Defender Bike Light Shipping Update Below
We’re less than 1 year old and only have 2,000 customers, but we’re building a foundation that’s designed to last decades and support millions of customers. That means time, money, and headaches now in order to scale later. Here are some of the tough decisions we’ve made.
1. Slava’s Apartment versus Third Party Fulfillment
We could have shipped everything out of our apartment. We’re organized and have a cargo bike to deliver to the post office. And perhaps some customers would have received their Defenders a few days sooner. But instead we’re building a fine-oiled fulfillment machine: order comes from bikegotham.com, automatically is sent to the warehouse, and ships out within a day. Amazon will be jealous.
2. DIY Manufacturing versus Mass Production
We could have built 2,000 Defenders ourselves. We’re crafty and have access to the world’s best machine shops at MIT. But while enthusiasm and adrenaline can make 2,000 bike lights, it won’t make 200,000 bike lights. So we spent 200 hours vetting factories, $40,000 on tooling, and many sleepless nights stressing about production delays before receiving a single part. But, now, as we prepare to order 10,000 more Defenders, the manufacturing foundation is set and we’re ready to build.
3. Offshore Call Center versus Founder’s Customer Service
Yesterday I did a FaceTime chat with a customer in Saskatchewan, Canada with questions about the Defender set screw. On Saturday, I got a 4am photo-SMS from a Los Angeles cyclist, excited (and drunk). He wanted to show me his new Defender. Later we’ll hire customer support reps, but just like Kayak.com has their infamous red customer service phone http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/the-way-i-work-paul-english-of-kayak.html, we’ll always be crazy about customer service.
4. Create Content versus Paying Bloggers
Each email and blog post we write takes me 4-8 hours. For $5 per blog post, we can replace me. But I never will. Our customer’s time is too precious for crap content.
5. Distributors versus Internal Sales Team
We have been approached by bike distributors who want to sell our products with promises of hundreds of bike shops and hundreds of thousands of dollars. We said, “No thanks, we’ll sell directly to American bike shops.” That decision is costing us quick and easy money, but again it’s a long term investment. It will hurt our long-term financial health and put a middleman in between us and the customer.
What do you think about our strategy? Is there anything else we can do to scale the business without jeopardizing product and service quality?
Where is my bike light?
1800 Defenders have been built and delivered from our factory to our warehouse(!!!!)
~900 are on your handlebars
~100 are on their way to customers
~800 are in our warehouse in Connecticut. They’re shipping ~50/day
