Bike Engineer

Can you build a bicycle out of Q-tips and gum? Can you start a fire using only a glass of water? Then Gotham wants you! Here’s the scoop:

Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries launched on Kickstarter (the 2min bike light video is fun to watch) a year ago with the world’s first anti-theft bike light. Now we’re building more products for urban cyclists and looking for talented MechE to join our team at the Senior Engineer / CTO level / Technical Co-founder level.

What you’ll bring:
- A love for biking
- Brilliance and creativity
- Awesome bike product ideas
- Experience with mechanical design of products in Solidworks
- Experience with rapid-prototyping
- Building prototypes with your own hands: (3D printing, wood working, machining, etc).
- Experience in designing for manufacturing bike products
- Experience with managing overseas manufacturing is a plus (our factories are in China)

What Gotham brings:
- A love for biking
- Awesome bike product ideas
- A fun, entrepreneurial team that loves building and loves biking
- Experience in commercializing bike products
- Experience in making kick-ass Kickstarter products
- Experience in design for manufacturing and volume manufacturing
- Salary plus equity

If you want to join a fast-growing startup and bring your bike product ideas to life, let’s talk: please email yourfriends[-at-]bikegotham.com

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

We are working with a few excellent factories with brilliant manufacturing engineers, skilled (and well-paid) technicians, clean factories, and assembly lines that would make Henry Ford drool.  All this to make the world’s best bike lights.

Take a look:

1. Production Begins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPtDjdyMArs

2. Jigging is NOT dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4_GTUeu8B4

3. HALT! Highly Accelerated Lifetime Testing 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oP993cGXNg

You’ve been patient.  You’ve been awesome.  Soon you will be rewarded:

Where are The Defenders?

As of September 27th, 849 out of 2,600 have being produced.  144 have been shipped from our warehouse in CT, 605 are being held in customs by DHL but should arrive in the warehouse by Oct 1st, and about >1500 are being assembled as we speak.

When will I get mine?

1. Kickstarter Early Birds are receiving Defenders now.  2) Kickstarter backers will start getting Defenders from the 2nd shipment of 605 next week, 3) BikeGotham.com customers will start receiving Defenders in early October, Slava’s Dad gets one after everyone else because he never paid up.

“Slava, is your next blog post going to be about Apple again?” asked Dave Auerbach, a friend and social entrepreneur from MIT.  ”Nope,” I responded.

I lied.

If you watched the iPhone 5 Keynote end to end, you noticed that Jony Ive, the SVP of Design talked about precision manufacturing and using precision jigs for assembly.  I thought to myself, “Hmm, Gotham does that.”  Here are the latest photos Brad sent back from the assembly factory. Notice the custom jigs Brad and Angela are holding – they keep our assembly tolerances super tight!  If you haven’t ordered one yet, you can still get the Best Bike Lights in the world from our first production run.

Brad holds the precision PCB + LED assembly jig.

Angela demonstrates the precision screw and hinge-pin assembly jig.

Limited Edition, serial-numbered Gunmetal Black.

Shipping Boxes

Manual’s for easy assembly.

Despite the company’s secrecy, it’s really easy to figure out when Apple is about to ship their next major product.  Investigative journalists like MacRumors.com speak to Chinese freight shipping brokers who tell them, “shipping rates rose 20% in one week.  [This must mean] Apple has snapped up available shipping capacity.”  The $600 billion Goliath dictates production and shipping schedules when it delivers a new product.

Unfortunately, Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries does not.  So when our factory told us last week, we’re pushing your bike light mass production date to September 10th there was little we can do.  We’re a small fish in a big, international manufacturing ocean with lots of promise but little power.

The best we can do is be honest with our super-supportive customers and give them play-by-play updates on our progress.  Shipping is now in September and we’ll let you know more when we know more.

On the good news side, we created custom packaging that minimizes waste.  Typically, when a manufacturer ships you a mail order product, it comes in plastic packaging within a generic (or Amazon) box.  This is wasteful.  We have created one box for both packaging and shipping.  It’s simple but gets the job done without creating extra waste.

Calculus books and Gotham T-Shirts. There’s about 300 more of these on other bookshelves.

We’re fulfilling t-shirts ourselves and dropping them off with the USPS. To fulfill the 1500 bike lights, we’re partnering with a warehouse in CT.