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Guest: Fabienne Serrière, founder of KnitYak.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
Building a Six-Figure Kickstarter Around a Novel Process
Fabienne Serrière shares how algorithm-based CNC knitting became KnitYak and a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $100,000. She explains the workload of running a campaign largely alone and the mentor advice that helped make the launch successful.
Episode transcript
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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako
Filip Valica: Design + Invent, and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.
Filip Valica: The Product Startup Podcast, Episode 7.
Filip Valica: Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast. helping you turn ideas into successful products step by step with your host
Filip Valica: Filip Valica. Hi everyone and welcome to the product startup podcast. In the last episode, we heard from Kelsey Duffy, the CEO and creative director of Versakini. She talked to us about how she was able to recruit collaborators and designers to work
Filip Valica: with her on her swimwear line, including Amanda Perna from Project Runway. We also talked a bit about why close relationships with customers are so important. So if you haven't heard it yet, make sure to check it out.
Filip Valica: Before I get into today's content, I wanted to thank someone who left the review on iTunes. Meyer K-77 said, Very Cool Podcast. Get ready to sit back and enjoy the ride. Great job, Philip.
Filip Valica: I love the variety of product startup topics you cover with your episodes, well-produced too. Looking forward to more of these great shows down the road.
Filip Valica: Hey, thanks a lot, Meyer K-77. I'm trying to keep the variety high to make sure anyone listening can get something useful from every episode. So if you haven't left the comment yet, I'd really appreciate a review. I don't get a lot of feedback on the show, and I really enjoy your comments.
Filip Valica: And now let's get to the show.
Filip Valica: In today's episode, I'm joined by Fabienne Serrière. She's a Seattle-based hardware engineer who created Knit Yak, a business she funded through Kickstarter that sells scarves knitted using patterns based on elementary cellular automata, an algorithm found in
Filip Valica: mathematics, computer science, and hacking. Each scarf is unique, and she uses a computer program she wrote to feed her industrial-grade CNC knitting machine, a new pattern, that's custom to every order. So let's get started. Hi, Fabien. Thanks for coming on the show.
Filip Valica: How are you today? I'm well. Thanks, Philip. Thanks for having me on.
Fabienne Serrière: Maybe you can tell everybody about yourself and how you got started with Mit Yat. Yeah,
Fabienne Serrière: I just moved back to the United States two years ago.
Fabienne Serrière: And I've been living in Europe for almost 10 years.
Fabienne Serrière: And I was ready to start a business. And I knew I wanted to do it in the good old US of A.
Fabienne Serrière: So after traveling around for about a year, I settled in Seattle and started a business. Why did you pick what you pick? Yeah, so I'm producing mathematical scarves on an industrial knitting machine.
Filip Valica: And each scarf is unique. Every single one is different. And my customers get to pick out which one they want. That's very cool.
Filip Valica: So one of the reasons I'm really excited to have you on the show is because I've found it really interesting that you combine math with fashion because they're almost like polar opposites, I think.
Filip Valica: math is very precise and logical and fashion can be so it can be very opinionated or it's
Fabienne Serrière: based on the eye of the beholder, so to speak. So is there anything behind that why you chose combine the two? Yeah. So I have a math degree, but I work in computer security and as a Linux
Fabienne Serrière: system administrator for many years. And I was doing machine knitting on the side, consumer machine knitting.
Fabienne Serrière: So a small machine that you can have at home with a hand crank.
Fabienne Serrière: And I was reverse engineering it and I released a lot of the information about how to do that to people who wanted to do that to their own machines. They're from the 1980s. They're out of print.
Fabienne Serrière: And a whole community kind of grew up around it at the same time that I was getting interested in it. And I had a lot of requests and people said, why don't you make this a product? And I said, I can't. The machine is great,
Fabienne Serrière: but it doesn't do the last row. It doesn't finish that last row for me. I would have to do it by hand or pay someone to do it by hand. And I don't think that's sustainable or a really good business model.
Filip Valica: And then I kind of got enamored with the thought of getting access to an industrial knitting machine.
Filip Valica: And that's how I ended up where I am. So that's really amazing. I'm familiar with some of the machines that you speak of where I think you basically turn a crank and there's some cams in there that regulate how much travel.
Filip Valica: all the knitting needles do so whenever you turn the crank it it basically goes through this automated
Fabienne Serrière: sequence of knitting is that about right is the original machines from the 80s sure yeah some of them are punch card operated so they have those physical cams and some of them are actually electronic
Fabienne Serrière: they have a small microcontroller inside and those are the ones that i had and i made them speak to a modern computer so in the command line i emulate a floppy drive because it expects a floppy.
Fabienne Serrière: And then I went ahead and sent it a new pattern and a new piece of a pattern because the memory was really small.
Fabienne Serrière: And then so about a scarf would take about five or six images sent to the machine in the correct order. So I did, you know, new software, new hardware
Filip Valica: for that. And I open sourced everything. And it was, it was really a side project and a labor of love on the side with all my other weird side projects until it became more than that. That sounds really fun, though. I wouldn't have thought to combine the two, you know, hacking and
Filip Valica: knitting machine that's out there. That's awesome. That's really fun. You said people approached you
Fabienne Serrière: for the final product for these algorithmically generated patterned scarfs. And you said that you couldn't produce it because of the last row. And then you thought, okay, maybe I should start a
Fabienne Serrière: Kickstarter or? Well, it didn't happen that quickly. But I knew that there was nothing really in between the consumer knitting machines that are around $800 on eBay and the industrial knitting machines that started about $100,000. So they start.
