Diewood

Our product made the long trip from China to California.

We officially launched to our customers who signed up on our landing page. Very excited to announce we received our first customer! Funny enough, he hit us up on Instagram hours before we launched asking about it.

Excited for the next chapter of the business. Time to start selling.

I have always had plans to visit my table manufacturer in China to make sure I wasn't getting screwed and decided Thanksgiving break was the best time to do it since I still have a full time job. I went to finalize the details of the first order, tried my hand at negotiating, and finalized the wood type. I'd never been to China before and speak no Chinese so I knew it'd an interesting trip. If you're interested in reading the details or seeing the pictures, check them out here.

For the past 5 weeks I've been running Instagram ads directing people to my Shopify landing page to enter their email to reserve a table. I've just passed the 200 mark which is exciting because my first batch of tables will be limited to 150 total. I'm not quite sure how many email subscribers will convert to paid customers but still excited for the milestone. I'm going to continue testing ads, tweaking them slightly each time to see what works best. I've also started trying Facebook ads which grabbed a good chunk of people too. I've also been tweaking the landing page, if anyone has some ideas for improvement would love to hear them! Check it out at https://diewood.com/

Our trademark for our logo and name was approved! I found a company with solid reviews on Fiverr that specializes in trademarks and hired them for less than $1,000. It took probably about ~5 months and the USPTO made me revise one small item. Overall it wasn't that painful of a process.

With lots of pictures I summarized how I developed my product from idea up to production. This was my first blog post and I had a blast writing, hopefully more on the way. I've always taken lots of pictures at each step of development not sure on exactly the reason but it definitely helped tell my story. In the coming months I’ll be traveling to visit my manufacturing partner in China to review the products before they ship to the U.S. and will document that whole process as well.

P.S. shoutout @harrydry for teaching me the ole twitter thread technique

I finally made the big step of making an LLC. After talking with a couple of people who started businesses they said just to do it in your home state, it makes things a lot easier with banking, mailboxes, etc. I ended up using Zen Business which I'd recommend to anyone else who is trying to register their business. It is setup for online businesses and makes the process super easy.

With the help of some friends I made a short video and launched on Instagram @diewoodoutdoors. I had a landing page setup using Kickofflabs and started collecting emails for when my product was ready to sell. The overall response was positive and a handful of people were ready to buy.

To protect my unique product's design I worked with a contractor on Fiverr to develop a Provisional Patent Application for ~$700. The contractor was not an actual lawyer but their reviews were good enough for me. Not long after I received the official letter in the mail that my product was now Patent Pending.

After living in San Francisco for 9 months without playing beer die I realized I could solve my own problem. I broke out a notebook and began sketching out my portable beer die table. Soon after I learned to weld in order to create my first design. It was much too heavy.