The Minimal Phone: A Full Record of a Rather Unsuccessful Crowdfunding Experience

From the day I backed the project on February 28, 2024, to finally receiving the Minimal Phone on June 27, 2025, a full 485 days had passed. This was nearly a year later than the original estimated shipping date of August 31, 2024.

This blog post is intended to document my crowdfunding experience, which I’d describe as “a failure, but it eventually arrived.” The conclusion comes first: I ultimately received the phone, but to this day, a large number of backers are still empty-handed.

This incident is, perhaps, a microcosm of the decline of American manufacturing. It’s often said that phones can no longer be made in the US, but the reality seems even grimmer: they seem to struggle even to find a factory in Shenzhen to handle an OEM order.

Joining the Crowdfunding

So, what kind of project was this? It was launched on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo by an American startup. The goal was to create a unique smartphone: one that featured both a BlackBerry-style full keyboard and an eye-friendly E-Ink screen.

In recent years, crowdfunding projects for E-Ink phones and full-keyboard smartphones have not been uncommon. However, combining the two so radically made the Minimal Phone a true first of its kind—and likely the last.

I can’t recall where I first stumbled upon the Minimal Phone, but for an enthusiast with a “fetish” for both E-Ink and full keyboards, I was instantly captivated.

As it turned out, I was indeed one of the earliest backers. With order #261, I successfully secured a spot at the lowest early bird price and joined the campaign.

There were only 250 slots for the $300 early bird tier. The fact that I managed to snag one with order #261 must have been due to someone’s payment failing or them dropping out. At the time, I was quite pleased with my little bit of luck.

However, this was just the beginning of a nightmare.

A Series of Major Delays

To understand this lengthy delay, one must first understand the two models of overseas crowdfunding: one is the “fake crowdfunding” led by Chinese teams, and the other is the “real crowdfunding” initiated by Western teams.

Don’t be misled by the word “fake”; in this context, “fake crowdfunding” is actually a better experience for backers. These projects are usually run by experienced Chinese hardware teams. By the time the campaign starts, product development is mostly complete, with only mass production remaining. They launch crowdfunding more as a market warm-up and to estimate initial production volume, rather than to raise R&D funds.

“Real crowdfunding” is completely different. Projects often start with a conceptual PowerPoint presentation, carrying a very high risk of failure, even to the point of “money taken, no product delivered.” On overseas platforms, as long as the team can honestly communicate the process and reasons for failure, they can usually gain the understanding of their backers.

The Minimal Phone was a textbook example of “real crowdfunding.” When the project started, it had nothing but a radical concept and a few design renderings. I even suspect that founder Andre’s travel expenses to find suppliers in Shenzhen were paid for with the funds from us backers.

Therefore, while its first delay was unexpected, it was also understandable. The project was originally scheduled to ship in August 2024, but in September, they announced a delay to November or December. As compensation, they promised to upgrade the configuration for all early backers for free—the screen size increased from 3.5 inches to 4.3 inches, and the RAM from 6GB to 8GB. In retrospect, this seemingly generous compensation was likely because they couldn’t find a matching supply chain in Shenzhen for the original design, forcing a redesign.

However, this reasonable delay was merely the beginning of a series of subsequent troubles. From September 2024 onwards, the project experienced at least six delays (this is based on my compilation of announcements and may have omissions):