Fabienne Serrière: Yeah, so there's a huge gap there. So there's a huge gap in there. And I was a little bit concerned that there would not be enough of a market to really sustain that.
Fabienne Serrière: And so my way to test the market was, in essence, to run a, in hindsight, a crazy Kickstarter campaign, a $100,000 minimum for someone who was by herself and didn't
Fabienne Serrière: have any experience running a crowdfunding campaign. I had a lot of other experience online, but that was not one of them. So I had a lot of mentors, a lot of people helped me out. And really up until week three, it really didn't look like it was going to tip.
Fabienne Serrière: It didn't look like the Kickstarter was going to make it.
Fabienne Serrière: So it was a real nail-biter. I didn't really sleep in those 30 days. And it took me two months full time before the Kickstarter to prepare everything. So to plan out my break-even and my spreadsheets and have my CPA tell you.
Filip Valica: me that this was, these numbers were real and that, you know, my break-even was really my break-even and that I wasn't forgetting anything crucial and tax situations in Seattle and Washington State and federally and everything.
Filip Valica: That sounds really complicated.
Fabienne Serrière: So I'm going through the history on your Kickstarter campaign. And for people that aren't aware, can you walk through the process of kicking off a Kickstarter? And you said you planned for about two months before you started the campaign.
Fabienne Serrière: what goes into that? Well, first of all, I formed a business. I formed an LLC.
Filip Valica: And I had a CPA who
Fabienne Serrière: was provided by the Small Business Association of Seattle provides free CPA help. And it turns out he's amazing. He's pro bono retired guy and he's just on top of his game.
Fabienne Serrière: So that was really great. If people don't have access to the SBA, they can also go to score and it basically provides the same help. So in Seattle, they're tied together. Score and SBA are kind of one and the same. and they share resources.
Fabienne Serrière: Some other cities aren't the same way, but Seattle is that way.
Fabienne Serrière: So that's what I went through, SCORE and SBA. And a lot of people don't realize that that's a resource when they're starting their first business, especially.
Fabienne Serrière: I mean, don't just talk to your friend, you know, Bob that has a sandwich shop. Definitely try to find a mentor who's in your space.
Fabienne Serrière: And if the problem for me was that SCORE's Kickstarter guru or crowdfunding guru was full. Like there was no way I was going to get.
Fabienne Serrière: time with him at all before I was going to launch. So I went out and found my own. And I found someone who had had more than $100,000 Kickstarter and had done it by themselves.
Filip Valica: And I had mentors
Fabienne Serrière: who had also done, yeah, DIY-style hardware kickstaters that were successful and had shipped. So I really, my other focus was people who had realistically shipped as well.
Fabienne Serrière: Basically, you just scroll through the Kickstarter wins and then reached out to them individually and hope they responded back to you? No, these were recommendations from friends. Okay, good.
Fabienne Serrière: And I'd say one of the biggest secret sauces, I guess, that I could give away to other people. And I don't recommend crowdfunding. And people will be shocked. They said, but your Kickstarter was successful. Why not you recommend it?
Fabienne Serrière: And it's incredibly draining. So just be prepared. I worked 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every single day during the 30 days. And I worked full-time normal hours for two months before that, getting it ready.
Filip Valica: So people who want to kind of do this on the side to see if, you know, test the water, see if something's going to work, it won't fly. Like it just, you have
Fabienne Serrière: to be all in. And if you're not prepared for that and if you're not prepared to deal with it all the way through, it's going to fail. And it's unfortunate. But that's kind of the reality.
Fabienne Serrière: And it's not really a sink or swim thing anymore. You really have to do your homework. Let's talk about that a little bit. You reached out to everybody for help and they gave you some advice on what to do to prep for it before you launch. Can you share some of those tips? Yeah.
Fabienne Serrière: So my two number one tips that were really, really real. And I have a third tip that turned out to be not so good. And I'll share that one too. The number one tip is that you have on your items that you offer. You have something small. And then you have your product.
Fabienne Serrière: Your product has to be the second monetary offering. on your list. And you can't water it down with t-shirts and stickers and other stuff that people don't want. Your product has to be number two or number one on that list. You can't try to water
Fabienne Serrière: down your offerings and offer all kinds of silly little things, postcards and signed thank you letters and nope. Make it your product. Has to be their number one or number two. Because it's the whole reason they're giving you money after all is for that product. It's the whole reason
Fabienne Serrière: and it's really frustrating to someone who comes to a campaign and they have to sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll to find the thing, the thing that you're selling. The thing, the product has to be right there. So that was number one, and it was totally essential. And my mentor was
Fabienne Serrière: completely correct. And thank you, my mentor. You know who you are.
Fabienne Serrière: Secondly,
Fabienne Serrière: the same mentor also told me that you have to email everyone that you've ever emailed,
Fabienne Serrière: ever. So not just your friends,
Filip Valica: not just your family, not just people you think might be into, no, you have to email everybody in your email contact address book. And it's going to be really annoying to them. And one or two people are going to write back and say, quit spamming me. And all the rest of them are going to forward it
Fabienne Serrière: onto their friends. So you have to have the audacity to do that. And I think that was a really hard thing for me to get over is that, you know, my cute online marketing was not going to be everything.
Fabienne Serrière: I had to spam people. I would have a really hard time doing that too, because some of these people that you maybe had a single conversation with don't even remember you. Now, here you are sending them an email saying, please give me money in my Kickstarter. That's pretty intimidating.
