Delays, delays, delays...

I’ll start with the thing that has caused the most headache for many of you. In the last few months, we have not been able to achieve our goal of rapid turnaround harnesses, with some delays stretching into months. We absolutely hate becoming the problem that we aimed to solve. We are sorry.

So why the delays? MiniProto has grown way faster than we ever imagined during times of uncertainty. Our biggest growth spurt came at the confluence of Lunar New Year and the rollout of a new historic tariff regime which drove our demand through the roof.

We did not know if the demand was going to be sustained and took a conservative approach. As it turns out, this was not the correct path. The growth was sustained, despite having all our marketing channels off since the start of the year.

We’ve been upgrading our operations.

We finally accepted the fact that the demand was real and sustained in May, and have been working to improve our throughout. Our lead times have already decreased by 50% from peak. Here are some of the highlights:

• We have tripled the size of our assembly staff and created a staff training program to allow us to grow headcount at 10-20% monthly indefinitely while maintaining quality. Big thanks to HVVH for awarding us grants to accomplish this.

• We’ve invested in additional tooling to improve our throughput.

• We deployed a custom operations management platform tailored to our use case that will keep our hundreds (and hopefully thousands!) of orders organized and flowing smoothly.

• We’re moving to a bigger office in August, though remaining in Kingston, NY. One of our biggest bottlenecks has been space as we’re locked into a lease and this should uncork us significantly.

Looking to the future.

In our operations scaling, we’ve definitely neglected a few things that we hope to address in the coming months:

• Our customer communication and order transparency needs to improve. We’re planning to roll out systems that will make this significantly clearer.

• Our website is... broken. Our configuration tool could definitely use some love and it will receive it.

• We started documenting, but it’s nowhere near enough. Let us know what you’d like to see.

We’re going to continue on the path of growth and hope that you will join us. We’d love to hear from you regarding this direction - just respond to this email.