Evaluating the Opportunity

First, we needed to figure out which cables we were going to tiny-ify. We landed on:

HDMI (male A) to HDMI (male A)

USB to USB-C

USB to Lightning

USB to Micro-USB

Each of these will be produced with a length of 4–6" and they’ll come in black.

We’ll offer a “request cable” feature on our website and if we get enough interest in a specific cable, we’ll get it made.

To evaluate the opportunity, we considered the following:

What does the competitive landscape look like?

There is a surprisingly short list of available inventory for tiny cables, the majority of which appear to be non-Apple certified Lightning cables on Amazon. Websites like Monoprice and Newegg sell some, but listings are inconsistent and they don’t appear to be quality.

A friend told me about a tool called Unicorn Smasher, which offers a great tool for product research on Amazon. Unicorn Smasher promises to share pricing, fulfillment, ranking, and estimates monthly sales numbers for anything on Amazon — for free. It delivered:

Unicorn Smasher’s read of the short lightning cable marketplace

We learned a few things: there are several vendors making a few hundred sales each month, to the tune of ~$50,000.00 in Lightning cables alone. It is validation that people like Tommy exist. Our other searches confirmed that each cable type we’re evaluating has a comparable established market. We filed this information away for doing projections down the road.

Niche, but larger than we thought.

Can we do it better? / What is our advantage?

In a word: marketing. Rather than listing generic looking and sounding items with product names that are just a list of specs, we plan to create a brand around these cables and lean into the advantages that come with a name.

Among them, we decided we could:

Secure a great domain and hit Search Engine Optimization (SEO) hard. Though we thought we would simply be an Amazon seller, this would eliminate dependence on any single marketplace. If we locked down anything close to top ranking for key search terms like “short cables,” we could sell through our own site and cut out the Amazon costs. We landed on TinyCables.com, bought it for $12.99 at Name.com.

Create a brand/logo that people remember and print it on everything to encourage repeat business. It appears that a person who buys a short lightning cable from Seller A on Amazon will just go back to Amazon and execute their original search all over again, even if they had a great experience with the unit from Seller A. They won’t specifically seek out Seller A and even if they do, they may accidentally order from Seller B or Seller C. We want to be a brand name that people remember to seek out, and one that stands out from the other listings. We produced a simple block logo using Logo Maker on iOS. To remove the watermark, it was $3.99.

Possibly run a (heavily-automated) social media effort to maintain top-of-mind awareness. I don’t know how we target people who plug things into a laptop on their desk, people who need short cables for their portable charging brick, or people who are obsessed with maintaining a clean cable situation behind their desktop towers and televisions, but we’ll figure it out.

Focus on providing a great product so we earn great reviews. Reputation is one of those things that is not built, but earned. This is a little less tangible, but it means we’ll ask our buyers to write a review.

What does the cost structure look like? / What is the financial risk?

You always hear that charging cables cost “a cent to make in China,” which doesn’t feel great when you’re ponying up $29 at the Apple Store for a USB-C to Lightning charger for that stupid new MacBook. We needed to figure out how close this is to the truth.

I sought out quotes from three different suppliers: we secured two on Alibaba, which offers bulk rates on product manufactured overseas. Alibaba has turned into a hobby of mine: if you’ve ever wondered what it would cost to buy 30 off-brand, Chinese scooters, you’ll have a great time poking around their marketplace.

You can pick up this bad boy for $250 if you buy 25+ units and don’t mind waiting a few weeks for the shipment from Guangzhou.

We got our third quote from a United States-based supplier. This supplier offers manufacturing in both the U.S.A. and China.

The first pass at securing these quotes returned some interesting numbers. One of our next posts will discuss sourcing issues, what we did with these, and how we navigated the negotiations but the purpose in this first pass was to see if we thought the simple, back of a napkin cost structure made sense.

Prices per unit, by source. The US-based source is selling from their Chinese manufacturer in this quote. All three claim to have Apple-certified Lightning cables, though I personally question whether they’re actually certified at $0.38 and $0.37 per unit.

With a plan to sell each cable for $4-ish, these quotes passed the sniff test.