Fabienne Serrière: It's that one person that interviewed you for that one thing or that one person you met through someone and they happened to be in your email address book, you have to email them all.
Fabienne Serrière: And it really worked. And I had one person who wrote back and said, you're spamming me.
Filip Valica: And I said, and I wrote back a really polite email and I explained the situation.
Fabienne Serrière: And I said, I took you off the list and I'm so sorry to have wasted your time. And that person wrote me back and said, oh, I didn't realize this was your own thing. like this was your, you know, your thing thing. So they realized that they were being kind of, you know, and I tried to, I try to keep
Fabienne Serrière: every email to my email address book. I actually emailed my email address book three times during the campaign. Wow. So it wasn't just at the beginning, but it was also part way through and all the way through. So you didn't use a special tool or anything? You just BCCC'd everybody.
Fabienne Serrière: CECD everyone. And my mentor hooked me up with this. And that's how my mentor's campaign tipped. And it's, I think, how my campaign tipped. to. So that's it. And then the third piece of advice that was not so helpful is that you have to have Facebook.
Fabienne Serrière: So this was someone who was internal to Kickstarter, who had said at Kickstarter with Twitter alone, you can't make a $100,000 campaign. There's no way. And I said,
Filip Valica: okay, I'll join Facebook and put up a page and add all these people. I hadn't been on Facebook in four years. I had quit, had deleted all my accounts and everything. So I added everything back in and I used it.
Filip Valica: I put the juice through there and 34% of my Kickstarter click-throughs were from Twitter. And they had never had that on a $100,000 minimum campaign.
Fabienne Serrière: So I was the weird anomaly. So that piece of advice didn't work for me. I guess the takeaway there, though, is try to be wherever you can be and because you don't know what will work. I did look at some of the winning campaigns to see what was shared most on social media.
Fabienne Serrière: and it's crazy how lopsided some of them can be or some of them are really funded through Twitter and some of them are through Facebook and then some of them are just unknown like some sort of weird marketing campaign through direct mail or something.
Fabienne Serrière: Or speeches. So I gave a talk at the Microsoft campus and the day after my campaign spiked.
Fabienne Serrière: And I have no, there's no way for me to track those clicks. You know, there were 50 people in the audience, but then they went and forwarded on to all their Microsoft colleagues. So something. Very cool. That's awesome. I know. I know it was from that
Fabienne Serrière: because it was the next day. What topic did you speak on? I spoke about my Kickstarter and why I was doing it and mathematics and knitting.
Fabienne Serrière: It was fun. It was part of the Microsoft researches,
Fabienne Serrière: like afternoon talk series. So it was great. That's very cool.
Fabienne Serrière: I try to do as many local talks, podcasts.
Fabienne Serrière: Whoever would listen to you. Whoever would listen to me. I try, oh, local.
Fabienne Serrière: media, print media,
Fabienne Serrière: radio, TV, nobody picked me up. Zero. Stainful. So it turns out that they pick up almost no crowdfunding, anything. So if you have a contact at local, you know, your local newspaper or your local magazine or something, then go for it.
Fabienne Serrière: The only local thing that wrote about me was a blog in Seattle that only talks about tech. And they're pretty well known. I don't remember the name of it now, but they're pretty well known in Seattle. but they only picked me up because an intern thought my story was cool,
Fabienne Serrière: and that was on week three of my campaign, and I had been bugging them for two months.
Filip Valica: I had reached out to everyone in advance of my campaign and, you know, giving them blurbs and, you know, nothing.
Filip Valica: So it just goes to show. And then on the same day, I had Glamour magazine and Scientific American. So I guess my other piece of advice is no news is bad news.
Fabienne Serrière: Like you want to get the word out there no matter how you can.
Filip Valica: And this goes for anyone doing classic marketing or.
Fabienne Serrière: Anything. You just don't say, oh, Glamour Magazine. That's not my customer. Just do it. Just get the word out there. If Glamour magazine and Scientific American want to publish about your product on the same day, that's your customer. That's it.
Fabienne Serrière: Well, and who knows who can pick up that issue and read it or pass it to their friend and how it's connected. Yeah.
Fabienne Serrière: That's awesome. So you said that during the 30 days when your campaign was running, you were working 12, 15 plus hour days, doing what, answering a lot of questions, taking payments for? people.
Fabienne Serrière: Yeah.
Filip Valica: I tweeted once an hour every day for 30 days. You know they have programs for that,
Fabienne Serrière: right? They have programs for it, but I don't trust them and I don't really like them. And I feel like they're not as organic as if you live tweet. So that's probably why my Twitter also had a lot of good
Fabienne Serrière: click-throughs that I came up with, I don't know, 30 times. That's really hard. 12 unique tweets. Every tweet had a photo. That's the, I mean, some people will tell you, you know, if you can read about
Filip Valica: online marketing but your tweet has to have a photo in it especially if you're selling a physical product absolutely that's just good for your listeners that are selling physical products your tweet
Filip Valica: has to have a photo your facebook post has to have a photo um that's yeah be personalable on social media
Filip Valica: right yeah and be silly and funny and be how you've always been and that's i mean you don't want to put on a totally different personas my it was my personal twitter i didn't want to put on you know some kind of crazy marketing thing.
Filip Valica: I just kind of spoke from the heart and said, I know this is a crazy project, but I think it should happen.