Action	Announcement Date	Promised Shipping Time
Crowdfunding Starts	March 2024	August 2024
First Delay	September 2024	Nov-Dec 2024
Second Delay	December 2024	Jan-Mar 2025
Shipped some black units + Third Delay	January 2025	Only shipped black units, but didn’t say so until color selection in Feb.
Color Selection Opened for Backers	Feb 26, 2025
Third Delay	March 2, 2025	Second week of April
Indiegogo False Promise & Fourth Delay	March 19, 2025	Claimed all crowdfunding orders would ship by end of March, all website orders by early May
Partial Crowdfunding Orders Shipped	March 23, 2025	From this point, some in Discord reported website customers receiving phones while backers had not.
Fifth Delay	March 28, 2025	April 7 – Assembly resumes for all orders placed before Jan 2025 April 7-15 – Phones ship every few days Mid-April – Next batch of orders completed (all colors/specs) May – All remaining pre-orders ship
Falsely Claimed All 2024 Orders Shipped	April 18, 2025	Not true, especially for mainland China.
Sixth Delay	June 5, 2025	Admitted to hardware defects requiring rework. Shipping to resume June 20.
Still Shipping Slowly	To this day	I estimate 50% of consumers still haven’t received their phones.

Starting with the third delay, the atmosphere in the community changed. In the official Discord group, some users (especially Chinese backers) began to publicly question the risk of the project being a scam or absconding. Initially, many overseas users accustomed to the “real crowdfunding” model didn’t react strongly, as risk is inherent to crowdfunding. But after the fourth delay, an intolerable situation arose: some non-crowdfunding customers who had ordered from the official website at a higher price began receiving their phones before us, the earliest financial supporters.

This completely changed the nature of the event. If a crowdfunding project fails despite the team’s best efforts, and they seek understanding through honest communication, that’s within the rules. However, taking backers’ money to get the entire production process running, only to then prioritize later, higher-paying website customers—this is not a project failure, but a naked betrayal and fraud.

Meanwhile, the few users who did receive their phones did not bring good news. Their feedback only intensified the community’s anxiety. Almost everyone who received a phone complained on Discord about various issues, mainly focused on:

Laggy Performance: Despite using a top-tier E-Ink screen, the software optimization was extremely poor, resulting in slow response times and a very low refresh rate. The experience was even worse than that of cheap electronic shelf labels.
Weak Camera: The 16MP rear and 5MP front cameras were unanimously described as “almost unusable.” The E-Ink screen made framing shots difficult, the image quality was terrible, and the bizarre placement of the front camera in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard was heavily criticized.
Reduced Battery Life: The expected battery advantage of the E-Ink screen was non-existent. The officially promised 4-day battery life lasted 2 to 3 days at most in actual use and drained even faster with heavy use.
Software Flaws: The system software was clearly a half-finished product, riddled with bugs, including random shutdowns and automatic factory resets. The UI was not optimized for the E-Ink screen, with terrible animation effects, and the lock screen would even expose the user’s last viewed screen content. Many users had to rely on third-party launchers to improve the experience.

However, for me at the time, a Chinese backer still waiting anxiously for delivery, I had no time to worry about these product-level issues. Because the real drama was yet to come.

China! China! China!

Andre Youkhna (or Andre, for short) is one of the co-founders of the Minimal Phone team and the only human being we could communicate with throughout the project.

At many times, we even suspected the team consisted of only three people, as there were three administrators in the Discord, and at most, only three faces had ever appeared in past Twitter posts and vlogs.

But regardless of their team size, Andre was the sole representative chosen to communicate with the community (the consumers). Unfortunately, he was terrible at it.

In most cases, he would only reply to questions in the Discord group that were low in informational value, while directly avoiding difficult ones. He completely ignored private messages. It even got to the point where you would @ him in the group, he’d ask you to DM him your order number, but when you did, he would never reply.

No matter how bad the company’s actual operations were, Andre’s “talent” for communication undoubtedly made things much worse.

On April 23, 2025, another promised shipping date arrived. As Andre had announced, a portion of overseas backers received shipping emails.

But not a single Chinese backer received an email.

We initially thought it was because packages to China didn’t go through international forwarding, so we should receive a notification directly from SF Express. But a week passed, and there was nothing. No shipping email from the Minimal Phone team, no notification from any courier company. We began to realize that Chinese buyers were seemingly being treated differently.

At the same time, we tried to find the reason why Chinese orders weren’t being shipped. The reason was actually obvious: they hadn’t paid the taxes.

