and the small role we are playing in assisting their safety and success is deeply gratifying to us as a company – but I know it is frustrating for the Mesh community for us to further delay this build.

Our team is aggressively scouring the world for critical parts and we have been adding headcount to our logistics team. If anyone in the goTenna community knows anyone working with NXP MCU’s that may have excess stock we could purchase, or has contacts at NXP and the large distributors, please contact us at Support@gotenna.com. Going forward, we will continue to provide updates to you at least on a quarterly basis.

Sincerely,
Ari Schuler
CEO

[mert]

Thanks for the update.

Would you be interested in open-sourcing or at least completing the API work that’s needed to build top-layer software that works with GoTenna Mesh?

I understand that based on your pivot you’re not going to be properly focusing on Mesh for a while more. And I fully admire and support you keeping it alive! This feels like a low-hanging fruit for you and might allow the community to drive the value prop and continue to innovate there.

I understand gov margins are probably heftier than what you can achieve with mesh, but mesh could do volume. I would really try and focus on manufacturing more + opening up the API in a way that doesn’t include any bottlenecks on your end so the community can go find new ways to use the product, better up to date software, etc. (Think of all the apps that use Tesla APIs to create new functionality.)

That could help mesh stay alive, find a use and an avenue to scale for itself while you focus your efforts on pro.

[Pete94]

Thank you for the update and totally understand your issues.

The SDK offers some great features, but the (again totally understandable) limitation of messages sent via the SDK (especially the Python API) not being seen by the stock Apps which limits the use cases.

I am sure that an update to the Apps which allows the use of a user’s SDK key to send and receive messages with the stock app would allow for developers to implement some great Apps, without the need to replicate the App UI.

Arguably this would be relatively simple change and would show commitment to Gotenna Mesh.

[T11]

Governments will always be there to save us.
Keep the good work.