Fabienne Serrière: And if you know anyone else who thinks it should happen too,
Filip Valica: you should get behind this. And you kind of had that going for you in that it's something that's very unique. I don't think I've seen anything like it before. Thank you. I guess there's a lot of products that are like Me Too products or version 2.0,
Filip Valica: 3.0 of something or an improvement on something else. And this is something completely different. again, in my opinion, very wacky because it combines math and fashion together, that it has
Fabienne Serrière: that quality that people do want to share it and talk about it because it's just something that they haven't seen before. So I think congrats on having that idea. And I don't want to take away from your efforts at all, but I think that lent to a lot of the marketing that just people
Fabienne Serrière: wanted to talk about it. I was just thinking of the Squatty Potty. Yeah. I mean, Squatty Potty is a good example. That is an example of how you can overdo the marketing end on it and make something
Fabienne Serrière: that's completely banal turn into something that people are talking about. But that's all because of marketing. I think you had a really awesome product. So you didn't have to go to these great lengths to
Fabienne Serrière: create Astoria and Unicorn and all the other stuff that's needed now. Yeah. I mean, I did go above and beyond the weirdness of the product. I think I definitely focused on local. So my yarn is made in
Fabienne Serrière: America, which is a big deal. My machine is physically in Seattle. That's a big deal.
Fabienne Serrière: Right now it's, and I tried to allude to it a little bit, but I was trying to not worry people too much, but right now it's just me.
Fabienne Serrière: So that's pretty much been out of the bag for a while now, but people know that it's just me and I'm programming the machine and I'm designing how the ends of the scarf
Fabienne Serrière: are going to look and I'm writing the code that goes to the machine and I'm writing the code for the website and I'm the one who's going to be shipping it. So another mentor asked me, they said, you know, are you? trying to make something that's going to grow really quickly? Are you trying to make a business that
Fabienne Serrière: will feed you and your family? And I said, me and my family, you've got to know what you're really aiming for. I'm not looking for VC funding. I'm not looking for crazy growth. And I'm sure I will
Filip Valica: have some competitors that will come along that will be in that path. And my path is not. My path is slow and steady, bootstrapped, as bootstrapped can be. And just take it one year at a time. So it's,
Filip Valica: It's a little bit of a different strategy, and a lot of people in the startup world are on the other side of things. And I've been there. I've worked for those companies. I've CTOed one of those companies and it failed.
Fabienne Serrière: You know, I've been through it. I've been hired and then had to fire my whole team for near-shoring three weeks later.
Fabienne Serrière: Yeah,
Filip Valica: engineering for startups is not a pleasant working environment.
Fabienne Serrière: And I think that's why I kind of really wanted to switch into having my own business and being able to control my future as much as I could. I really appreciate you sharing that.
Fabienne Serrière: A lot of the people that come on this show are in that same spot where they don't want to deal with having a boss anymore.
Fabienne Serrière: And they'd much rather have something that maybe grows slower, but they control it all instead of being subject to some other decisions made by a team of investors.
Filip Valica: So that's really awesome that you shared that. I guess you've been able to work on it full time then?
Fabienne Serrière: Yeah, I've been full time on it for a year now. Okay. Officially April, I formed my LLC. It's been a year.
Filip Valica: You saved up some money, I guess, from your last job. Yep, and I have a partner, so that helps. That really helps. I know not everybody has that option. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Is he or she a silent partner or are they involved in the business? How did you meet? This is my life partner.
Filip Valica: I'm looking for a business partner, though. My life partner is working full time, so I'm able to do this and they support both of us. But in the past, I've supported them. So it's gone low face. Now it's my turn. This turn has been a little bit longer than usual.
Filip Valica: Usually we go six months each.
Fabienne Serrière: But this is, this has been the longer version. We're both in engineering. So we get a lot of work offers. So I feel very fortunate about that. I guess you get each other's idea as well, too. It's not a very hard sell. Yeah, they're really sick of hearing about knitting machines.
Fabienne Serrière: So I'm really excited to talk to people who want to hear about it. I want to talk about it. Before I saw your post on Twitter after your Kickstarter funded, I didn't know there was such a thing. as a CNC knitting machine. And I know that sounds stupid because your sweaters come out of somewhere. Right.
Fabienne Serrière: But to me, that was fascinating that you could basically program a CNC machine with new code every time. And of course, it makes sense to me being an engineer now. We've got CNC milling machines and turning machines and whatever. So why not knitting? Yeah.
Fabienne Serrière: Actually, that one tweet drew me to following you and watching your progress because I thought that was interesting. Yeah. So it's really cool. It's a 3,000 pound machine, the machine I bought.
Fabienne Serrière: And there are about two companies that own the whole market for industrial flat knitting machines. There's a distinction because your socks, the pattern socks that you buy are made on a round circular knitting machine, which is also computer controlled.
Fabienne Serrière: And there are about four companies, two in Hong Kong and two in Italy, that do that the best. So the one for the flat knitting machines, which also can knit tubes confusingly enough,
Fabienne Serrière: because the two flat sides just have the yarn that goes across, it knits across the bow. back and then it comes to the front and it knits again. And what comes out is a tube even though
Fabienne Serrière: it's knit flat. So my machine can do that as well. It's not specialized in knitting in the round. And there's different mechanical properties as to why it would be better to knit socks
Fabienne Serrière: on a dedicated sock machine. It's a lot faster, first of all. Okay. So for the flat knitting
Filip Valica: machines, there's two companies, Shima Sakey and Stole, and I bought a stole machine. And they're a German company. Shima's a Japanese company. And they have about 90% of the market. Stoll has been around for
Filip Valica: 148 years, almost 150 years. And they started in mechanical industrial knitting machines. And their knitting machines became punch card controlled first and then computer controlled in the 70s.
