There are some things you never forget when you’re a startup CEO, and watching my co-founder and VP Sales, “Ken,” run around the office yelling, “Hey, Hey!” after we got our first order, is one of them.
Picture: Depositphotos
We had just soft launched our first product, the TS1001. We didn’t do any marketing. Nothing at all. All we did was put our first product on our very crappy, Go Daddy, website.
And within 24 hours, someone magically bought our first product.
The reason we did a soft launch was we wanted to test our systems before the big launch, where would announce 16 products at once, a couple months later. So sales were slow.
Every few days, another customer would stumble upon our website, and they would buy the TS1001. The average order sizes were pretty low, less than $50 per customer, if my memory is correct.
Our goal, for those of you keeping score at home, was $10,000 per year per customer. We were slightly off our long term goal :-).
By the time we had our big launch a couple months later, we were ready to go. All our systems were tested.
We knew we could accept orders. We knew we could support customer sample requests. We knew we could test products. And we knew our distribution partners could accept orders too.
The launch for our next set of products was the formal launch of our company. Even though we had raised $12.1 million the previous year, we hadn’t publicized the funding at all. We didn’t even file with the SEC.
For all practical purposes, our company was a bear in hibernation. Now, we were ready to wake up, after 16 months, for the world to see us.
The previous week I did interviews with the major trade publications in our industry. The interviews were under embargo, scheduled to be released on the day of the launch for maximum impact.
In addition, we had completed the revamped version of our website. Plus, our distribution partner, Future Electronics, the third largest distributor in our industry, was fully stocked with our products.
When we announced our new set of products, or should I say the trade press released their stories, our web traffic went crazy. Customers started ordering samples of our products, and we received some production orders too.
Orders increased, but they still remained slow. We would need other strategies to get to 1,000 customers.
The team and I had years of experience in the industry, so we thought (the optimum word here is “thought”) we knew exactly how to attack this problem.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of customers for an Analog Semiconductor company like ours to sell to. They range from the obvious customers (Apple, Samsung, and Cisco) to the not so obvious industrial customers making anything from water purification systems to HVAC systems.