I think we should focus on the key topic: tackling high costs. While the backdrop for the article is content marketing for iomete, the point is a higher-level discussion on how companies can optimize their spending on expensive tools that we take for granted, e.g. Snowflake.
Plus, the "price as a weapon" concept is worth exploring further - for aspiring category disruptors in this current economic cycle. It would lead to more competitive pricing and benefits for the customer in the long run.
> This program uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol to drive a Chrome session that downloads your photos stored in Google Photos. By default, it starts at the most ancient item in the library, and progresses towards the most recent. It can be run incrementally, as it keeps track of the last item that was downloaded. It only works with the main library for now, i.e. it does not support the photos moved to Archive, or albums. For each downloaded photo, an external program can be run on it (with the -run flag) right after it is downloaded to e.g. upload it somewhere else.
Yes, we'd love to offer Prime shipping at some point. The reason why we are hesitant to do so right now is because we want to handle our own customer service.
Yes we definitely did experience limitations in the beginning. We heavily relied on our dotcom sales for initial traction and feedback. To test our idea, we carefully trickled in traffic for some long tail keywords from SEO and Google AdWords. We still don't do any advertising besides some branded placements on AdWords and Facebook.
Listing our product on Amazon.com created additional sales and a new market which was great. But we realize this is a 3rd-party platform which we can't control and don't want to become dependent on it.
That's a great point. We didn't put our product on Amazon until we reached a high level of customer satisfaction. In the early days when we first started, we had to hustle when we had upset customers. We fixed the problems really fast to avoid them writing about a negative experience. As an example, we've provided complimentary upgrades to our new versions of the bed to previous customers.
JT and I left our jobs to start a company together. We sought out a stagnant industry to disrupt and saw ripe opportunity in mattresses. Most of the products were mediocre and designed without taste, and there seemed to be a lot of greed among the major players.
So we launched with a very simple v1 product — an all cotton mattress — and then iterated from there based on customer feedback and surveys.
Agreed. The MU forum may not be the prettiest design to look at, but it's run by an honest advocate of the industry and there are many mattress professionals active to answer technical questions.
Thanks for the feedback, and I understand your concerns. I'll address them below.
>> Even if mattress retailers are making a fortune on margins, well you guys also have margins too. And a retail price of $299..to..$499-king tells me that your mattresses are very low end.
We of course have built-in margins on our products, and we try to keep it as fair as possible while supporting our operational overhead. But to write off our beds as "very low end" is a misinformed assumption. We have internal pricing of well known mattress brands that are considered high end by many and they have the same if not lower costs as ours (due to volume and manufacturing in Mexico/China).
>> It is just too thin. Less than half the thickness of a regular mattress.
We have a 10-inch model (double the thickness) coming out soon. The price won't be too much more than the 5-inch, while offering the same level of comfort. But to be honest, we've never had a return for it being too thin.
>> the fact that is made of foam only makes it worse as with that thickness it will unavoidable deform with usage
Our foam should last 5-7 years before there is any deformity/compression. We've done thorough cycle tests in a lab to test this.
>> Then there is the foam density, that I can't see anywhere in the specs. And as you can guess when you import materials the bigger the density the more expensive the foam sheets are.
The foam in our bed is roughly about 2 lbs in density. There is some variance as with any foam manufacturing process. Our foams are poured and crafted in California, and 3 different layers provide a blend in density that's proved to be comfortable and durable. To give a point of reference, Tempurpedic recently dropped below a 1.8 lb density base foam, and that is considered high end. They used to use 2 lb but they reduced it to increase their margins.
We are available in the US only at the moment, but Canada would be the next logical expansion for distribution. That being said, we don't have a specific date on this yet as we don't want to overextend ourselves and risk the quality of our service.
Plus, the "price as a weapon" concept is worth exploring further - for aspiring category disruptors in this current economic cycle. It would lead to more competitive pricing and benefits for the customer in the long run.