Filip Valica: And they're proprietary, but works beautifully. So just a different market. It's not a market that anyone's really going to be able to compete with them anytime soon on. And a lot of people are trying. Stoll is just so good at what they do. So.
Filip Valica: I think that's a little bit hard for me as a hardware engineer to admit that, that their product is pretty much perfect and that I can't really make it better.
Fabienne Serrière: I can use it better, but I can't make the product better. So my product is what comes out of it, which is good. Normally, whenever we have these interviews, guests will talk about how they got the ID and validated it and kind of go through the chain until they got funding.
Fabienne Serrière: And we kind of went through that really quickly.
Fabienne Serrière: Crowdfunding, while I agree that I wouldn't recommend it to everybody because it is a ton of. of work. The upside of crowdfunding is that it does a lot of that together. Not only are you validating your market, but you're also getting funding and you're able to maybe gauge
Fabienne Serrière: demand for manufacturing, so you'll have kind of a sense of what your pre-orders may look like. Sure. So can you shed any more light in terms of validating your product that you're designing?
Fabienne Serrière: So some of these scarves that are coming out, did you have to make any changes based on feedback from people or how did you know that they were going to be that successful?
Fabienne Serrière: So I actually did all the prototyping on consumer knitting machines. So all of the scarves that are in the campaign, the photos are not made on an industrial knitting machine. And
Fabienne Serrière: a lot of the things I hoped that the industrial knitting machine could do, I wrote about them in the campaign, but I really didn't know until I physically had already bought the machine. So that's not a risk I would recommend to other people.
Fabienne Serrière: That's not the best thing. But I tried for years to get access to one. And I could it. And so my thought was, well, I'm talented enough to be able to do this. And the machine, when you buy it, comes with an eight-week course physically in Germany at the factory.
Fabienne Serrière: And I went and took that course. And unfortunately, the English class was full. But fortunately, I speak German. So I went and did the whole class in German at the end of last year. Wow. Yes. The other tricky part is yarn.
Fabienne Serrière: So some people who are making their own products have to figure out about, you know, supply chains. The raw materials and things like that. And for knitting, it's yarn. Yarn is so badly documented.
Fabienne Serrière: So yarn has kind of two or three or four standards on how to measure the thickness. And no yarn manufacturer really or spinning house really sticks to those rules very specifically. It's kind of a arbitrary measurement.
Fabienne Serrière: So when you're talking about the size of yarn that my machine can take, it's usually around 228, 230, which means two ply of something that's 28 thick. and what does 28 mean? We don't know. It's the NM rating.
Fabienne Serrière: So it's very kind of a weird thing. And we had three full days of it during the eight weeks of training just about yarn sizing.
Fabienne Serrière: And I had already studied a lot about it, but I was so unsure about it that I brought three test cones with me to the class in Germany and knit them on the actual brand of machine I'd bought because my machine hadn't gotten to me at that point yet.
Fabienne Serrière: And I knew I had to order my yarn as quickly as possible. So we're talking about 500 pounds of yarn. It's about $12,000 of Marino. Just for my Kickstarter. Just to fulfill the orders that you promised. Just to fill the orders that I sold during the Kickstarter.
Fabienne Serrière: So I had a manufacturer and I had their yarn and I took it to Germany and I tested it on the size machine because the machines come in different gauges, which is how small the needles are and how close they are to each other.
Fabienne Serrière: And as the numbers go up, the needles get smaller and they get closer to each other. So kind of like wire gauge. Yep.
Fabienne Serrière: So my gauge of machine is also a proprietary size called a 7.2 gauge, which is actually a 7 slash 14 gauge with a 10 gauge needle. It makes zero sense. Nitting machines
Fabienne Serrière: are strange. But since they're only two real market leaders, they kind of define how everything goes forward. And knitting machines are all done in imperial. So in inches and
Fabienne Serrière: not in centimeters, even though Stoll is a German company and has been around for 150 years, they still use inches. So they talk. about stitches per inch. So a 14 gauge machine has 14 stitches per inch. So my 7.2 gauge machine
Filip Valica: means two things. It means you can knit yarn between a 7 gauge and a 14 gauge. And you can mix and match in one knit piece. You can mix something, a thicker yarn with a thinner yarn.
Filip Valica: And so that's what they mean by a multi-gauge 7.2 machine. So none of the nomenclature makes any sense at all. And when I was there, to make a long story short, the yarn worked. And I ordered it
Fabienne Serrière: for my manufacturer. And that was in December. And then they said, well, we just fulfilled a 2,000 pound order. So your 500 pound order will have to be custom spun because we'll be out of stock on the burino. So you're going to get your marino at the end of April.
