The Nimb Story

Early Days

It was a beautiful August evening in Moscow. I had just gotten back to my apartment after work. I live on the 8th floor, so on the rare occasion that the sky is crystal clear and blue, I immediately go out on my balcony to enjoy the view and watch the sun go down. For those of you who have never been to Moscow, I highly recommend coming in the late summer — the weather is warm, the days are long and people actually smile. For some reason, I had a need to call my friend, perhaps to share this pleasant moment with her, or perhaps subconsciously my mind knew something was wrong. As soon as I heard her voice, my pre-frontal cortex also knew. She could hardly speak as she was struggling to utter the words out of her mouth. She was dead scared. After 10 minutes of trying to calm her down, she finally managed to gather herself and explain to me what happened. A stalker who had been contacting her for months followed her on the way to her house. He grabbed her in front of the entrance and told her that she had to come with him. She resisted, started crying for help, tried to reach for her phone in her bag, but he grabbed the bag and covered her mouth. For the sake of privacy and respect, I will not go into details as to what happened next, but luckily, she managed to break free and run to the safety of her apartment. After having finished the conversation with her, I felt so angry and helpless at the same time, because I was not able to be where I was needed the most. This incident also got me thinking about my two younger sisters and if ever they would find themselves in a situation like this. This is when I started to think about what could be the best way for people to call for help in such cases, because phones, shouting and pepper sprays obviously did not work. The idea of a smart ring with an alert system was born on that day.

Several days later, I called my best friend Nick, who is our co-founder, and shared both the story and my idea with him. He loved it and joined me for a bicycle ride to discuss things further. We were so fired up about it that we rode all the way into the early hours of the morning discussing ideas and making plans. We immediately started researching current solutions, the issues involved and the market. Being men, we were never really aware of the size of the issue and how it effects women and men all over the world. The research really opened our eyes. In October of 2014, we formed a company and invited Alexey, our CTO to join us. Nick and Alexey had marketing and software backgrounds, whereas I was stronger with financial and organizational skills, but none of us, however, had any real experience in bringing a hardware product to market. So, we met our first hardware and software consultants at a local wearables conference in Moscow. With them we went through two iterations of design of the ring and three iterations of the PCB (printed circuit boards) during a period of 18 months. That might seem like a long time, but there are so many details that go into new product development that we had no idea about. From designs, to detailed product and component specification and suitability. Then, when you receive the first prototype, the testing takes ages, because there is always something that does not work, such as the wireless signal being too weak and that causes us to change the internal mounting position of some components, which in turn affects every other component in turn affects the design again. In fact, we went through more than 100 different designs before we reached today’s final design. The funny thing is, we hired jewelry designers and even architects and none of them really got it right until one day our engineers came up to us and said, “Guys, we know exactly what you want, give us a couple of days and we will come back with a preliminary design.” After the first try, they nailed it and our Nimb ring was ready (in digital format).

Crowdfunding Period

Having finalized our design and getting working prototypes in the middle of Spring 2016, our engineers told us that testing the prototypes and implementing the potential changes would take 6 months and that by October, 2016 we would be ready for mass production. That is why we decided to launch the crowdfunding campaign because we believed that, if we could begin production in October, we could deliver the rings in January 2017 as initially stated in our Kickstarter campaign. Boy, were we in for a surprise.

Firstly, we had never done a crowdfunding campaign before. We hired a consulting firm to help us with the campaign page, and after numerous tries, we were not happy with their job and decided to redo everything ourselves two days before the launch. Can you imagine the stress? All the media was lined up, we had already informed our followers of the date and we could not postpone. Luckily, we had a very successful campaign which was reflected in just under $300,000 raised, 6,000 related publications and 8 mln video views. However, it took up so much of our time that we as founders did not have enough time to control the hardware development process.

By that time, Kathy had already joined us as our new co-founder and we were all so touched by her story that we had to share it with people and get even more support for our cause. Shortly after, Tatiana and Dmitry had joined our little team and with all their help we were still struggling for more hands. In parallel our engineers were doing testing and other preparations but problems started coming up. We quickly realized that as good as our engineers were, they did not have enough experience in mass production and we needed help. We hired two more consultants that together have launched more than 20 products out to the market.

