Joe 2009 Web Edition

We've moved the blog to http://blog.saleae.com.  Mostly because you don't have to sign up to leave a comment.

Finally, light at the end of the tunnel!  We recently launched the cross-platform SDK and although it didn’t work perfectly right away I think it’s actually pretty close.  Meanwhile the cross-platform app continues to come along nicely.  I’m shooting for a bare-bones GUI release pretty soon.  That said, I’ve been wrong about every prediction I’ve made with this effort so the new deadline is “it’ll be ready when it’s ready”. 

We’ve moved!

Late last month we moved into a new space managed by a company called Activespace.  So far I really like it.  I sit right next to a bright window.  The new address is

Saleae LLC

3150 18^th St Suite 344

Mailbox 416

San Francisco, CA 94110.

It’s literally 4 blocks from the old place.  Oh, the new place actually has parking (parking tickets were really killing me for a while) although it’s $.75/hr – at least it’s there when you need it.

Sales Update

While no one is buying a new car, sales have stabilized to a rate that definitely keeps the lights on, so that’s fantastic.   Looking at the total number of units sold, it’s actually pretty mind boggling to have gotten to this point. Thanks everyone!

Inventory

Inventory has continued to be the bane of my existence.  Here’s the deal. When you run out of inventory, sales go down.  And sure, you recover some, but overall you probably loose at least half the sales you would have made. Now inventory is hard to manage because it takes so much cash to finance – and when cash is tight and you have to choose between making payments on overdue invoices and inventory purchases… By the way, this is not at all an intractable problem.  Our inventory could be managed like a champ if I had the time to put a proper system in place.  Having plenty of cash generally makes managing the inventory much easier and we’re moving in that direction.

Fufillment

Speaking of putting a decent system in place, we have done that for order fulfillment.  In January we started out with this fulfillment house called Webgistix.  While this wasn’t a complete disaster, they were a major pain in the butt to deal with, their IT systems were apparently implemented by an intern,  they would duplicate orders, lose packages, mis-count inventory etc. (Maybe we’re just high maintenance)  This plus our declining sales made me decide about a month ago to pull fulfillment back in house.  During that time and soon after our fulfillment infrastructure got pretty good (lots of php/mysql work).  Now it’s just a series of button clicks to print invoices, shipping labels (including all the customs stuff), and send out various order confirmation/order shipped emails.  The only thing that isn’t automated is anything that doesn’t go through the normal website sales channel.  Although I imagine that won’t be too far off either.

Sunk Cost

By the way, about this whole Linux/OSX thing.  I don’t think it was really the best business decision to have made in hindsight.  On the plus side, it’s going to be awesome and we will definitely get some new customers (what % is a good question).  On the down side (in hindsight) it has turned out to be an extremely challenging engineering undertaking, far beyond what I had originally imagined.  It’s allowed our competitors in large part to catch up and reclaim their market share.  That all said, and with due respect to sunk cost, I’m actually fairly happy to be doing it:  1)  It’s going to be awesome and a nice feather in our cap 2)  It’s been an fantastic  learning experience for me 3)  It’s given us a chance to re-architect the entire application from the ground up.  And for better or worse,  I’m more motivated by a vision of how awesome we can make something than with strictly business decisions. 

One part of many in the Saleae world-class fulfillment implementation

The USPS API doesn't actually let you pay via the api, thus the make-your-own-stamps

Woo!  Latest n' greatest

Ubuntu Linux!  Running native on 2.0GHz core2 duo/ 3GB ram

A typical hour's worth of orders.  Just kidding :)

Saleae gets a mascot.

Wow, it’s been a while!  It’s already been a year since the idea to do Logic was starting to take a physical form, and it’s been a great learning experience.  Kindof of like having your own little MBA case study.

Inventory:  Is holding up!  We finally have assembly taking place by not-me, by these great guys in LA.  I flew down a couple times to get them started but they pretty much have it under control now.  They put everything together, functional test it, and ship it off to the fulfillment center.  I still handle the ordering and logistics but that could be outsourced as well to these guys, just a matter of getting around to it.  Cash flow is super tight so unfortunately it’s hard to get order placed in a timely manner but the problem is being worked.