Fabienne Serrière: Wow. So I found out
Filip Valica: about this in December, even though I had been speaking with them for months since the April prior, about lead times and everything. But they didn't expect the demand. And since that person snuck in three days before me with the 2,000 pound order, I was out of luck. So I'm getting a bunch of
Fabienne Serrière: a bunch of takeaways here. So first of all, you really did your research when it came to your
Filip Valica: manufacturing model because I guess you wanted to make sure to ask educated questions and to see what factors would influence your end product. A lot of people that aren't technical would
Fabienne Serrière: probably outsource the manufacturing to maybe even a domestic knitting company, let's say, or a domestic manufacturer to do something for them. Yeah. So I tried. No one can do fully custom run of that many pieces. I'm glad that you brought that up because I was going to be my next
Fabienne Serrière: question no one in the world and that's why I ended up getting a machine I figured well this is my path to my product I'm going to do direct to consumer and I'm going to do it so everyone's clear all of your scarves
Fabienne Serrière: are 100% unique yes each one is different yeah because it's the algorithm that determines the pattern on the scarf is basically you rerun it with different parameters correct every single time and then I have a
Fabienne Serrière: database of that so once one customer gets it no one else gets to have that particular pattern to me that is huge. If you basically tell people that they're going to have a 100% custom scarf that
Fabienne Serrière: nobody else will have in the world, the value of your product now has gone up tremendously. I feel that way. And from a nerdy perspective, the particular algorithm I picked happened to touch a chord with a lot of different people. And I knew a little bit of it, but once I got
Filip Valica: into the Kickstarter and everything, I realized how much cachet it had. So the elementary set of the automata are basic in mathematics, computer science, hacking, computer engineering, computer
Fabienne Serrière: engineering. So all of these different fields knew about this algorithm, and they had learned it in their very first computer science class. So it was just something that everyone had remembered and thought,
Fabienne Serrière: hey, yeah, that would be a really great thing to knit. So it's something that everyone kind of had had an idea of. And a lot of people had hand knit it. So if
Fabienne Serrière: you look on Ravelry, which is a hand knitting community website. You'll see a lot of people use elementary cellular automata to knit fully custom scarves and hats. I saw T-cozy with Rule 100.
Fabienne Serrière: 10 on it. So all kinds of fun things that people have knit because it's, it's a very simple
Filip Valica: algorithm, but it looks beautiful when it's done. And so I think that kind of the visual appeal of it also affects people. That's awesome. So you went through your Kickstarter. How much of the money
Fabienne Serrière: that you won through the Kickstarter or that you earned through the Kickstarter is money that you have to spend on fulfilling orders and how much can you reinvest back in the company, maybe as a percentage?
Filip Valica: A hundred percent. So I broke even last year, just broke even zero zero. And that's allowing for six months of rent starting in January, six months of rent on my machine. I'm on
Filip Valica: the building where my machine is currently housed because I can't have it at home. It's a very heavy machine. So it has to be, you know, dock loaded in with a 5,000 pound forklift.
Fabienne Serrière: Right. And you need high voltage supply and all that. I have to have 223 phase and it's loud. It's not ear protection loud, but it's going to be. constantly running once I'm in production, hopefully in a few weeks here.
Fabienne Serrière: Okay. So when you finish fulfilling your Kickstarter orders, what is the end result? You'll have a customer base and you'll have a machine that's partly paid for? Fully paid for. Amazing. So break even is break even. 100%. 100%. Awesome.
Fabienne Serrière: So last year's break even, this year's profit, hopefully. If things go according to my current plan. Well, and since you've been through the course and everything, you've been educated on how to operate the machine, chances are that you're going to take care of it pretty well,
Fabienne Serrière: so you don't expect to have any huge maintenance cost this year. And hopefully any new orders
Filip Valica: that you take on now are going to be largely profit. You know, the material cost is in there somewhere. Right. So the material and the running cost of my rent and the electricity and then the
Filip Valica: yarn. And that's, that's currently what I'm doing. That's awesome. Yeah. The other piece of equipment that I lucked out, I really lucked out. It's a $1,500 professional steam table that you would
Filip Valica: see at a dry cleaning shop. And I found it on local Craigslist for $400. Even though I never expected to see it pop up, I put a flag on it and six months later, one popped up. And the woman had
Fabienne Serrière: no idea what it was. It was just in her garage and her friend had had it. And she didn't know what it was or how expensive it was supposed to be. So that's the other thing. Any other like side equipment you need for your business, definitely put a flag on your local Kickstarter or your eBay local listings
Fabienne Serrière: or whatever. You never know when that weird piece of equipment is going to be local to you. And I went and picked it up in the Al Camino and now it's in my office. So it's perfect. That's awesome that
Fabienne Serrière: you have at El Camino. Yeah. It's great. As you move forward this year and you finish fulfilling orders, what do you think your next step is to help grow your business? Because, I mean, in my opinion, And you're one person at some point that's going to break. Right.
Fabienne Serrière: You're not going to be able to fulfill orders at the same time as keep on top of production. We're designing the next product. And you're very true to 100% made in the U.S.
Filip Valica: So how are you going to approach that? I guess you're going to have to hire some contractors maybe or automate as much as you can. Yeah. So I'm automating a few things and I'm hoping to hire people this year. And I'm also looking for a business partner who's local and into textiles. Hint, hint, hint.
Filip Valica: you never know, never know. Yeah, I don't scale.
Fabienne Serrière: I'm one person, so I don't, I don't scale. So eventually I will have to hire help, probably with shipping fulfillment. So I'm using Indisha for my shipping, and I'm basically scripting that into my current tool chain,
Fabienne Serrière: but I'm going to need help for, you know, packing and labeling and making sure the right scarf gets to the right person because they're all different. So I've kind of built a, I'm building a kind of a shipping.
