Ah this is a great post. I think you get to the heart of the misunderstanding here, which was really puzzling me. Thank you for kindness and understanding here.
I certainly apologize upfront for any misunderstanding, and I’ll do my best to elucidate away any confusion as I can. I will also study this situation and upgrade communication processes to make things better in the future.
The only active consumer mixes with our (mostly plant based) copulins (or any kind of so-called “copulins”) around that time were Lust After Me and Dirty.
If you do a google search of androticsdirect.com (and google’s data is still kind of old, so it’s not like we changed this or some other deceptful thing you might see a truly dishonest company like pherlure do), you’ll see that we didn’t really have many products with copulins.
do this at google:
site:androticsdirect.com copulins
and
site:androticsdirect.com copulin
This will answer it once and for all.
Instant Sexiness does not come up.
This description has not been edited since we started. You can use both Google’s cache and archive.org to verify this.
It was never, and has never been advertised (meaning at smartmones.com) as containing copulins, although we certaintly did mention it on the forum at for the time it time.
The timeline goes something like this:
V1.0 had none. From what I can tell from our note (I’m not the master of the women’s context here 
)… Due to requests (some women are copulin crazy and WILL tie up phone lines and saturate email with anything remotely copuin related!), we put them in for a very brief time with v1.1. Then sometime is either very late 06 or in 07, when our reserves were low, we took them out again and moved to 1.2, where the version has remained.
This is not even necessarily something that Steve would know, since I don’t think he was even a client at the time the versions changed over. He’s been with us for awhile, but not forever. He seemed to make an honest mistake of simply speaking out of what he knew to be true.
At that time, btw, we had Jasmin on the phone for something like 10 to 14 hours a day. Just an amazing amount of time. There was really no one on the forum that we didn’t talk to verbally. We were as close to our customers as we could be.
At that time, a lot of notice of changes, and supply warnings, were issued verbally. We did have the expectation (perhaps wrong on our part) that this information would then be shared with the forum publicly.
I’m sorry for expecting something that was perhaps unrealistic. I do not know, however, how we could always function without making a communication mistake or deletion. Sometimes you innovate things far faster than you can publicly edict. Mostly I think of large, “make a big deal out of this” public notices and edicts as a function for ethical & mission positioning statements to establish a culture, as well as a function of marketing when you really want to sell a product (and we don’t really do much “marketing” yet – not the really flashy, get-attention type anyway)
We did try emailing a bit early on when there were changes, but… honestly, a lot of the time we were afraid to email clients about basic notices over little things, because we’d see a huge spike in sales. A spike we could not handle. We simply did not have enough people power at the time. An nowadays, oh my gosh, even though we have more people and capacity, if we emailed over 16k people… we might get the gears all jammed up again.
There is always a downside to every upside. It’s tough to consider some of these things.
A sort of “soft notice” is probably best for our type of R&D store model, but I guess sometimes nobody is going to catch a small bit of text, or understand that what we share on the phone about certain product or mix changes might best be shared far and wide on the forum.
I will deeply consider how to handle this. As I mentioned before, again, a sort of “Bugtrac” system or changelog as they use at sites like Sourceforge, might be best. That might be the best way to distribute information without unduly flooding ourselves with sales, and creating an order & customer service situation that we are not prepared to handle.
Ok, I think this is the key right here. It’s understanding what Jasmin meant. I’m sorry it wasn’t more clear, but I’ll explain it here.
To me, this means we have no copulins we’re going to sell to you. It means we have inferior level copulins and we’re not going to give them to you, because we actually like our people. I’m pretty sure this is what many people would think when they read this, but I’m guessing that without further details you might not fully understand why Jasmin said what she said.
Again, I’ll explain it.
See, even now, we have gallons of what someone out there thinks are “copulins”.
We disagree.
We think it’s a bunch of doctored vinegar.
We also have smaller amounts from different formulators of what THEY think are copulins. Again, we disagree. We think one might be diluted dog poop (ok, that’s not our exact suspicion, but it sures smell like it!), while another one (this one from a “competiting” company) smells like Welches’ grape juice.
We’re not going to take your hard earned money and give you some doctored vinegar, dog poop equivalent, or grape juice, like some other folks do. Does that make us evil?