In the Discord chat, Andre had mentioned that the first batch of shipments included some orders for mainland China. But they quickly discovered that the initial delivery route “Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Global” could not be used to deliver to mainland China.

By this time, the Chinese consumers had already set up their own Discord group, so we quickly figured out what this “could not” meant:

This involved an issue that is very easy for Chinese people to understand but might be forgivable for foreigners not to know. When exporting goods, the quoted price is based on receiving an export tax rebate. This means that this batch of Minimal Phones, when sold abroad, was exempt from certain taxes required for circulation within China. If they wanted to sell this product normally within the country, the best strategy would have been to set aside a batch that didn’t go through customs for the tax rebate and sell it directly domestically. Shipping the phones to Hong Kong and then back to mainland China would likely incur higher import tariffs.

Andre’s “could not” was just an excuse for not wanting to pay the taxes. Some Chinese consumers began to question his differential treatment, which could even be called discrimination.

I don’t know what his real thoughts were at that moment, but he chose to use lies to temporarily deceive people. He claimed in the group that Chinese backers had already received their devices:

This enraged almost everyone, because we knew for a fact that no one in mainland China had received a device, although some people in Hong Kong had. Andre seemed to be using this to play word games. This statement was immediately challenged on Reddit. A Chinese Redditor asked him to post a single photo of a Chinese consumer holding the phone to prove that someone in China had received it. Andre then posted this photo:

But unfortunately for Andre, he had too few Chinese friends. The photo he posted was actually of the Chinese guide who had appeared in his vlog visiting the factory in China:

The Discord erupted in an uproar. Andre, infuriated and embarrassed, kicked all the Chinese consumers who had questioned him during that period out of the Discord and made the following outrageous statement:

This was at the height of the US-China tariff war, with both sides imposing tariffs of over 100% on each other’s goods. This discriminatory and hateful statement successfully misled some foreigners, dissipating any sympathy they might have had for the Chinese users in the Discord.

But the reality was, the US-China trade war wouldn’t have affected Minimal Phone’s shipments to China at all. At that time, China had already announced an exemption policy for smartphone products. The “high taxes” he spoke of were actually the taxes that should have been paid in the first place but weren’t.

After this battle, most Chinese buyers were kicked out of the Discord group. A few, including myself, who hadn’t had a chance to join the fray, decided to stay undercover in the group to prepare for future rights-defense actions.

The Chinese Supply Chain Detective Squad

A key figure emerged. He is the founder of a publicly listed Chinese tech company, someone who enjoys dabbling in digital products and has years of business dealings with numerous OEM factory owners and investors in Shenzhen.

And this tycoon was also one of the Minimal Phone’s backers and, as of that moment, had still not received his phone. Prior to this, he had repeatedly offered in private communications with Andre to help solve the problems, including the potential tax issues.

However, when he tried to explain to Andre in the Discord group what the tax situation was and what the most cost-effective way to ship the phones to mainland China would be, he too was kicked out of the Discord.

He was furious. He almost immediately located The Minimal Phone’s Shenzhen OEM factory, Along Electronics. After arranging a chat with an investor in the manufacturing company, he obtained a crucial piece of information:

The factory had already produced a sufficient number of phones. I can’t disclose the specific number here, but we judged that the figure seemed large enough to cover all of The Minimal Phone’s crowdfunding and website orders. Based on the project’s popularity on communities like Reddit, its crowdfunding and website order numbers were unlikely to have exceeded that figure.

Furthermore, the factory was not responsible for direct shipping. Instead, all units were handed over to a freight forwarding company designated by Minimal Phone for shipment.

At this point, all the Chinese backers who hadn’t received their phones came to this realization:

This crowdfunding project, at the very least, was probably not going to run away with the money. The phones had already been produced, the major costs had been incurred, and there was no reason to abscond over a logistics issue.

So, was he really discriminating against Chinese users?

