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 18th 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. =)
