Sometimes you're too early

I was naive. And I was early.

Way back in 2015, way before there was any kind of “smarthome” gear, I launched Gate, a mailbox sensor that I spent years designing and building.

I thought that if you built it, they would come. After all, everything online told me that success was a click away.

We launched Gate on Kickstarter. We even got a TechCrunch article written about us.

I was so excited that I prepped my team for an onslaught of orders. The story was simple: we built a smart mailbox sensor that notified homeowners when mail arrived. Our Kickstarter price was $299.

$299 was too much for most users. $299 for a mailbox sensor was an investment, not something you pay for on a whim. I knew that I had solved a major problem for folks. I knew that people needed this. I saw folks trudging to the mailbox, down super long driveways, just to find out the box was empty. So why didn’t people bite?

They didn’t bite because I was naive and too early. My vision was clear, my idea was good, but the time wasn’t right. For decades, many of us have been trying to shoehorn tech into places it doesn’t belong. We tried to build things using tools that were clumsy at best and destructive at worst. My product was just like that. It was a device that cost as much as a cheap cellphone that did one thing well. In the price-value-quality triangle, we were well within the value and quality corner but no where near the price corner. We were doomed from the start.

I learned a valuable lesson that day: always be selling. I should have tested this product in the wild much earlier. I should have sold it at trade shows, at events, to people with long driveways. I shouldn’t have depended on an online campaign. My device was a piece of hardware. It made sense to maybe 20% of the U.S. population with long driveways. And those people didn’t read TechCrunch or visit Kickstarter.

When everything is available online, nothing is special. I now know that the real moves happen face to face. That’s how the ball starts rolling. Maybe you send a hundred emails to your biggest fans. Maybe you set up a booth. Maybe you show your product to people in real life.

But you have to sell.

Gate didn’t become the company I’d hoped for.

Fast forward ten years.

Ring now sells a mailbox sensor for about $30.

The lesson isn’t that we were “right.”

The lesson is that markets, technology, manufacturing costs, and ecosystems all have to mature and the winners aren’t always the first movers. The most important thing to consider is that you have to have sold your first dozen products to friends before you even try to sell online to strangers. And don’t be frustrated when your great idea fizzles. Ninety-nine percent of them do. But that one percent that wins? That’s where success lies.

Sometimes the hardest part of entrepreneurship isn’t having the right idea.

It’s having it at the right time.