TinyPilot
A low-cost, open source device for remote server management
TinyPilot is an eCommerce business, so there's a large physical component of parts that need to come in, get assembled, then ship out to customers. For the first ten months of TinyPilot, I did all of this out of my house. In May, I moved into our first real office and worked with a local employee to staff it.
The best decision I made in this process was to do all training through writing. This was partly due to COVID safety, but it's likely what I would have chosen anyway because I love documentation and defined processes. Forcing ourselves to write down our processes revealed ways we can approach our workflows more systematically, and it made it easy to scale training. We're training a second local employee now, and it's much easier because all of our documentation is already written.
One of my goals for 2021 is to systematize enough of TinyPilot that my girlfriend and I can take a two-week vacation without interrupting the business. I moved closer to that goal in March.
I began touring office spaces, and I'm interviewing candidates for a local assistant who can help me with order fulfillment and inventory.
In February, I found myself scrambling as one of the critical parts I use for my product suddenly disappeared from the market. I scoured eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and AliBaba, and found a lot of shady sellers, but not much of the part that I need.
I also hired three developers as part of my effort to free up time for myself. I've been finding myself working only on what's urgent rather than what's important, and I'm hoping that the additional dev resources will free up time for high-level strategy.
This was a month of unexpectedly fast growth. One of my favorite YouTubers posted a positive review of TinyPilot, and it led to an enormous spike in sales. It also revealed some weaknesses in a manufacturing pipeline that
To adapt to the growth, I'm focusing on scaling in three dimensions:
- Scaling support by focusing on features that empower users to resolve issues on their own.
- Scaling manufacturing by exploring alternative methods of producing custom parts.
- Scaling development by hiring freelance developers.
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Amazing ! I followed you from the beginning, it's impressive how fast it was. Can you give more details about your acquisition strategy ?
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Thanks for reading!
So far, my acquisition strategy has kind of been dumb luck. I wrote a blog post that attracted a lot of customers to the product, then when the positive YouTube review came out, a bunch of people purchased based on that.
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This month showed me that building momentum helps you continue to grow even when you screw up for a few weeks. I feel like I took my eye off the ball this month and got too distracted by a new side-project.
Nevertheless, TinyPilot continued to grow on the strength of previous work I did in content marketing and customer support. But I still need to trim down my commitments so I can narrow my focus to TinyPilot again.
The big difference this month was simply staying ahead on inventory. Previous months, I've run out of parts too early and had to list items as backordered as I waited for new supplies. I overhauled the way I track inventory and made more strategic decisions about amounts to keep in stock.
I worked with electrical engineers and a 3D printing lab to create a new electronic component and 3D-printed case from scratch in just 26 days. Prior to this, I had no experience with either 3D printing or fabricating printed circuit boards, so I made a lot of mistakes, but the result was surprisingly successful.
My blog post about the making of TinyPilot led to 48k readers in its first week and $9k in sales revenue.
Takeaways:
- You can build successful content marketing around the backstory of your product if you have a technically-savvy customer base.
- Selling physical products has very different challenges and obstacles for scaling than SaaS prodcuts.
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