Fulfillment:  So we’re set up with a fulfillment house in NV now, and that has been an interesting experience.  Overall I’m not super happy but on the plus side I’ll I have to do is some button clicking and orders go out every day.  The alternative is to have someone here to do that but then you’re kindof at the mercy if whether that person just happens to be out sick, or on vacation, etc.  Still, in hindsight it may have been the better option.  On the plus side the whole process of getting set up for fulfillment has forced me to write a ton of code to handle all the e-commerce back-end which before was a hodge podge to manage.  It also really helps for accounting, which is now finally 95% or so worked out.

Shopping cart survey:  To try and tease out what works and what doesn’t, we’ve put a little opt-in survey at on the shopping cart.  This is tied into a database on the backend and I can run reports against it.  So not only do I have sales data for reporting, I also have the breakdown of what channels customers came from.   The results have been slightly inconclusive, but a couple of things kindof were made more obvious.  This is something I’d like to significantly improve over time, time permitting.

New site:  Not much to mention here, other than I’ve cleaned up a few things, and finally removed the imote stuff.  I finally got around to showcasing some of the better pictures we have of Logic.  Oh, and now all the Logic accessories are available!

Sales sluggish:  Well after we got inventory finally sales peaked out but then have kindof trailed off a bit.  This means we can’t throw engineering talent at the Linux/Mac software like I had hoped and also it means we have to cut back on marketing.  There are a number of reasons why sales have slumped I think, although without hard data it’s difficult to be sure.

Linux/Mac development:  So the last major hurdle for Logic is this Linux/Mac development, and it’s turned out to be quite the doozy.  Half of this is because it’s non-trivial, and half is because with sales slow I’ve had to spend a ton of time running the store.  Unfortunately things don’t look to be solving themselves, so it’ll be a long hard slog to get Linux/Mac support out there.  However, I’m still very excited about it and think it’ll be really cool.  Unfortunately though, for all the heroes anxiously awaiting it, it’s probably something like 2-3 months away I’m sorry to announce.  With everything going on it was way too optimistic to think we’d have this done so quickly.  I shouldn’t have pinned estimated dates to when it would be a available but unfortunately there’s no ceo here to temper the idealistic claims of the overconfident engineers =)

What’s Next for Logic?  Pretty much the same stuff that’s been next for a while:  Linux/Mac, more protocols, and a boatload of software improvements.  After that I think Logic will be pretty much squared away and maximally useful,  and with it checked off the list it’ll be on to other cool ideas.  I kind of want to start an education company, among 20 other ideas, but I digress.  We’ll see how it goes.

Pictures!

Here is the first 100 units for SparkFun going out in December.

Each one of these is a Logic PCB. Woo! 

Site updates!

Flying to LA for Logic assembly.  This is San Francisco. The little fuzzy bridge is the golden gate.
 

Logic assembly happening!

I love boxes of tested, ready-to-ship Logics.  Gives me a warm feeling. =)

Oh yah, it's time for some holiday bling on the website.  And btw, it'll turn itself off automatically after the 1st :)

Wow, things have been busy.  An update has long been overdue:

First off, welcome to SparkFun, our new distributor!  They’ve done a fantastic job with their entry for Logic (check out the great photography!) and it’s great to have these guys on board.  I’m thinking that they’ll be the only US distributor, at least for a while.

I finally got my first shipment of assembled and tested PCBs in from China.  Very cool.   I also developed some cool automated functional test software that I use here as well as in China.

Since our volumes are up we’re now using a machine shop near here called American Prototype.  The heroes over there have done a great job cranking out some really nice Logic cases.  I even have some samples of nice red ones.  Eventually I would like to offer some different colors.

The other day this guy comes to the door and asks if I have a forklift.  Let me tell you there’s something very cool about getting asked that, like you’ve hit a certain milestone.  Of course I don’t have a forklift or a loading dock or anything but since this was just a big shipment of Case Logic cases it wasn’t a big deal.  Now I have a stack of cases in my cube that’s nearly as tall as me.

USPS has been a bit of a pain lately, losing some packages overseas, or just the other day taking about 4 days for a domestic overnight shipment, which the customer wasn’t too happy about.  I was a bit annoyed that I was taking the heat for USPS’s screw-up.  I think I’ll switch to UPS overnight and pass the cost along.  As far as international goes USPS is something like 3-4 times less expensive than the -- I can only assume much more reliable -- FedEx/UPS/DHL – and for the immediate future I’m willing to re-ship some packages in order to pass along that good price to my customers.  However the real solution is to get fulfillment in the EU, which besides Australia is the destination of most overseas Logic units.  I’ve got some books on the way from Amazon so I can try and come up to speed on exactly how it’ll work tax-wise, etc.

