Re:My Fourth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder
by visaals on Saturday February 05, 2022 @04:04PM
(#30226027)
Agree with the parent commenter some more elaboration on how your seemingly low profitability isn't a concern in the long term would be helpful to understand as I don't see immediately how your investments in the short term will help in the long term. The table makes it seem you spend -$464,071 to make $477,449 but your comment here makes it seems like 460k sales actually only cost 200k in raw materials, which is impressive!
best of luck and great article as always!
Raw materials includes the $59k I have in inventory, so cost of goods sold would be closer to $200k on $460k in sales.
I've been iterating on the hardware to reduce cost and increase value. The Voyager 2 reduced costs over the Voyager 1 by eliminating some retail hardware components I had to buy. I was expecting to release a PoE version of the Voyager 2 in December, and I think customers would pay a premium for PoE, but it's taking longer than I expected to get that version ready. I'm hoping to ship it in another few weeks at a price that's about 15% higher than the non-PoE.
I should experiment more with pricing. I used to sell the Voyager for $249, and then someone on HN suggested I raise prices, and I thought, "I can't possibly sell it for more!" And I raised it by $50, and it didn't seem to change sales, and then basically the same thing happened a few months later. So maybe it's time for another price experiment.