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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

#21

Post by nbouscal »

"a $500 system that successfully managed the first four months of Soylent shipments."

Successfully is rather overstating it. The shipment of Soylent was delayed by over a year and went at a snail's pace. My shipment was delayed at a rate of roughly one month per month, with it eventually arriving something like six months after the first shipment had gone out, despite being one of the first backers. I can't think of a single metric on which I would call the Soylent shipping process "successful".

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#22

Post by scriptman »

onion2k wrote: post #2

This 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…

This is true. But, it seems a waste for the hacker to spend so much time working on a problem that would already be solved if they used a vendor that specialised in what they wanted to achieve.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#24

Post by Rifu »

nbouscal wrote: post #21

"a $500 system that successfully managed the first four months of Soylent shipments." Successfully is rather overstating it. The shipment of Soylent was delayed by over a year and went at a snail's pace. My shipment was delayed at a rate of roughly one month per month, with it eventually arriving something like six months after the first shipment had gone out, despite being one of the first backers. I can't think of…

To be fair, you receiving the product is technically a success. But I understand where you're coming from.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#26

Post by gnoway »

"As ridiculous and janky as that initial experience was, it wasn’t like it was a failure on our end or on the other end. I wouldn’t really see this as a shortcoming."

He can only say this because they are profitable. In reality I think they were lucky to have a product people wanted so badly. In the first 12-18 months, most of the complaints by actual Soylent customers about Soylent had nothing to do with the product itself, only the fulfillment.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#27

Post by scriptman »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #16
yen223 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would it still be an issue with TSV? That's my preferred flat file data format, find it less error prone compared with CSV.

Yes, it's still an issue. I prefer tab separated too, but it still doesn't help you.

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#28

Post by insulanian »

While I enjoy such war stories and love hacking ad-hoc systems myself, I can't help myself not to think how much time they wasted instead of going to someone familiar with shipping industry. There is a saying in my home country: "Not everyone can sing through the vilage!"

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#29

Post by virmundi »

harkain wrote: post #23
SQL2219 wrote: post #13

Don't eat soy.

Why?

There are various reasons, some of which will require time to checkout. One is that soy is a phytoestrogen [1]. So the studies show there could be some issues with men eating soy at high levels. Googling provides a lot of arguments founded in reasoning for and against. Another issue is that soy requires heavy agriculture and processing [2]. This can harm the environment in much the same macro ways as beef production. The chemicals used in processing soy into tofu and other products can be bad. Again, processing arguments go both ways (though soy is poisonous in its raw form [3]).

So right now many, myself included, advocate minimizing soy. You can't get away from it. Thanks to several US administrations soy is huge business. Just watch it. It might be that its good for you. Right now the soy debate is much like the egg debate of the 80s. I leave you with Lewis Black's commentary on food nutrition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ

1 - http://blog.zocdoc.com/does-soy-feminize-men-fact-vs-myth/ 2 - http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/im... 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition

Re: How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

#30

Post by jonknee »

onion2k wrote: post #2

This 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…

... Or just should a fulfillment provider that is halfway competent. Perhaps one that isn't doing you a favor and actually does similar stuff for other people.
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