It seemed not…

Although Andre’s statements in Discord were outrageous and even had a touch of Sinophobia, after kicking out a bunch of Chinese people, he quickly provided a new shipping timeline for mainland China: 2 weeks.

We initially thought this was just for show, to prove to the remaining foreign buyers in Discord that “I’m a good guy, it’s the Chinese buyers who are unreasonable.” But guess what?

A week later, on May 10, 2025, a portion of mainland Chinese users received their Minimal Phones. This was the first time any buyer in mainland China had gotten their hands on the device.

In other words, no matter what Andre was thinking during his meltdown in the group, that outburst, which would professionally ruin his future business in China, was completely unnecessary.

Because, although he verbally expressed unwillingness to pay the taxes, he hadn’t even stopped working on the problem of shipping to China. It’s even possible that at the time of his outburst, he had already solved the problem and was just waiting for the logistics to start moving after the Labor Day holiday. But… as a company founder, he just couldn’t hold it in and had to verbally offend all his Chinese customers.

Due to the numerous delays, some Chinese consumers had long wanted to request a refund. For those who purchased from the official website, he processed the refunds quickly. But for early crowdfunding backers, because the transaction was marked as complete on Indiegogo and the funds had already been moved to cover expenses, they couldn’t even process refunds for these people.

A Chinese backer once applied for a refund. Andre spent a week figuring out he couldn’t use Alipay or WeChat, so he asked if the backer could use Wise or Stripe. But obviously, individuals in mainland China cannot use Wise or Stripe either, so the path to a refund was blocked.

At this point, most Chinese buyers began to realize: If we have to choose between stupid and evil, this company’s problem seems to be stupidity. They seem to genuinely want to get things done, but they have absolutely no idea how to do it.

Subsequent developments only confirmed this. Originally, after the first batch of mainland Chinese users received their phones, the rest of us thought we would receive ours soon too.

But we quickly realized something was wrong. As everyone knows, with the speed of Chinese logistics, shipping from Shenzhen to any domestic location shouldn’t take more than 4 days. Furthermore, nowadays, with almost all couriers, the recipient gets a notification the moment the package is picked up. But a week later, on May 17, apart from the few Chinese buyers who had initially received their phones, no one else had received any notification.

From the Chinese buyers who had received their phones, we got the sender’s information and located Minimal Phone’s freight forwarder: Shenzhen OrangeShip International Logistics Co., Ltd. In our communication with the company’s agent, we confirmed: all orders for which they had received information had been shipped. For those of us who hadn’t received our phones, Minimal Phone had never given them our orders.

In other words, the repeated claims by Minimal Phone in Discord announcements, group chats, private messages, and 1-on-1 emails that “your order has shipped, if you haven’t received it, it may still be in transit” were complete lies.

They simply had not provided the correct (or complete) shipping list to the forwarding company. How could the forwarding company possibly ship the items?

On May 20, I sent a long email to Andre about this issue, using a friendly tone and suggesting that he might have missed some information in his communication with the logistics supplier. To make sure Andre saw it, I reminded him multiple times on the Discord server. But he gave no response.

On the same day, Andre announced in the Discord group that he and another founder would be traveling to China that week to resolve some issues:

During this period, the sentiment among overseas users also began to shift, as international shipping had also been halted. After the batch of shipments on April 23, 2025, no new orders were sent out.

They finally began to realize that the issue with the Chinese buyers was not an isolated problem. The initial accusations of fraud by the Chinese buyers in the group were not hostile acts, but rather based on some sensitive intuition. Many discussions about a “Soft-Exit Scam” began to appear in the Discord group:

A Soft-Exit Scam refers to a fraudulent act that appears legitimate and involves a gradual withdrawal. A common tactic is to continue some superficial operational work to extract the last bit of value from the project after draining its capital pool. According to ChatGPT’s explanation, Minimal Phone fit almost all the characteristics:

Project still operational: On the surface, the project is still running, the website and social media are not closed, but development and maintenance activities are significantly reduced.
Gradual withdrawal of funds: The project team cashes out or liquidates funds in the background, rather than running off with everything at once.
Cessation of updates or maintenance: Slowly stops code updates, announcements become less frequent, and community interaction weakens.
User withdrawals blocked: May freeze withdrawal or cash-out functions under the guise of “technical issues” or “system upgrades.”
Project founders slowly “disappear”: Transition from active participation to appearing only once every few weeks or months, or not responding at all.