Filip Valica: heads up kind of a thing for our like where my shipping table it's going to have its own monitor
Fabienne Serrière: and everything so you can see what scarf what person and hopefully that'll real reduce errors since every single product is different but they look similar so talk about that order process really
Fabienne Serrière: quick you said you wanted to make sure that each person receives the right scarf yeah but since
Filip Valica: each scarf is custom yeah how do they know what they're ordering so i wanted to place a order for a
Fabienne Serrière: scarf for my wife online. I go to the website once the website launches. What is the intent? Yeah. So my website that I'm working on right now, and it will probably launch in the next
Fabienne Serrière: month or so, it's for the Kickstarter fulfillment and for future orders. And what it's going to be is you're going to be able to choose the specific scarf that you want out of the elementary
Fabienne Serrière: cellular automata generated scarves. So the way that it's going to happen is you're going to see a page and you'll have kind of an endless scroll of generated scarves. And you'll pick one. And if not you'll keep scrolling and it will start showing you different rules or different generations
Fabienne Serrière: or different things. That's pretty amazing. So all of that will basically generate it on the fly based on your algorithm. Well, it's pregenerated. But yeah, it'll be displayed on the fly. And I mean, it's a discrete algorithm. So it's not artificial intelligence or anything like that. Even though I
Fabienne Serrière: went and spoke at a conference about AI a couple of weeks ago, it's fully discrete algorithm. So they're all pregenerated. So talk about what discrete means for people that aren't geeky like me and you.
Fabienne Serrière: Yeah. So discrete algorithm means that when you put in some kind of input, you're going to get the exact same output at the end. So the only way to change the output is
Fabienne Serrière: to change the generating row of the cellular automata or change the rule. So there's 256 rules in the elementary cellular automata. And there are some
Fabienne Serrière: rules that are mirror images of each other. And so I think there are only about 100 actually unique rules. And with those rules, I'm going to be generating them in a scarf width. So they'll be reflecting off the walls.
Fabienne Serrière: But if you add some rules like to have an odd number of width and some like have an even number of width to make interesting outputs, they'll work either way, but it'll have a really boring output.
Filip Valica: It'll just start repeating very quickly. And then you can just change the generating row.
Fabienne Serrière: So the generating row has which pixels are on and which pixels are off. And every single pixel across the top row, all 90 or 100 of them, depending on how wide your scarf is, can be turned on or turned off.
Fabienne Serrière: So I'll also have the ability. If you're someone who says, oh, no, I have to have Rule 110. That's my rule. That's my jam. I got to have Rule 110.
Filip Valica: And, you know, I pre-purchase the scarf for my wife and she's a mathematician.
Fabienne Serrière: And she has to have this Rule 110. That's her role. And I want her birthday in there. So I want the birthday in the generating row. Then I'll allow you to do that.
Filip Valica: So you'll be able to click Rule 110 and the pixels that you want turned on in the first row. That's very cool. Yeah.
Fabienne Serrière: So you'll have the option. If you don't know anything about elementary cellular automata, you'll be faced with a myriad of options and you'll be able to click to your heart's contend.
Filip Valica: And if not, you'll be able to drill down and say specifically what you want out of your scarf.
Fabienne Serrière: Sounds like a ton of options. Have you narrowed it down to certain colors or anything like that to keep the amount of variables down for you? Yeah. So the original Kickstarter, I did just black and white. I just felt it was very geek chic and classic.
Filip Valica: And you can't go wrong with black and white, especially my core group are nerds, hackers, computer scientists, mathematicians. They pretty much wear black all the time. So black and white is good. And then as a
Filip Valica: stretch goal, I added in a third color and the Kickstarter backers got to vote on it. And they voted for purple. So the third color is purple. I saw the results of that poll and it was really tight. It was tight. It was very
Filip Valica: tight. I think the problem is that I put three different blues up there and only one purple. And I think the blue vote got kind of split. If I were just to now offer colors, I'm sure I would offer blue and gray because those were really, really close. It's a good idea to pull your audience.
Filip Valica: You did that through Kickstarter or? No, I did it outside. I think I use SurveyMonkey. I don't really recommend them, but I didn't have time to throw together my own surveying at the time. I was so soft. Well, it's a quick answer in this way. At least you're building what people want. Yeah.
Fabienne Serrière: And I think it's fun to get people engaged. They're more apt to come by from you again if they know that you're going to ask them what they want. Absolutely. That's a big plus of being in a new kind of marketing world where you can just ask your customers directly what they want and then make it for them.
Fabienne Serrière: So one of the reasons that I really started this podcast is because I feel that in the last 10 years have been all these developments and not just with the technology in terms of rapid prototyping where you have 3D printers, but now we, the hobbyists of access to
Fabienne Serrière: CNC machines that previously we wouldn't be able to have. Yeah. You have access to crowdfunding that we didn't have 10 years ago, although I guess you could have always done it off the internet. But in the last 10 years have been so many developments, even with some of the tools,
Fabienne Serrière: that we use to design products now, they've been open sourced or released for free. And you have teams of developers that are working on really cool interfaces for programs that used to be super clunky.
Fabienne Serrière: And you used to go to school to have to learn the program, but now they've got maybe a more simplified version of it that anybody can play around with. Yeah. So I think that's huge. And that's just been in the last five or ten years.
Filip Valica: Yeah, the advances in simplifying interfaces is, I think, so integral to a lot of the advances we've seen, definitely not in knitting machine control.
Filip Valica: It's a great interface. So they sell basically a CAD program that they sell for upwards of $10,000 per user license for the knitting machine and it's proprietary and it only works for this brand of knitting machines. But if you have a
Filip Valica: factory full of them, you can't really drill down and do complicated things without it. Right. I mean, you would be able to back in the day and I met one of these people in my class When I was out there, he was one who had done it all in the command line back when they were basically
Fabienne Serrière: mainframes attached to a machine. And so he knew how to put all the parameter strings together correctly and everything. Is that G code? No, it's a proprietary language, kind of like basic that the grandson of the company came up with in the 70s and they still use it now.