Speaking of fulfillment in the EU, I also intend to get that going in the US.  The last month has seen me go from running the store with 50% of my time to running it with 95% my time which is not sustainable or particularly fun.  I love putting labels on boxes and taping them, don’t get me wrong, but that actually isn’t what takes very much time.  

The other thing we’ll be doing is getting more and more assembly done externally.  With our current volumes it would have made more sense to go directly to a turn-key manufacturer but as it is right now we have a small number of different ones, none of which is ultimately responsible for the end product (that would be me).  That said, now that I’ve got boards coming in already assembled and tested things will be a lot easier.  The only other non-trivial step is the assembly of the case, which I’m on working on outsourcing.  It’s tough when it’s your baby and you’re concerned about quality and defect rate, etc, but it simply must be done.

I’ve been working on getting a new manufacturer ramped up with the wire harness and that’s all under control now but we’re going to be out of stock for about 3 weeks, which is really too bad but there’s not a lot I can do about it short term.  The good news is that after the first massive shipment gets in we pretty much will be set, and be able to fill a massive number of orders without skipping a beat.

We’re doing some fun magazine ads these days and I think they’ll just get better.  Definitely write in if you have some ideas for an ad you think might really resonate with people.

I’ve added an FAQ for Logic and also updated the Press page.  Check it out to see some cool blogs that have written about Logic!

I’m looking to hire a software person to jumpstart the Logic software efforts which have been taking a back seat to running the store lately.  It’ll be my first employee, first experience with payroll and with a real accountant so it should be pretty fun.
 
About porting Logic to Mac/Linux:  This will be an interesting challenge.  Logic runs on .NET 3.5, which is a fantastic environment, but Mono doesn’t and isn’t going to offer .NET 3.5 support (certainly not Wpf), and WINE, so far as I can tell, just isn’t going to let you install .NET 3.5.  So right now the plan is to port Logic (including the windows version) to .NET 2.0.  This will be a considerable effort, but worth it if we can keep essentially the same codebase across the platforms.  Another option would be C++ and GDK although I’d very much prefer to steer clear of that if at all possible.

All for now!  Thanks to everyone who’s been sending in suggestions, it’s been great stuff.  Things are going slow with the software updates but everything getting logged and we’ll get to it, not to worry.

Hurray, finally I had enough time to hammer out 1-Wire.  It's not as buttoned up as it could be, but it's still much much better than trying to decode it by hand.  I didn't know anything about 1-Wire a few days ago, and I have to say it's kindof cool!

Here's what else is coming down the wire, besides putting out the fires.

1. New google adwords image ad, Logic stickers, and Logic FAQ
2. Top secret project, part 1
3. Linux & Mac drivers working + SDK
4. Good support for VMWare + Parallels
5.  Top secret project, part 2
6.  Website overhaul
7.  Get Logic accessories on the site (clips, wires, cases, etc)
8.  New video
9.  Distribution & Accounting overhaul
10.  CAN support
11. More Logic software features

Back to it!

I’ve just spent the last 5 days or so getting Logic ready for 64-bit Vista prime time.  Here’s the deal:  First of all Vista 64-bit needs a 64-bit driver.  2nd, that driver MUST be signed.  In all prior versions of Windows, as well as 32-bit Vista, driver signing isn’t a requirement.

Signing, by the way is somewhat similar to what you go through to get an SSL certificate for your website.  A Certificate Authority who is authorized to do MS driver signing makes sure your background is at least somewhat credible and then gives you a bunch of numbers – in exchange for a hefty pile of cash.  Verisign, for example, wants $500.

Anyway I had been using Cypress’s handy driver (Cypress makes the USB chip in Logic) along with their .NET API for that (which is actually much messier to use than you might hope).  Unfortunately that driver is neither 64-bit compliant or signed by Cypress.  I checked into it and Cypress does apparently have a 64-bit driver in the works which they kindly shared with me, however it’s not signed and it wasn’t at all clear that the API I was using would work with it anyways.  So I decided to go over to WinUSB.