But as a Chinese buyer who had become a supply chain detective, I felt that the most important condition was not met: draining all the funds from the project’s capital pool.

Because in fact, as mentioned earlier, we learned from the factory that the project had already produced far more phones than the number of orders. If the founders really wanted to misappropriate funds and run, they should not have placed such a large order with the factory, nor should they have allowed so many phones to be produced.

And, if he was really going to run, there was absolutely no need for him to come to China again. After all, the cost of flights and hotels from LA to Shenzhen is about $8,000 per person, making it $16,000 for two. This is the price of nearly 50 Minimal Phones, which is not a small sum for a “startup” like theirs, as Andre repeatedly emphasized.

So, I proposed another possibility in Discord:

That is, although a sufficient number of phones had been produced previously, after the first and second small-batch shipments, they discovered a hardware defect that required these phones to be sent back to the factory for rework. So they halted all phone shipments, waiting for the phones to come out of the factory a second time. This was not without a trace; before this, multiple users in Discord had reported issues with fingerprint recognition and vertical lines on the screen.

But their response was always that it would be fixed in a future OTA update—how could such obvious hardware problems be solved through an OTA update?

I have to say, although I’ve never worked in a hardware company, my business intuition is quite sharp, because the announcement Andre posted after returning to the US confirmed my theory:

In short, a sensor (I guess the fingerprint sensor) was found to be faulty. They needed to give the factory two weeks for rework, after which shipping would resume. They set the next shipping date for around June 20.

But I felt none of this mattered, because the reason Chinese buyers’ orders weren’t shipped seemed to have nothing to do with hardware defects, but rather that they had lost (or deliberately omitted) some people’s order information during the information transfer process.

But this time, Andre’s trip to China did lead to some progress. Due to their silence during the trip, the public opinion offensive from overseas buyers in Discord had surpassed the initial criticism from Chinese buyers. As a result, they admitted for the first time that some packages they previously thought had been shipped might have been lost in transit, and they would re-ship for these users.

In the announcement, they said about 200 packages were lost in transit, with wording that implied it was the fault of the Chinese forwarding company, not theirs. But from what I actually knew, that was not the case.

However, they realized there was indeed a communication problem between the company and the community participants, so they hired a dedicated customer service representative to reply to emails.

This is the real reason I was finally able to receive my phone.

Epilogue

So, how did I get my phone?

It had nothing to do with the hardware defect repair or the re-shipment. The only method that finally got my order shipped was maintaining a rhythmic communication with their newly hired customer service representative.

On June 1, they announced they had hired new customer service and would reply to every email. I immediately sent them an email. Although the customer service person did reply to every message, the information content was the same as communicating with Andre before. He would only reply with templated content.

For example, the first time I inquired about my order, he politely replied that it had been shipped and asked me to wait. The second time, he asked for details like my shipping address and chosen color, information he should have already known.

Although I had already waited 12 months, to prevent him from continuing to string me along, I waited 4-5 days (spanning a weekend) before replying each time he told me to “wait.”

In about the fourth email exchange, I made a specific request. I asked if he had received confirmation from the third-party logistics provider that my “order has shipped,” and if he could ask the provider to check the current status of my package.

The customer service representative politely replied again that the order had been shipped long ago, they had not received more information from the third-party logistics provider, and asked me to wait patiently.