Fabienne Serrière: So it works. I mean, it's not hand wavy. It's definitely discreet, but it's really complicated. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot like basic. It has line numbers, has go-toes, just look. looks a lot like basic.
Fabienne Serrière: So, yeah, it's very different than GCO. There's very few people in the world that I think that probably have the skill set that you have that combine your hobby or love
Fabienne Serrière: of knitting with computers and coding and programming to be able to marry the two together. This is
Filip Valica: basically a perfect marriage for you. I'm listening now and thinking, gosh, we've got a manufacturing background. I have experienced coding some CNC machines. I have no idea how it would go from
Filip Valica: random generated patterns with some seeds that I put in and turn that into code and then feed the
Fabienne Serrière: machine with that in the language it likes to speak. That's just a huge leap from end to end there. Well, thank you. I knew that this was going to be like an ambitious and crazy project when I started.
Fabienne Serrière: And I think, I mean, sometimes you just, you, it's better if you don't really know what you're up against and that you just sort of plug out, plug away at it and go forward. I've done it a lot of
Filip Valica: times in the past and it's worked for me. And then later I look back and go, how did I do that in X amount of months? Like that was nuts. But I think when you're in it and you just go forward with
Filip Valica: what you have and you just keep going, I think, I guess the biggest thing I can say is that
Fabienne Serrière: don't be afraid to take that leap from an $800 machine to $100,000 machine. Do your homework, plug away at it, ask for lots of advice, get mentors, but don't be afraid of just doing it.
Fabienne Serrière: Excellent advice. So we're nearing the end of the show here. And while we're on that topic, can you recommend any tool or book or anything that you've read recently that you think
Filip Valica: other small business owners who've launched physical products should read or a tool that they should use? Yeah, I think the most inspirational book is Tony Hase's book on the running shoe company.
Fabienne Serrière: Okay. Zappos. I'm familiar with that. I think his last name is spelled H-S-I-E-H or something. Tony. Anyway, he founded Zappos and his book is great.
Fabienne Serrière: I think it's got enough anecdotal evidence, but also enough just plucky entrepreneur, just go forward kind of thinking that I think it's great.
Filip Valica: Great. And what about any tips for people just based on your experience? Do you have any tips for people that are in that hard point now, whether they're just starting or they're
Filip Valica: about to launch and they just keep hitting these road bumps? How do you know when to quit? How do you know when to push forward? What keeps you going? Yeah, how to know when to hold them, how to know when to fold them.
Filip Valica: I think I didn't really listen to some of that advice of when people told me, okay, no, this is a side project.
Fabienne Serrière: Like, you shouldn't do this as a business. And a lot of people said, oh, I want that product.
Filip Valica: And so I listen to the people who said, I want that product. So I guess that's my advice is to listen to your customers and figure out what they want. Yeah, and just plug away at it until you get your machine done. Yep. That's awesome advice. So where can people find you if they want to reach out to you or if they're, want to buy a scarf.
Filip Valica: My company website is knit yak.com, like the animal, K-N-I-T-Y-A-K dot com.
Filip Valica: And I'm on Twitter under F-B-Z.
Filip Valica: My company has a Twitter under knit-yak, and I have a Facebook page under knit-yak as well. Great. You mind if people ask you questions about knitting, manufacturing, the combination of the two? No.
Filip Valica: Textiles, manufacturing, localization, startups, whatever. Well, it was my pleasure having you on the show. thanks again for coming on. You have a really awesome story. I think you have a really interesting
Filip Valica: product as well. I wish you all the best this year. Maybe after you finally sell off all your products from your Kickstarter, we can have you back on the show again whenever you hit that next milestone when your website launches. And we can kind of talk about some of the other topics related
Filip Valica: to e-commerce or packing and shipping your own product. Yeah. Hey, shipping logistics. Let's talk about it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Philip. I really had a good time. And hopefully people learned a little bit of something. I know I did. Okay, good. Well, thank you. And that's all I have for today.
Filip Valica: Thanks for listening. I've put all the links that we've covered on the show notes posted on the product startup.com
Fabienne Serrière: slash episode eight. Join
Filip Valica: me in two weeks when I speak with Doug Marshall, the founder of the Gameface Company. Doug invented a better way to paint your face and the game face company creates temporary face tattoos and masks that peel off using safe, hyperallergenic, and FDA-approved materials
Filip Valica: made in the USA. Doug will get into the behind-the-scenes details of appearing on Shark Tank and how he secured a great partnership with Laurie Grenner and Mark Cuban.
Filip Valica: Lately, I've been listening to the Curious Minds podcast. It mixes an interview, storytelling style with background music and audio set to content. It reminds me of this American life and combines history, storytelling, and science,
Filip Valica: and explains technical concepts in simple terms, so I think it's approachable for listeners of all ages. A link to the Curious Minds podcast is in the show notes, and you can find more information at cmpod.net.
Filip Valica: If you'd like this episode and you want to see more like it, or if you want to see something different, please leave me to review in iTunes by going to the product startup.com slash review. I appreciate your support and I'll see you in two weeks.
Filip Valica: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast with your host, Filip Valica. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit theproduct startup.com. Your guide to getting there.
Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. The show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent,
Filip Valica: the first firm in North America to provide global caliber, end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com.
Filip Valica: That's M-A-K-O-D-Dign.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-Design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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