The blog is written by a guest writer; our founder and CEO James Bell-Booth and covers the journey to date of getting Earshots off the ground. 

I left the last post in this series with the line 'we cracked it'.  In hindsight...we were far from it...the year was 2018

Quitting my job 4 weeks before global COVID lock-downs, to go full time

I remember it like it was yesterday, it was mid-December 2019, we had just had the first units off the production line arrive and they looked ok.  Not perfect, but we definitely had something we could start selling and properly 'start' the business.  I remember ringing one of my business advisors and saying 'maybe we should do some more testing before I quit my job and go full time?'...his answers was categorically, 'James, you committed to this journey, you need to go all in now?', so I agreed after Christmas Holidays I would resign from my job and go full time.

It rolled around quickly, and in mid-January I talked with my employer and said that I was going to resign to do my business full time.  They were fully supportive and so the exit terms were agreed, a four week notice period.

A week before I was due to finish, news started to roll out around the world that a new disease was taking hold.  I didn't think too much of it.  However, fast forward a few weeks, I had ended my employment and everything relied on us selling Earshots Gen1, but the most of the world was sent into lock down and my first day of working full time was from my soon to be baby girl's nursery.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my wife was pregnant at the time...she came to me on multiple occasions and ask 'Do you think you should be going back to your old job and asking for it back??...how can Earshots' possible work with all this COVID stuff going on?'

Above: One of our first event stands

Above: Gen1 Earshots branding

Initial feedback on Gen1

So from the nursery/office we got up a really basic website, self taught myself Google Ads and Facebook ads, and started reaching out to riders and runners to see who wanted to try Earshots.  I was pretty stoked that most of the people we spoke to totally understood the problem Earshots were solving, top kiwi riders like Sam Blenkisop, Wyn Masters plus a whole raft of others.  This helped us start to sell in the thousands of sets of Earshots, but we also started to get feedback from customers that we needed to listen to.    Because I relyed soley on our manufacturing partner, I didn't know what I didn't know.  The feedback was primarily around the following:

• Sound quality - we had now acoustic engineering in the team, so that sound quality was poor and some of our customers let us know.  Interestingly though, I learnt something; everyone hears sound differently, so what is good sound quality to one person, is poor to another.  However, we knew  we needed to make improvements in that area
• Connectivity - We had used what's called a 'chip' antenna.  It's essentially an off the shelf component that is added to the PCB.   I didn't know anything about antenna's at the time, other than we needed one.  But this was another key area we needed to improve
• Fit/comfort - The earbud was a one size fits all, but again we really hadn't done the ergonomic testing required.  So we also need to improve in this rea
• Construction/water proofing - The Gen1 Earshots used screws to assemble the rear part where the electronics and battery sit.  These screws rusted with sweat and became weak points for moisture 

Above: The assembly screws on Gen1

Above: Me, fixing waterproofing on Gen1 Earshots

So we knew we needed to build Gen2...but I had no idea how we would improve in those areas so I set about talking to as many people as possible to try and find the expertise required to improve in those areas...

A chance meeting that turned into meeting an acoustic guru

Once COVID lock-downs started to lift, I started to put feelers out to meet people in New Zealand who were in the product development industry.  There was a person in Auckland who I was recommended to speak to so I decided I would visit him at some point.  That point came, and I wasn't going to make the trip to Auckland especially, but decided I would go.  It turned out that person's business wasn't the right skill set for us, but the owner asked me 'Is there anyone else I can introduce you to, that you need on the team?'...I said 'I really need an acoustic engineer, and he introduced me to Simon, a kiwi living in Japan, who had 15 years experience as an acoustic engineer in Chinese manufacturing.  We were introduced by email and set about building a relationship.  I finally had the skills of someone to make the improvements in audio that we needed!  What luck! 

The challenges of developing Gen2 during COVID

We were determined to develop our Gen2 Earshots.  However, in hindsight there were significant challenges that while we did our best to overcome, they meant we couldn't  do the job we wanted.  Those challenges were

• New Zealand borders were closed so we couldn't travel to our factory in Shenzhen.  This made it difficult to monitor quality through the development process. 
• Our development team had to work from home and couldn't travel so we couldn't get in the same room together
• Testing of ideas with our customers was tricky because we couldn't get people in the same room (due to social distancing)
• Ordering parts as a start-up was challenging because key components were being snapped up in bulk by large companies
• Lead times for everything were long due to having to ship components and prototypes across oceans for the development team to test and improve

First batch of Gen2 has a 50% crash rate, what do we do???

In November 2021 we planned to launch Gen2.  The first batch of 200 units arrived in New Zealand at the end of November.  We got together as a team and were supposed to package the pre-sale units up and send to customers.  BUT...what we found was that our firmware, the software that controls the bluetooth and connectivity, was crashing on 50% of the units.  We had no idea why...we were supposed to be selling Gen2 for Christmas but now we couldn't which meant we couldn't generate revenue, we had sold out of Gen1, but with no Gen2, we had no money coming in.  It was an incredibly stressful time.  I rung the company who had helpped us develop the firmware, but it was Christmas, and all the team take a long break so there was nothing they could do until they come back in mid-January.  It was the longest four weeks of my life waiting to sit down with someone to figure out what was going wrong.   We were burning money as we had hired people to help us sell Gen2, but they had nothing to sell.  It ended up I had to camp out, sleeping on a person's couch in the same town as the vendor that supplied us the firmware until they had actually fixed it.  And we never got to the root of the problem, but we did figure out how to create a mechanism that meant if the units crashed they could be restarted by turning them on again.  A bit like a reboot.  

Gen2 isn't perfect, but has great sound, improved connectivity and improved durability, we have to start selling or we go out of business

So we had our Gen2 product, we knew we had improved the sound, connectivity and durability, but we still had some challenges.  The decision we had to make was start selling it, or go out of business.  So we started selling it knowing that it would take another generation to fix the areas that COVID issues had created.  We had to fight through with Gen2 and try and sell enough to give us resources to develop Gen3.

Little did I know how close to failure trying to do this would take us...wait and see in part 4 of this blog coming soon.