The Evening Project - Part 2, Building a prototype

My wife and I ventured into the unknown and started an evening project together, this is Part 2 of the story that unfolds pretty much in real time. Please like and share the articles, follow me if you like, we’d really appreciate your support. You can read Part 1 here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/start-evening-project-andy-rietschel/

It was pretty clear from the start that if we would get ourselves into this project we would need to build a proper prototype. In Part 1 we promised not to give away what we’re doing until later, but I guess it’s safe to say already now that yes, we are “building” something :). Neither my wife nor I are engineers, but we both do have a big attention for details and love to figure things out. Thankfully though, there should be no need to be an engineer for this type of product (or maybe just a little bit), but being creative and figuring out the details will be much more important for the final result. 

One strategic part of the project is finding the right suppliers. Sourcing has thus become an interesting new found competence that we are learning fast, in particular when there are a few of them and some with language barriers. We continuously learn as we go and are knowingly doing several mistakes along the way. I’m happy to say that I made a new friend at the local DHL Service point office! Hats off to DHL’s tracking app and Service points being open during evenings and weekends. We couldn’t have done it without this service! 

From our initial perspective and thoughts, we figured it would be a pretty easy task to put this prototype together. But as many of you know, in reality nothing is ever as easy as you think it is. It’s really amazing to what degree you get down into the details after a while and all the unknown issues that suddenly becomes project critical. I mean, where do you draw the line? How perfect does a prototype need to be? The more challenging it gets, the more perfect we want it to be and the more details we need to solve. I’m grateful that we are having many good laughs along the way though, but our creativity and perfectionism are ghosts that we will need to handle. 

The final product will involve quite a few processes when putting it all together. Since we are looking at scaling with very limited resources, we have to take this into consideration when building the prototype. In my daytime job there are 2 important lessons that I’ve learnt for (hyper) scaling with limited resources. Remove complexity and minimize processes. Both these lessons are thoroughly incorporated when the creative ghost takes over. My CEO Elon recently tweeted how painfully long it took him to realize that the best process is No process. Well, let’s go with that! 

So every evening it’s 2 steps forward, 1 step back. What shall we call it? Will it be good? Do we dare? Should we do it like this or like that? If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, right?

We are still waiting for some important input to be able to do a proper budget. I’m a bit worried that we are overdoing it. Scary.

Best,

Andy & Sarah

Ps. Thanks Henrik for being our first customer, even if you don't know what you are buying yet :).