How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
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Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#2This is a really good example of why you need a 'hacker' in your startup, in the traditional 'one who is good at building ad hoc systems' sense. Having awesome technologists who can write brilliant, well-tested and robust code is certainly useful, but a lot of the time in the early stages of a company you just don't have time. You have a problem and it needs to be solved fast. Most things can be fixed later when the initial traction turns in to cash. Until then, hack all the things.
Note: I might be biased because hacking things together is what I'm good at.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#3This was really interesting, but it just seems like they chose the wrong fulfilment partner for their warehousing and logistics. I work for a third party warehousing and logistics company in AU, but we specialise in receiving orders from external parties in electronic formats and providing tracking information back to the orderer. People think that warehousing/distribution companies are all the same, but there are a lot of different niches. Some are strong with bulk shipping, some with small and fiddly picking, some with large national campaigns that need simultanous delivery. You need to do your research and look for which suppliers are being used by other companies that have a similar distribution profile to you.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#4Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"?
That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#5Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number.
Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#6Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
Can't you set the number format on the cell?
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#7Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
Can't you set the number format on the cell?
It's possible with .xls or .xlsx files, but csv files can't store number formats.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#8Summary: "Fulfillment of physical goods is hard, especially when you don't know anything about it."
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#9Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number. Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.
If you put the apostrophe in front of a number, and save it as csv, that works. But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number.
The issue here was that there's no way to let Excel know that this value in this CSV file is not a number. The only way around it that I know of is to stick with xlsx, which has its own pain points.
Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number. Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.
If you put the apostrophe in front of a number, and save it as csv, that works. But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number. The issue here was that there's no way to let Excel know that this value in this CSV file is not a number. The only way around it that I know of is to stick with xlsx, which has its own pain points.
Yes, it isn't ideal.
What you can do is put 2 apostrophes in front of the number in xls/xlsx and save it to csv. The conversion will drop one apostrophe and when you open the csv it will still have one apostrophe in front of it followed by the whole number. Then you can use a formula like =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-1) to remove the leading apostrophe. The number generated by the formula appears as a proper number again and is usable in calculations.