Thx! We were definitely a special circumstance. We found a tiny mom & pop manufacturer who had the equipment and had capacity. We negotiated 30 net terms (this

Thx! We were definitely a special circumstance. We found a tiny mom & pop manufacturer who had the equipment and had capacity. We negotiated 30 net terms (this was hard to get) allowing us to fund with negative working capital... customers buy the product, we paid mfgt 30 days later. My co-founder and I also have engineering/design/product backgrounds so we didn't need to hire anyone to build our initial dotcom or product. We ran it all for the first 1.5yrs before we could afford to hire our first customer service team member in 2014. Marketing expense was also kept to almost zero, branded search primarily, until around 2014.. we had to rely on word of mouth/organic. This forced us to build in such a way to keep costs low while ratcheting up the value prop which has translated into an efficient process we still have now. Our spend of advertising as a % of net rev is estimated at less than half of our next heavily funded competitor.