To build trust with factories, we decided to make earbuds first, as they are smaller but still complex, allowing us to sell a lot and gain credibility. The only factory that wanted to work with us was one that had no other clients; without us, they would go bankrupt.

In our first year, we ended up selling about 600,000 units after addressing the initial quality issues.

We manufactured our first 100 units by hand, which allowed us to quickly iterate and fix problems as they arose during production.

We faced challenges with our product's pre-order sales drying up and struggled to maintain press coverage as our product wasn't ready for manufacturing yet.

In 2008, we faced a major setback when the financial crisis hit, leading to canceled orders and a million units on backorder.

After launching our first consumer product, we realized we had compromised on key design elements, which ultimately led to its poor performance in the market.

Before going through the entire manufacturing process, we sold around 700 to 800 units of our product, which helped validate our idea.

We faced the reality of having to manufacture 8,000 smart covers to ship around the world, which was a significant challenge for us as none of us had hardware experience.

After demo day, we had to ship our first units, which required moving most of our team to China to manage manufacturing.