You'd be wise not to confuse the rabid purchase of miners in a market with very little supply and high demand with running a business successfully.
The BTC/ASIC phenomena will settle soon enough and unless your plan was for AMT to only last a few months, you will find that being an asshole to your existing and/or potential customers will bite you in the ass.
I think what we're doing is the furthest thing from "being an asshole" or confusing this with running a business successfully. We are not running this successfully at the moment at all, we're basically just trying even run it. And other manufacture out there that claims anything but the same, is full of it. And this business of BTC miner manufacturing can only be comparable to something like "riding a psychotic horse into a burning stable". We've designed our miners to have the ability to work with several different types of chips. Slotting a board on 3.5 modified heatsink will not only allow us to keep shipping but to partner with most of the real chip manufacturers in the process. As long as our boards stay the same size, and we master ways to cool these things which is another challenge of the week (Avalon), we're fine. The LTV of our customers will surpass those of any other manufacturer. Because if your a miner and the difficulty just sky rocketed, do you want to wait for a another full miner on pre-order, or to order an AMT 220ghs drive that you can use to swap out your 45ghs bitfury drive.
Coincraft is a great chip, I promise you that. And bitfury is still a great chip and will always be the best chip design during the blossoming of the BTC mining industry. But since the value of BTC skyrocketed they have chosen halt sales for the moment. Bitfury was designed by a Ukrainian man so intellectually and so smart that even 1 year later the chip itself yields a higher hashing power with the right board design. No one ever seems to notice or recognize that fact, and their distributors Dave and Niko are honest and good men as well. But in a world of chaos and greed, I don't blame them for being out of stock, but it does present an issue and a possible problem which we foresaw when designing our miners. So that effects our business obviously, but since our board/hotslot model is a versatile one, we can swap these out with Avalon boards and change our products to the AMT100 and AMT 150, and continue to ship. A problem we have currently is that Avalon heats up like crazy, so now we have to figure out a smart cooling method to the hot slot model, which we will, and needed to anyway, because moving 320W of heat per board (Coincraft) out of an aluminum case isn't an easy one. So whats the solution to that - the most simplest - slid-able removable side panels for the moment.
We've designed this business and these miners with the idea of what the mining customers goes through, the problems of greed in this industry from all levels, and the problems that that the customer faces, and basically the only thought process anyone could and should have needs to start with " Ok, So what's the worst that can happen " and then make the business model backwards.
So do we want to flaunt these miners, create videos and gain the attention of some of the other competitors out there who obviously invest their time and money in trolling and DDOS attacking sites(Our site is undergoing one right now by the way) and putting down other companies over the phone trying to sell their clients. (A few of our larger clients came from one company who spent 20 minutes on the phone just bashing everyone else ). Or do we want to sell and ship quietly to our customers which are also, on the level.
But between DDOS attacks, an attempted break in, merchant processors/banks screwing things to hell, chip suppliers limiting availability and the worst of all it, trolls. Most men would have quit by now. But we are not most men - and if we come off like an asshole, we don't mean to and apologize in advanced.
Okay, I feel bad, you sound like you're working hard. And if you are, it's even more tragic that you sound like you're running a scam, which if you just take a step back and objectively read this thread, is honestly what it sounds like.
That being said, don't blame the bitcoin community or these forums as some kind of unique environment where everything is horrific. Running any small business is like what you describe. People are trying to swindle you, from suppliers to customers. I've seen it in the restaurant biz, I've seen it in B2B. You're not cursed, in fact, you have the unique opportunity to have a large amount of customers concentrated in one place (here) and that should be an advantage to you, not something to hide from. Put on your game face, show people how excited you are about it and people will drink the kool-aid if you sound positive and like a believer. Don't be pressured to promise anything because of b.s. promises other companies are making.
Speaking to customers and making them believe in you and your product is a skill and it takes hard work to get there. It means not getting pissed off (in public) when someone talks shit about you or the little company you are trying to build, it means taking feedback from people with a smile on your face, even though you are boiling with rage inside, it means telling everyone to "calm down, be patient, we're hard at work!" when you mean "fuck off, we're working on it you impatient bastards". It means have a real plan and a schedule for updates even though it seems like your time is better spent on actually doing the work.
Just to use a Thanksgiving analogy, when you're cooking a turkey you are tempted to open the oven and check on the turkey a bunch of times, which slows down/ruins the cooking. But, you can solve that problem with a digital meat thermometer - even though the process hasn't changed, the information, whatever it is, is the difference between watching the game and enjoying your family and standing around in the kitchen, getting short with anyone who wants to know when we will be eating.