After three months of work, the first batch of SD cards has finally shipped. I learned two things. The first is that there is a market for Flying Car. The second is that I am personally capable of selling consumer electronic devices. Now it is time for the training wheels to come off and the real fun to begin.

The newsletter which announced that the SD cards are ready to ship was sent to 139 people. 6 people completed the order form. 4 people made the payment. This conversion rate is higher than the 2% industry standard for SaaS. It is also mind-blowing for consumer electronics. A positive sign that gives me confidence to continue this adventure.

The orders came in from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In retrospect, I am glad that I did not spend more time researching CE marketing compliance seeing as no orders came in from the EU.

I did not have time to set up an online store. Instead, I used a simple online survey form to collect mailing information. To collect payment, I provided one-time payment links using Wise and Stripe.

I bought 5 SD cards. One of them was dead. That’s a 20% failure rate. To be fair, they were very reasonably priced at 64GB for just under 6 EUR. The failure rate and corresponding rate of return was probably a factor in the discounted price.

Each card took an hour to bake. Fortunately, most of that was idle waiting for testing and flashing to complete.

Every card that I sent out was tested with Fight Flash Fraud (f3). All passed with flying colors.

My significant other deserves all the credit and praise for painstakingly hand-drawing all of the wonderful illustrations for the OOBE.

It was an interesting feeling to seal the SD card in the envelope and deposit it into the mailbox. There is no blue/green deployment or rollback procedure like in SaaS. For the first time in my life, I had to perform physical QA. As a result, I have newfound gratitude for the privileges I enjoyed in SaaS up to this point.

I set the price at 11 USD, which covers the SD card itself and the postage stamp. In other words, it is priced to break even.

Ultimately, I cannot continue selling the SD cards indefinitely. Customers would still need to purchase a development board from a third-party manufacturer, and I get no commission from those sales. What’s worse is that I have no visibility into or control over the manufacturing process.

Therefore, the next target is to get the people who purchased the SD cards onto my hardware as soon as possible. This includes migrating their data off their SD cards — leave no thoughts behind. The hardware would also be priced to make a profit and fund future development.

I want to give a 30% discount to everyone who ordered the SD card to use on their next purchase. The wording reads intentionally vague because I legally cannot market any product that has not received FCC certification, and any additional clarity would most certainly constitute as marketing.

If you still wish to order the SD card, I am accepting orders up until Sunday, September 22, 2024 00:00 UTC. It will be first come, first served, and I will only bake 5 more SD cards. To find out how you can order the SD card, you can read this blog post.

Up next, I need to decide how to balance failing fast while shipping quickly, with delivering a product that lives up to its name. From forking NetBSD to choosing the right type of screws, it’s destined to be a lot of fun.

Thanks for keeping me company on this voyage.

See you back in the future. Stay tuned!

The blog post for this newsletter was submitted to Hacker News.