The fifth time, the day after Andre’s promised resumption of shipping on June 20, I replied to the customer service again, this time with a more pointed request: Your previous announcement mentioned that some people’s packages were lost. Is my package in the same situation? How long of not receiving the package and feedback from the logistics provider would it take for you to mark my package as “lost” and re-ship it to me? Because, in fact, if my package was sent in the previous batch, it would have been over two months.

At this point, the customer service gave me a very unexpected answer:

He claimed to have contacted the third-party logistics provider again and asked me to send him another email tomorrow to inquire about the status, saying he should be able to give me some updates. In all my past communications with the Minimal Phone team through any channel, I had never received a reply with such a specific and imminent timeline. Therefore, I suspected this was the first time the customer service had actually inquired about my order information with the third-party logistics provider.

Of course, the result was obvious. The third-party logistics provider would tell him that they didn’t have this person’s order information at all. Because I had called OrangeShip before, and they said I wasn’t on their shipping list.

So, before I could email the customer service the next day, he took the initiative and sent me another email:

Customer Service: It has been shipped. Here is your tracking number.

Finally, we reached this step.

Of course, the tracking number he gave couldn’t be traced at all, and he didn’t say which courier company it was, yet he still said, “you can track the package with this number,” just like their usual unprofessional style.

Just as I was replying to his email to ask which courier company it was, I received a notification from SF Express on my phone. The sender was OrangeShip. This had to be the Minimal Phone.

However, they dropped the ball even at the very last step. I had communicated with them early this year about needing to change my shipping address. In the last month of email communication with customer service, they also indicated they knew I had changed my address. But in the end, the shipping address on the SF Express package was still the old one.

To this day, many consumers in China and overseas still have not received their phones, and many of them were early crowdfunding backers, not later website buyers.

But when they send emails to customer service, the representative still tells them “it has been shipped, no more information has been received, please wait patiently.” But the actual situation may be that The Minimal Phone team thinks they have shipped these orders, but in fact, they haven’t (missing from the list), and the forwarding company will never ship because they never received the correct shipping list. It’s not until you, through some means, trigger The Minimal Phone team to actually check your order information with the forwarding company that they will realize: “Oh, crap, I really didn’t ship it.”

Therefore, the risk of them absconding still exists. If you are really interested in this phone, you might want to buy a second-hand one. Absolutely do not order a new one from the official website.

As I write this article, Andre has just announced their developer program in the Discord group, offering free phones to developers willing to participate in software adaptation and development for the Minimal Phone.

A similar situation occurred before. For example, on March 27, during the fourth delay, they announced their “Minimal Plan,” a virtual network operator (data SIM card) for US users. As a business strategy, this is quite clever. Since the Minimal Phone is mainly used as a secondary device, perhaps pairing it with a secondary card with data functionality is a good combination. This could also convert their one-time income from selling the Minimal Phone into a long-term subscription revenue.

Most such bundled sales with a free SIM card require the SIM card to be shipped in the same package as the phone. This significantly increases the activation rate when the user receives the phone. If you’ve bought a smartphone in China in recent years, you’ll find that some domestic phone brands (like Xiaomi) occasionally do this.

But the only problem is, unsealed SIM cards are absolutely prohibited from being imported in bulk into mainland China. This means that Minimal Phone could not ship their US-user-oriented SIM cards to mainland China and have the Chinese factory package them with the devices at the factory.

A few of us Chinese backers had discussed this before. This might have been the real issue between the fourth and fifth delays, and what made Andre furiously say, “China doesn’t let us import anything.”

This has only solidified my suspicion: this company (perhaps just Andre himself) is not truly fraudulent. They might genuinely want to accomplish something, but their incompetence is so profound that they have no idea how to do it.

No wonder most of the hardware projects on Indiegogo and Kickstarter in recent years have been initiated by Asian or Chinese companies.

I even feel that a high school student from any first-tier city in China could start a company and perform more professionally than this one.

Jokingly, for letting such a low-level company succeed in crowdfunding, the early backers, including myself, probably have to bear some “consumer responsibility.”