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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

#71

Post by angersock »

chrisBob wrote: post #70
angersock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28drink%29 ) Look at the timeline. They only started shipping in like May of '14. This article covers April of '14. They had only run a crowdfunding campaign like less than a year prior. They raised funding (a lot) a year later. The problem with "but but but they should've used an API or an order-fulfillment company" ignores that, at that time, they very likely were lacking the…

Lots of people make bad business decisions, and I don't want to give them a hard time about the shipping company they chose, especially when they were willing to share the experience in a blog post. What worries me most is the internal accounting that gets them to $500. I am pretty stingy with the money I spend on my hobby projects, and sometimes it is fun to build things that I could buy for slightly more money. Tha…

I absolutely agree that your logic is correct, for a grad student or full-time engineer.

But again, early-stage startups != normal business calculus.

Look at it this way:

You've got two buckets, one of cash and one of time. You can fulfill business goals by dipping into either or both buckets. The time bucket continually replenishes at a fixed rate but never change capacity, the money bucket may replenish unpredictably in both amount and time and have its capacity expanded (more employees, capital, whatever). If either bucket goes dry, you lose.

At an early stage, your cash bucket is near empty compared to your time bucket. If you've spec'ed your business properly (hah) and are not too unlucky (hah hah), you will never have a demand that exceeds the total available amount in the two buckets.

So, to fulfill demands, you pull from the time bucket, because it has the greater reserves, and because it'll replenish as every second tics by.

As time goes on, though, the demands outstrip what your time bucket can handle. Your time bucket, remember, never gets larger. But, since your business is growing, the cash bucket has been getting larger, and so you start to fulfill demands out of that bucket, using contractors or vendors or whatever.

Eventually, you are fulfilling demands entirely out of the cash bucket, because you simply will never have enough time to do them in the required timeline otherwise.

The same rule ("gotta fulfill my business demands without emptying my buckets") applies at both ends of a company's lifecycle, but results in entirely different behavior--and that's not bad.

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

#72

Post by jonknee »

onion2k wrote: post #48
jonknee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

The point is that you can't really predict what you're going to need. Someone in the business who can pick up a problem and solve it fast, even if the solution is a hack you'll replace later, is useful. Having them around means you don't miss opportunities you'd otherwise have to pass on.

Sure, but in this instance you can 100% know what you need--a shipping fulfillment provider for B2C sales. There are hundreds to choose from, they didn't choose one.

They are happy and proud, but their slow shipping and fulfillment disappointed much of their customer base and surely cost them a lot of sales. I'm not even a customer and I knew that they were a clusterfuck. Their $500 hack probably cost them at least 100x that in revenue.

Hackers are great and valuable, but sometimes you don't need a hack you need competence.

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

#73

Post by jonknee »

replicatorblog wrote: post #49
double0jimb0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before reading the article, I was thinking 'have these dudes not heard of ShipStation?!?' But yea, to answer your question, yes, shipstation + shopify works brilliantly. One person can process and ship 60 orders in 30 minutes. 60 orders via a 3rd party warehouse with all their fees, would run you ~$150 - $200.

Thanks! I'm still a little bit confused about the problem they're solving, but I'm glad to know I'm not crazy :)

Probably because it's not a real problem, they created it entirely themselves. At least they solved it!

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

#74

Post by vinceguidry »

protomyth wrote: post #68
vinceguidry wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel really is horrible at handling anything that needs to feed into a software system that isn't also built on Microsoft technology. Just yesterday I was trying to get a coworker to manually order some rows in a database that I had exported to CSV by date, the problem was that some of the dates were just month-year, and some were month-year-day. Excel insisted on formatting the columns as dates and the month-year r…

Well, a lot of people use Excel to prep data for other systems and it really isn't that hard to handle. Perl has excellent libraries for reading and writing Excel spreadsheets. Excel is really easy with a large amount of training material. Even the Perl libraries are very easy to use. I would never tell a user to open up a text editor on tabular data. It is too easy to configure Excel to do the right thing each time.…

Let me know when Excel can do real Unicode. Ruby rejects CSVs made with Excel's default Unicode export. I had to sit with my boss last year trying out different ways to get it to work right, and eventually made him use LibreOffice to do the xlsx -> CSV conversion.

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

#75

Post by protomyth »

vinceguidry wrote: post #74
protomyth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a lot of people use Excel to prep data for other systems and it really isn't that hard to handle. Perl has excellent libraries for reading and writing Excel spreadsheets. Excel is really easy with a large amount of training material. Even the Perl libraries are very easy to use. I would never tell a user to open up a text editor on tabular data. It is too easy to configure Excel to do the right thing each time.…

Let me know when Excel can do real Unicode. Ruby rejects CSVs made with Excel's default Unicode export. I had to sit with my boss last year trying out different ways to get it to work right, and eventually made him use LibreOffice to do the xlsx -> CSV conversion.

Let me get this straight. Your boss's preferred tool outputs a CSV that is rejected by your tool's CSV import and your solution is to force your boss to do the conversion in another piece of software? You being a developer and your boss being a business user doing his/her work in his/her tool. That tool being one of the biggest selling programs of all time for business use.

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

#76

Post by asillystory »

unethical_ban wrote: post #50
moonbug wrote: post #20

Cool story bro, but it give me hives just reading it. "We didn't know anything about physical order fulfilment so we hacked our way into a local optimum, rather than asking anyone who knew". Or, as we say hereabouts, a month in the lab solves a day in the library. But it only cost $500! Well, I'm sure that'll come as a lovely surprise come payday when John discovers he's working pro bono. Also, that product looks dis…

Cool story bro + unrelated attack on the product = reddit-level posting.

I came here to get away from reddit but there's definitely a lot of unfortunate overlap commenting wise. I should just stop reading comments but I can't help myself.

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

#77

Post by yen223 »

protomyth wrote: post #52
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.

"But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number." No, you can set the import to treat it as a text field. It is really easy and this should not be a problem. The import can define field by field what it should be treated as (most often used with dates).

The problem here is that, like the folks mentioned in the article, I wasn't the one opening the file on Excel. I'm generating a CSV file from a webapp to be sent to clients for processing. They would double-click the file, and see those mangled fields.

The real issue here is that Excel doesn't respect quotes on a CSV file for some inane reason. That is a bug on Microsoft's end.

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

#78

Post by vinceguidry »

protomyth wrote: post #75
vinceguidry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know when Excel can do real Unicode. Ruby rejects CSVs made with Excel's default Unicode export. I had to sit with my boss last year trying out different ways to get it to work right, and eventually made him use LibreOffice to do the xlsx -> CSV conversion.

Let me get this straight. Your boss's preferred tool outputs a CSV that is rejected by your tool's CSV import and your solution is to force your boss to do the conversion in another piece of software? You being a developer and your boss being a business user doing his/her work in his/her tool. That tool being one of the biggest selling programs of all time for business use.

Yep. It was much easier than writing a layer to translate Microsoft Unicode into real Unicode. But he wasn't a business user. I wouldn't dream of telling the business users what tools to use to get me the information I need. Not because I can't, I absolutely can, but because if it's a business use case, it's worth engineering a real solution. This was just a temporary hack to get us through a tricky data problem. Installing it on his machine and working out a procedure took 10 minutes. Would have been quicker if his machine didn't have the characteristic slowness and inscrutability that Windows machines operated by non-techies exhibit. That procedure carried us through until I could work out a saner way.
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