The Way of the Dodo — How to Sell 10,000 iPad Cases at $60 Each | Hacker News Reader

The Way of the Dodo — How to Sell 10,000 iPad Cases at $60 Each

fourhourworkweek.com

51 pointsgr36628 comments

I like the idea of my DodoCase, and if it weren't mostly defective, I'd use it. It's a very inconspicuous way to carry the iPad, which I love.

Unfortunately the bamboo curls outward in essence making the shape that of |( where the pipe is the iPad and the parenthesis is the DodoCase.

I've sent a request for some sort of reasonable way to fix this, as it's been this way since I've received it. The reply was they would send me new rubber feet and it's doing what bamboo does naturally. I stopped using it the day my iPad slipped out of the case and hit concrete on the corner making a nice nasty dent.

Happened to me, except the iPad bounced on carpet. Their Friendly Support is excellent, and sent a replacement quickly. Replacement was bowed too, before or during shipping.

They then offered a technique to micro-fracture the outer bamboo, but I'm not persuaded this would help it hold the iPad tighter.

I think they should consider changing the layers to counteract the curvature -- it should want to curve in to hold tighter, not curve out to hold less.

While assembling, they'd also have the option to pre-form the bamboo to a bowed in shape, then glue the layers while bowed. The glue would keep the bow in place, and use the aluminum (not gonna bow) iPad hold it back straight. The case might look odd without an iPad in it, but would grip much better when carrying the iPad.

I was lucky too. My iPad fell onto the carpet. What I did was I used a couple of small strips of black craft foam (<$1 per letter size sheet) and reinforced the bottom corners. The iPad fits in there very snugly.

The corner bumpers from Dodocase don't inspire a lot of confidence.

That's great that they offered you a replacement. No such luck here, even sent them a photo of the case and the damage.

I'm right there with you. At this point, my DODOCase is the prettiest waste of $60 that I've made since I took a cute brunette out for an astonishingly unremarkable day way back in college!

I'd think they are responsible for the damage to ipads as it's their design defect/material choice causing this?

P.s. I learnt today not to put bamboo in the dishwasher, even on economy cycle.

From winner, Nashville Flood Tees:

"Not only did PayPal shut us down for 24 hrs after only being live for less than 8 hrs, because of the sheer volume we sold, but they’ve been really slow and difficult releasing funds to us."

This is why I can't understand how startups still use Paypal. With Paypal, your dispute could take forever to get resolved and there's no one you can call directly to get things fixed asap. Not only have costs on your own merchant accounts come down, they're easier to setup as well as make your business look more professional.

Because they either don't know about the problem or they think that the current alternatives are too hard to implement (or don't know them either).

Might also be a problem that Paypal is a brand that end users want to use. I'm sure I've read reports of online sales increasing when Paypal is an option. I guess the downside is that with that increase in sales there is the cost/risk that Paypal might also give you problems.

ease of use. merchant accounts are easier, but still not nearly as easy as paypal. and i wish i could tell people about some alternative to use, but there isn't anything as easy to use out there (amazon payments probably being the next closest).

This happens really a lot with PayPal, the other case I can think of off the top of my head is wtfjeans

I bought a DODOcase and absolutely love it. I found out about them when their founder asked about optimizing a sales pitch on the Lean Startups Google Group. It's a great product and I can't recommend it enough!

Vaskel, I don't know about suspending their merchant account, but they do have about a 4-5 week wait after your order. I know you can't sell speculative products on Etsy but they never tried that (to my knowledge).

With this guy, I can't get my mind past the feeling that he's trying to sell me a DODOcase, a Shopify account, and a get-rich-quick scheme in one post. Are we to believe that he, of all people, isn't being compensated by DODOcase or Shopify? I mean, it's a cute story by its own merit, but unless they're paying for it, he just did them a huge favor.

I believe he's an advisor for Shopify: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/shopify

I didn't catch a disclosure in the post, but I may have missed it.

Disclosure – The Full Monty: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ftc-disclosure-blog/

What? Isn’t $100,000 in prize money a big enough favor to begin with? This post just discusses the winners of a contest he posted about before as a post-mortem. If you were in the contest because of reading about in his blog, would you rather not find out who won and how they did it?

Tim is on the Shopify board of advisors. He gets no other compensation beyond the shares that advisors get. The whole contest also was Tim's idea. It promotes exactly the kind of thing that he is all about: build an awesome business and have fun doing so.

It just goes to show that there is a market out there for creative cases. Not everyone wants the standard silicon rubber or neoprene cases that are sold in Apple Stores. I love my DodoCase. The only thing I wish it had were pockets in the left cover.

Check out Etsy for other amazing hand-crafted iPad cases and sleeves.

It also shows that there are moments to break into a market and moments not to. If they had made an iPhone 3GS case, no one would care. Making an iPad case though, that is the new hot thing, and everyone was doing case round-ups and linking to the new cases.

isn't this the same company that was selling cases that they haven't even built yet, so Google or was it Paypal locked their merchant account

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1432107

Yeah it got too popular and they had trouble filling the orders fast enough and got some complaints from impatient customers. A slight mishandling of things by the sounds of it but an understandable one. FYI Selling something you haven't yet built isn't a crime btw.

Them taking part in a competition with a $100,000 prize for getting the most sales in 6 months might go a long way to explaining why they didn't suspend orders once they realised they production capacity was lacking.

I think it is fair to accept money in advance, the customers were informed of the waiting time. The difficulty was that Google Checkout requires you to ship within 24hrs of accepting the order. I doubt it was an intentional violation of the TOU, it is likely at the time they read the TOU they didn't envision the situation they got into.

"Selling something you haven't yet built isn't a crime btw."

Wait what? Manufacturing companies do it every day. For a lot of them, their entire profit margin rides on the fact that their AP is on Net-90 and their AR is Net-60 (or similar). For stuff with long lead times, payment in fact does often happen before delivery. How is that illegal?

Was responding the the parent implying that selling something that isn't yet in existence is somehow wrong.

>isn't a crime

That whole article was pretty good. This was the most insightful part for me:

> On the marketing side, we’ve learned that having a great story is as important as having a great product. As a small company, you need to connect with your customers on an emotional level as well as on the physical level of the product. We sell DODOcase’s exclusively online which means most of our customers are buying a product without ever touching it. To achieve sales in this way, its important that customers ‘want’ to buy into the story as well as the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com