Preparations for Production

When our new consultants started working with us in September, they realized that a new change needed to be done with antenna and some other technical details. The range was not quite satisfactory and this affected the PCB again. The changes and testing took two months and we were ready in November. At that point, we were already looking for different manufactures and created a shortlist of the ones we wanted to visit. Just as we were getting ready for our trip to China, we received a response from all the potential manufacturers that they have a problem with the existing position of the button on the ring and that we needed to change that. Again, another setback, which took us another 3 weeks to amend.

In the meantime, Nick, Alexey, Davor (who joined us in October) and myself went to Shenzhen at the beginning of December for a final factory inspection. We had a very productive trip and we narrowed our decision down to two manufacturers as a result. Despite the setbacks, we finally thought, that we were ready for production and that all we had left to do was to sign the contracts and make the first payment for tooling and molding.

At the same time, we had the biggest event of our 2-year history to prepare for, the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas at the beginning of January, 2017. Again, our first time at such a show and we were overwhelmed. There were many issues that we had to overcome to get everything prepared but I am just going to single out one, otherwise, this letter might become a book. Those five days leading up to the CES show will go down in the history of Nimb forever.

We had an issue with our original manufacturer of our prototypes for the show, so we asked our new potential partner in Shenzhen to make the prototypes. They had two weeks to deliver. They worked day and night to make it happen. On the 1st of January, the morning after celebrating New Year, Nick took a flight from New York to Hong Kong (see screenshot of his flight path below) to pick up the newly assembled rings and jump on a plane back to the US. As he receives the rings from the courier, he goes up to his hotel room and takes out the rings. All super excited, he cleans them and lines them up to take photos and selfies with the rings. As soon as he sent us the photos all smiling and happy, the next message we received from him was ”Guys, I have bad news for you. The rings are not turning on!”.

There was no other option — only to jump on a train to Shenzhen to go back to the manufacturer and get the rings to work. Nick spent two days and two nights in the factory and on the phone with our engineers, who are based in Russia. Our Russian backers will know that from January 1st to at least January 11th it is almost impossible to get anyone to work because the whole country is away for the winter holidays. However, we had no choice and had to get it done.

Finally, on January 4th, the rings showed signs of life and Nick jumped on a plane to Vegas via Dallas. He arrived to Vegas on the evening of January 4th completely exhausted. We were saved!

Or so we thought.

Imagine yourself in a situation, the night before one of the main events in your life as an entrepreneur, you are about to showcase your product on the biggest stage in the world, where you can meet your backers, the press, potential investors, distributors and other important people. You have been preparing for this event not just for the last 3 months, but in fact for the past 2 years since you started your venture. Everything seemed to be ready, the booth is set-up, your co-founder undertook enormous efforts to get the rings and chargers in on time, the whole team had arrived, and your family comes to give you support. The “only” two things that you need to do is to glue the magnets to the rings and chargers and double check that the rings and app are connecting and functioning well. Should be straightforward.

As we got to our hotel room just before midnight, we started gluing the magnets to the rings. Just as we finished with the last ring and tried to place the rings on to the charger to test them, the rings started jumping. We had placed the magnets in the rings in the wrong way so instead of attracting the rings to the charger, the exact opposite occurred. So, we needed to take all the magnets back out and start all over again.

At about 3 am we realize that the rings are not pairing with the app. Because of the changes made in the factory in Shenzhen when Nick was working on fixing the rings, the firmware needed to be updated. We finally finished everything by 6 am which gave us enough time to get into bed and back up again, because we need to be at the booth at 7 am. Hardware is hard! In the end, the show was amazing and it was all worth it, we gained a lot of new interest and exposure.

Having finished the show, we finally thought “great, we can now focus on production, let’s get cracking!” We signed agreements with our manufacturers and were getting ready to make the first payment. At that point, our consultant tells us that we should change the structure of the PCB because given that we have 10 ring sizes, in the old structure we would need to produce 5 different sizes of PCB and that would greatly affect the pricing and logistics. So, again we decided to make this change and that has taken us to the current situation.