Hi everyone,
If you're reading this for the first time, you probably joined our pre-order. Thank you so much. You can't believe how exciting it is when the Shopify notification arrives. It gives us hope that we're on the right track.
This email goes to a small group of early supporters of mamacool. It consists of family, friends, local moms, entrepreneurs and now you.
Update since pre-order
Since launching our pre-order, our main focus has been creating content and tying up loose ends. And there have been a lot of loose ends.
Content
We're slowly getting better…if we're measuring success on views-per-argument or likes-per-retake. Turns out acting is hard. We spent 3 days' worth of Millie-naps to shoot a video about engorgement which we subsequently discarded. We were trying to do a "talking head" style – looking straight down the camera and entertaining the viewer with pure charisma. That didn't work.
So we bought a teleprompter. That also didn't work.
So we've ditched those videos and returned to montage style videos with a voiceover.
How I felt after take 1000
The good news is that those videos are working. We went kinda viral on one video (~20K views), which has brought in a lot of Canadians (hello if that's you!). Interestingly, the video underperformed for the first ~24 hours before taking off on day 2. At the time of writing this, a video that had been lethargic for almost 48 hours is now starting to gain traction. Thanks Zuck!
Manufacturing
The rest of our focus has been on ensuring the first production run goes smoothly. We've confirmed our outer packaging (i.e. our boxes). Now we need to finalise the pouch that seals the product. While inspecting the final box designs, we noticed that Jack had our US phone number wrong 😬
This prompted us to formalise our QA process. FDA and Health Canada require strict quality control and production tracing processes. This is also a requirement for insurance and generally just a good thing to do when we've invested so much in manufacturing. To ensure quality, we are contracting an external company to monitor the manufacturing process. They will receive a detailed list of our requirements for observation. Here's one example:
Finally, after months of back-and-forth, we've confirmed our gel recipe. Our gel supplier was having issues matching our consistency and there was some debate as to the best preservative (we strongly declined when they suggested formaldehyde.)
How do we know the gel is the right consistency? We give it a shake. If it's silent, it's the right consistency. I hope our gel supplier is more scientific.
That's all for now. Talk to you soon.
Cheers,
Soph
