From software to a fully mechanical product

TL;DR: After many attempts at building a software business, I decided to enter the physical world. Call me crazy, but I'm building a manual walking pad called the Office Walker (https://office-walker.com). I can tell you it’s tough and totally outside my comfort zone. But it's also fun.

I joined IndieHackers back in 2018 while building my third software product: Airbnb for pet owners. I already had two failed attempts at building a business. This time, we at least had users.

Of course, this "startup" failed as well. But with every "failure" I learned a ton. Here it was the importance of marketing and monetization. Plus not overworking, because a burnout killed the project eventually.

Then I started an online course business. I invested a lot of time. I learned SEO, paid ads, content marketing. I went niche viral on Reddit, popped up on Google news, and ranked on the first page on Google within a week. I was mentioned in newsletters and was even interviewed on a popular podcast.

A lot of small successes and I also earned some money. Around $50k in a couple of years. Not bad, but nothing compared to the time I invested. If I had just kept freelancing as a software dev I could have bought a house by now.

Eventually, I lost interest in this course. And as soon as I stopped working on it, the revenue plummeted. Flywheel my a**!

Testing new ideas

This time I wanted to do things differently. I already had an email list of almost 5000 developers. So I decided to test an idea for a course about software architecture and React apps.

I saw the need but didn't want to invest a lot of time into creating the course without proof.

So I wrote a series of blog posts on the topic. Each blog post showed a waitlist for the course. The content did ok on Reddit but it was very controversial. There were interesting discussions and decent number of visitors to my website.

But only few people subscribed to the waitlist. After 8 blog posts and videos there roughly 200 people on the list. That was a bad sign.

So I stopped working on it.

Next was an AI interview bot for software developers. I created a quick MVP, shared it on Reddit, and nothing. Some users, some feedback. But no way this would take off.

Taking a step back

With al the success stories in AI my FOMO was running high. I thought about what OpenAI wrapper I could build. But honestly I was exhausted. And I didn’t want to create another software product with 1000 competitors that I didn’t even know about. Competitors that can go all in because they are young and don’t have a family yet.

So I decided to get away from all the AI stuff. It’s a great era for that. But I can’t handle the speed at this point in my life.

Instead I took a step back. A friend of mine was working on a physical product at the time. And that made one idea pop up again.

A manual walking pad

Now don’t laugh, I wasn’t sure if I went crazy either. As a software developer I started suffering from my sedentary lifestyle. I gained weight and had back pain. And because of COVID, home office, and the kids I just didn’t have any time left for exercise. So at some point I got myself one of these walking pads on Amazon.

It was a game changer. I lost 13kg by a combination of calorie restriction and walking. Turns out you can easily burn hundreds of calories if you walk for most of your working day.

More importantly my back pain was gone!

But walking pads have one problem: those cheap electric models on Amazon burn out fast. In three years I burned through 3 walking pads.

But doing some research I realize there aren’t many alternatives on the market.

So I decided to build my own. But instead of a motorized walking pad I went the manual way. No motor, nothing to burn out. Meaning longer lifetime!

The ups and downs

I can’t tell you what a crazy ride this has been so far. Almost a year ago this journey started. First, I hired a mechanical engineer who promised he’d be done with a production ready prototype in a month! Sounds too good to be true? You’re right. From hindsight I was a fool.

Before Christmas I decided to switch gears and get involved myself. And by the time I realized why the competition was so rare:

Patents!

Together with a new engineer I developed a completely new mechanical design. And that allows us to work around these patents.

This was a big risk to take because we had no idea how this would end up. The initial prototype was super loud. But it worked. I was super excited.

But that didn’t last long. I quickly realised that the seemingly easy-to-fix problems weren’t that easy to fix.

It took another half a year iterating on the design, ordering new parts, waiting for the parts to arrive, sourcing in China, assembling and disassembling the prototypes, and being on the brink of giving up a thousand times. It was frustrating. And expensive.

But finally we’re getting closer. The latest prototype is on a much better level. But more on that next time.