Preparations for Production

When our new consultants started working with us in September, they realized that a new change needed to be done with antenna and some other technical details. The range was not quite satisfactory and this affected the PCB again. The changes and testing took two months and we were ready in November. At that point, we were already looking for different manufactures and created a shortlist of the ones we wanted to visit. Just as we were getting ready for our trip to China, we received a response from all the potential manufacturers that they have a problem with the existing position of the button on the ring and that we needed to change that. Again, another setback, which took us another 3 weeks to amend.

In the meantime, Nick, Alexey, Davor (who joined us in October) and myself went to Shenzhen at the beginning of December for a final factory inspection. We had a very productive trip and we narrowed our decision down to two manufacturers as a result. Despite the setbacks, we finally thought, that we were ready for production and that all we had left to do was to sign the contracts and make the first payment for tooling and molding.

At the same time, we had the biggest event of our 2-year history to prepare for, the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas at the beginning of January, 2017. Again, our first time at such a show and we were overwhelmed. There were many issues that we had to overcome to get everything prepared but I am just going to single out one, otherwise, this letter might become a book. Those five days leading up to the CES show will go down in the history of Nimb forever.

We had an issue with our original manufacturer of our prototypes for the show, so we asked our new potential partner in Shenzhen to make the prototypes. They had two weeks to deliver. They worked day and night to make it happen. On the 1st of January, the morning after celebrating New Year, Nick took a flight from New York to Hong Kong (see screenshot of his flight path below) to pick up the newly assembled rings and jump on a plane back to the US. As he receives the rings from the courier, he goes up to his hotel room and takes out the rings. All super excited, he cleans them and lines them up to take photos and selfies with the rings. As soon as he sent us the photos all smiling and happy, the next message we received from him was ”Guys, I have bad news for you. The rings are not turning on!”.

There was no other option — only to jump on a train to Shenzhen to go back to the manufacturer and get the rings to work. Nick spent two days and two nights in the factory and on the phone with our engineers, who are based in Russia. Our Russian backers will know that from January 1st to at least January 11th it is almost impossible to get anyone to work because the whole country is away for the winter holidays. However, we had no choice and had to get it done.

Finally, on January 4th, the rings showed signs of life and Nick jumped on a plane to Vegas via Dallas. He arrived to Vegas on the evening of January 4th completely exhausted. We were saved!

Or so we thought.

Imagine yourself in a situation, the night before one of the main events in your life as an entrepreneur, you are about to showcase your product on the biggest stage in the world, where you can meet your backers, the press, potential investors, distributors and other important people. You have been preparing for this event not just for the last 3 months, but in fact for the past 2 years since you started your venture. Everything seemed to be ready, the booth is set-up, your co-founder undertook enormous efforts to get the rings and chargers in on time, the whole team had arrived, and your family comes to give you support. The “only” two things that you need to do is to glue the magnets to the rings and chargers and double check that the rings and app are connecting and functioning well. Should be straightforward.

As we got to our hotel room just before midnight, we started gluing the magnets to the rings. Just as we finished with the last ring and tried to place the rings on to the charger to test them, the rings started jumping. We had placed the magnets in the rings in the wrong way so instead of attracting the rings to the charger, the exact opposite occurred. So, we needed to take all the magnets back out and start all over again.

At about 3 am we realize that the rings are not pairing with the app. Because of the changes made in the factory in Shenzhen when Nick was working on fixing the rings, the firmware needed to be updated. We finally finished everything by 6 am which gave us enough time to get into bed and back up again, because we need to be at the booth at 7 am. Hardware is hard! In the end, the show was amazing and it was all worth it, we gained a lot of new interest and exposure.

Having finished the show, we finally thought “great, we can now focus on production, let’s get cracking!” We signed agreements with our manufacturers and were getting ready to make the first payment. At that point, our consultant tells us that we should change the structure of the PCB because given that we have 10 ring sizes, in the old structure we would need to produce 5 different sizes of PCB and that would greatly affect the pricing and logistics. So, again we decided to make this change and that has taken us to the current situation.