WinUSB is a generic USB driver provided kindly by Microsoft that will work in XP and Vista and of course 64-bit Vista.  It is signed out of the box.  Anyway the API for it is very Win32-like and was a bit of an interesting code project.  Especially after I got it working in 32-bit windows only to find that the same code utterly refused to work on 64-bit, due entirely, it turns out, to a large number of bad 32-bit-world assumptions in a lot of the .NET interop stuff I wrote.  Anyway it went fairly well all-in-all and it was great practice for the Linux and OSX SDKs I’ll be putting together shortly.

One more thing about the signing: generally you need to have your driver’s ini file point to a .cab file which includes the hashes and signatures for all the drivers and the ini file itself – thus ensuring that the entire package hasn’t been altered since it was signed by the publisher.  Of course I’m writing my own ini file so I was scared at first that I still hadn’t managed to get around the driver signing issue on 64-bit Vista – but luckily for me 64-bit Vista seems okay installing the drivers with the just embedded signatures – however it does unfortunately still pop up the unsigned driver install warning box.  Eventually I’d love to be releasing signed code…

Oh, here’s a picture of my new Mac Mini OSX / 64-bit Vista development computer.   Very cool!  This purchase is the ONLY splurge over here I should mention, the cash flow situation is still very tight.

Some more random pictures --

Well, we’ve been backordered since August 21^st.  Despite that disappointing fact I am happy to announce that on Monday, everyone’s back orders are shipping out.  I have all the parts in and everything’s ready to go. 

So what happened?  In hindsight, I should have made a few different decisions, and I think probably the biggest issue was my lack of thinking more than one step ahead – i.e. focusing on the immediate issues at the expense of the longer term ones.  Lesson learned!

Sadly, we’re not out of the woods yet.  Orders didn’t fall off after the backorder started -- which I expected – in fact they grew instead and the result is that the majority of the new inventory is shipping out to cover the back orders and another somewhat briefer backorder period is probably going to start.  If you get your orders in over the next few days they’ll go out early this week, but after that there will probably be a backorder for a week or two.

One takeaway from all this is that I’m becoming much more bullish on this product and am willing to place much larger orders.  I’ve had RFQs out all week and a bunch of attractive quotes have come in.  Of course this is a longer term solution, so I still am quite frustrated about the current situation.  But I believe Logic is an awesome product and I’m going to do the best I can to do a great job with it despite these stumbling blocks.  Thank you to all the heroes who are patiently waiting on their Logics – the wait sucks but I think you’ll really like the product when you get it.  Maybe like it enough to forget about how long it took to get =)

Some takeaways--

• Take growth into account when predicting future inventory levels
• Assume suppliers will be late and plan this in
• Start outsourcing things you did yourself at the beginning as soon as possible
• Use local manufacturing for small runs.
• Go though larger-qty quoting process earlier in the game.
• Sanity check the inventory status more often.

Things are going well for Logic!  Thank you to all the heroes who have sent in suggestions as well as everyone who’s buying Logic!  Good times.

 In case you’re wondering, we are definitely working on a whole host of different software enhancements.  It’s going a little slow but rest assured they are coming.  I’m really looking forward to the upcoming enhancements, as well as the upcoming releases of some cool SDKs.  Thanks for your patience – I think it’ll be worth the wait.

Inventory is holding up fairly well despite increasing demand. There’s a good chance that we’ll run out of stock temporarily in about a week or so, before the next shipment of Logic aluminum cases gets in.  Hopefully that won’t happen, and I’ve got a much better inventory system in place so the likelihood of running out of stock going forward should drop dramatically.

You may have seen all the ads in Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts, and Servo magazine.  I’m going to change up our magazine advertising strategy and it should be pretty cool, so look for that in Circuit Cellar’s September issue.  Also if you’ve seen the ads you’ll notice that they say you can get logic from our buddies at SparkFun Electronics – however unfortunately due to stronger-than-expected demand we’ve been unable to ship them an allotment of Logics.  They should have stock at the beginning of September.  I’m really excited to have them on board, and looking forward to getting Logic on their site.

 All for now – on to the pictures!
Joe

Lots of international orders! It's been pretty cool to get orders from all sorts of interesting places.

Logics, before being laser etched.

Inventory, sweet inventory.

Shipping central!  Despite appearances, Logic doesn't actually come with skittles.  I’ll talk about what those are for later.  Frankly, I’d like to include skittles, but I’m hesitant to ship internationally with any sort of food.  And I can’t have all the US people talking about how much they love their skittles while all the international people feel left out…  Anyway, I’ll look into it more.

Hooray!!