“It’d be funny if a camera told me to do the dishes.”
I said that about five months ago, built a prototype, and started shipping it to anyone who emailed asking for one.
That prototype turned into a small in-home camera that generates simple, practical TODOs (dishes, trash, clutter). It's now grown into a more broad home intelligence layer.
I made a deliberate decision early on to avoid pre-orders. I only sold because I was willing to fulfill. My first Reddit post went mildly viral that first weekend and resulted in ~40 emails. Within 30 days, I’d shipped 36 devices.
Since then, we’ve shipped over 1,000 units and crossed six figures in revenue with a two-person team, a few 3D printers, and a lot of late nights.
For context: after the joke turned into a company, I raised a modest pre-seed (~$375k). We experimented with paid distribution early, but most demand came later after months of iteration, shipping, and embarrassing TikToks that flopped. Toward the end of December, some of those TikToks reached a much wider audience than expected and spread organically (~40M views since January 1st).
The point of this post isn’t the graphs or the view counts. It’s that a lot of consumer hardware (and startups in general) seem optimized for decks, renders, and fundraising rather than getting products into users’ hands. I wanted to see what would happen if shipping was the constraint instead.
Posting to share what that’s been like and to show how far a small team can get by building and shipping continuously without over hiring or frivolous spending.
Happy to answer questions or be told why I should keep my mouth shut.
stanmattingly•1w ago
I said that about five months ago, built a prototype, and started shipping it to anyone who emailed asking for one.
That prototype turned into a small in-home camera that generates simple, practical TODOs (dishes, trash, clutter). It's now grown into a more broad home intelligence layer.
I made a deliberate decision early on to avoid pre-orders. I only sold because I was willing to fulfill. My first Reddit post went mildly viral that first weekend and resulted in ~40 emails. Within 30 days, I’d shipped 36 devices.
Since then, we’ve shipped over 1,000 units and crossed six figures in revenue with a two-person team, a few 3D printers, and a lot of late nights.
For context: after the joke turned into a company, I raised a modest pre-seed (~$375k). We experimented with paid distribution early, but most demand came later after months of iteration, shipping, and embarrassing TikToks that flopped. Toward the end of December, some of those TikToks reached a much wider audience than expected and spread organically (~40M views since January 1st).
The point of this post isn’t the graphs or the view counts. It’s that a lot of consumer hardware (and startups in general) seem optimized for decks, renders, and fundraising rather than getting products into users’ hands. I wanted to see what would happen if shipping was the constraint instead.
Posting to share what that’s been like and to show how far a small team can get by building and shipping continuously without over hiring or frivolous spending.
Happy to answer questions or be told why I should keep my mouth shut.