An Entrepreneur Juggles Six Companies and One Worker: Herself
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have one on my meeting table; it is a great conversation piece!
>To churn out products more quickly, she plans to automate aspects of her production processes. Doing that requires a larger studio space with better ventilation, which Ms. Baskin said would be easier to find in California. So this month, she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she plans to start a fabrication lab next year.
With rents the way they are, this seems ill-advised. Unless she's planning to take funding. Even then, I'm not sure why she'd want to spend gobs of it on rent.
NYC keeps trying to push its "Silicon Alley" and various tech stuff, but it seems to fall flat. It's a shame too because there's tons of old factories and stuff there that aren't really being used well, and could be converted to low/mid-volume flexible manufacturing using modern automated equipment. I imagine there's a few factors working against this: 1) the very high rent costs make it hard to attract new people to the area (unlike the Bay Area where the tech people and tech companies are already there, and have been for decades), 2) the public transit isn't that great unless you're in or close to Manhattan (a lot of those old factories and such are in other boroughs or on the NJ side; anything in a decent place in Manhattan has likely already been renovated and converted into something else by now), and 3) the taxes and regulation probably stifle things too much (Silicon Valley certainly has its taxes and regulation too, but the local government has decades of experience in taxing and regulating in a way that mostly supports the tech economy and not driving it out). In a nutshell, inertia is a very, very hard thing to overcome.
You can't just start up a manufacturing operation in some random, cheap cost-of-living city in the US; it doesn't work that way.
Note: I'm not saying that living Ms. Baskin's life, or otherwise not being fulfilled with a 9-5 work life with satisfying home/nightlife, is the optimal way to live life. I'm just saying I had never even felt the pull until moving to New York, and it undeniably made me a more well-rounded person, at least in the arts.
I imagine it's just as easy to do what Ms. Baskin is described as doing elsewhere (at the end of the article, it says she's moving to the Bay Area)...but the mode of transportation in New York, plus just the density of creativity/craziness, makes NY stand out in my mind.
But I kind of fail to understand why she can't take the orders for 200 helmets. It seems to me that if she is selling up to 75 per month already, you say "Well, I can take the order, but it will take me X amount of time. (call it 3 months)" If they are okay with it taking the time, you have income security for that period. Then you increase the price on your other products in hopes of slowing sales and you put up an announcement that orders will take X amount of time now instead of whatever the previous time was. If sales aren't slowed by that, you have just increased your profit margin.
This is a great thing to think about. Many of us are getting lost in the details of it all with premature optimization while Ms. Baskin goes out there and just ships. She's truly someone to aspire to.
Lean Startup, the 'premature optimization' that software entrepreneurs do, is an attempt to handle the sales end of a software business in a similar fashion to how the operations end is conducted. If just getting out there and schlepping your wares worked, more people would do it. Obviously shipping early and often is necessary, but if you ship too early then your MVP will be missing the 'V' part.
Payments? Stripe! Support phone number? Forums! Cold calling? Self-service platform!
There is so much to be gained from talking and interacting with potential and current customers and most of us - myself included - avoid it way too often.
How does she afford the insurance on those things? I say this because those things are pretty tricky to ride: you either have to go really slow or you need to ride with one hand on the handbrake at all times as the pedals will throw your feet off them if you try to slow down that way due to the momentum of the whole thing being much more than your typical bicycle. I bet lots of costumers would end up causing some cosmetic damage to cars and such, just getting used to riding them.
I'm sure insuring bicycles or tricycles is much cheaper than insuring automobiles (and actually not required, by law, as it is with autos). I would think the rider would be responsible for damages, and not the owner of the vehicle, but that's just a guess.
Regardless, somehow bicycle rental businesses manage to exist in every major city. So, it must be possible to insure them. I would think the personal injury risk to her customers would be the bigger insurance concern, but if I were doing it, I'd require customers to sign a very strongly worded waiver of liability for injury.
If the bicycles I use for my business have defective brakes and are recalled by the manufacturer, my rental customers are at risk but some of that liability is shouldered by the manufacturer. If bikes I manufacture have defective brakes, I have to assume that liability and could be found at greater fault because I have the ability to test and recall the product.