If so, that’s exactly the type of evil I want to be. I want to be so evil, I won’t sell people garbage, even when they desperately want to buy it.
That’s just our choice, and I ask you to respect that, and see how we actually meant this to be a GOOD thing. A kind thing.
It’s no different, really, than how Apple held out on a miniature laptop until they came out with the MacBook Air.
Lots of people wanted a small Mac laptop right away, but some reason, even though Apple has almost infinite investor money, AMAZING amounts of the world’s most talented employees, as well as over $30 billion of CASH in the bank (unusual for any corporation, since the tax system with holding taxes, etc. is designed to destroy a company’s cash holding to literally FORCE them to lend from banks), it took them years & years & YEARS to fulfill this want. It happened eventually, but it only happened after they were able to make a prototype they found acceptable.
Some companies have class. Apple, Nordstrom, etc. Some even have love, like Trader Joes and hopefully us (at least I have a lot of love for people in general, and I know Jasmin always loved talking to everyone here). Some don’t.
Maybe with some folks, they don’t care about the reality of what a company sells 'em. Maybe they WANT the placebo effect. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hate to condemn anyone for what they want, even if I don’t personally want be the one selling it to them.
I, personally, would feel awful if I sold things like that. I, personally, also would believe that I’m part of the downfall of world if I participated in behaviors like that – in making a world I wouldn’t want to live in, or have my children live in. But that’s just me. Maybe I’m wrong. But those are my personal choices, and this company is affected by my personal choices as Apple is by Steve Jobs.
(and btw, for those of you who know your tech history… I didn’t always like the end result of Steve Jobs – it was only the past few years where I considered even touching an Apple; I was sore about them, honestly, because they outsold and sort of helped destroy a truly amazing-beyond-belief computer at the time – The Amiga. The mid 80s were back when, hardware-wise, Macs were absolutely inferior in comparison to something as revolutionary as The Amiga, except for some apps such as Hypercard and some DTP. Apps for writers were where Apple shined. Although the Mac was still great for some purposes, overall the strangeness of the Amiga being overlooked at the time reminds me something like Pherlure. “Well, Pherlure has superior hype. Something like the Amiga may be superior in “reality”, but their hype is inferior so I’m not convinced. I ain’t buying somethin’ without the right propaganda. Nope. No. Nuh uh. No way!”)
Yes, this is a wonderful way to put it.
I assumed we were pretty clear. Even now when I read it, it seems clear enough to me.
And therein lies the problem. You are 100% right. The problem is that you aren’t me. You don’t know everything I do. You also don’t necessarily know me and my preferences well enough to have figured out our statements. I apologize for that. I figured I wrote enough at the beginning of this forum for people to really “get” our culture, but even that is making possibly dangerous assumptions. Again, I apologize.
The lesson here, I guess, is always (or as many times as possible), write as if you are talking to somebody who is completely new, who knows absolutely nothing, and has no pre-knowledge.
This is certainly the best way to success with communication. It would mean, however, that we could participate less in the “conversations” here and write more in dictational style (not dictator, heh, I mean literally… you know, like the old fashioned way of dictating something to a secretary, to then be distributed throughout an org). More of a top down model of communication, where you don’t enter the stream so much, you post sort of articles and stickies and whatnot.
There’s an interesting new(er) book called “Give War a Chance” by P.J. O’Rourke. He has some interesting points!
Nonetheless, I much prefer being productive and as KIND as possible. I grew up in pain, and around people who didn’t know any better but to treat people with less than respect. Less than kindness. Less than human worth. To treat others without dignity.
I hated that, and that’s not what I aim to do in my own life.
In my life, I want to treat people as what they are. Grown children who are infinitely capable of any good (or evil), but hopefully folks who have good enough taste to make more good than they ever would evil (but perhaps they do a little bad by ACCIDENT – and that’s ok; we learn from mistakes).
Thank you for clearing that up, Tisha. I finally had something concrete to respond to other than completely puzzling and vague comments that we or Steve or somebody was a big boob. I mostly searched for MX feedback and whatnot on this now massive forum, so sussing out the posts involved in this misunderstanding was very hard for me! Overwhelmed by “my own” forum, you could say… Heh
And thank you very kindly for your time here and all the folks you’ve been a kind resource to. If there’s some way we can be of aid to you in return, just let me know.