With the launch being just days away, I barely had time to write this Substack. But I did promise myself I’d send it out before the end of the month, so here I am on Halloween evening, polishing this post for you, whilst my friends are watching me work.
My team keeps telling me I need to post more. So I had actually made an over-ambitious plan to post more this month. Then hardware and work got in the way. That’s why I’m taking a bit of time to write this one now, with, to be fully transparent, Claude cleaning up my mess and correcting my English. Which is why it might not be as good as usual, despite me rewriting it 3 times jajaj!
The last two months have been, for real, crazy busy. Today, Alex and I had a little nostalgic moment where we realised that 60 days ago, we had no finished badge, no app, no website, no nothing, and here we are now, 2 days away from our official launch.
This post is about the story of launching our little eNO badge, and the mess that comes with it… The run-up to launch is not a countdown, it’s a f*cking storm. Everything you’ve prepared for a year has to switch on at once: badge hardware testing, app connection, internet plan for the product, monitoring centre, certifications and regulation, the new website, packaging, setting up payment methods for purchases, and so much more, all to be overseen by a few delusional people.
September: the impossible prototypes
The rush started in September, when our first electronic board came out of the factory. I asked them for a fully assembled product by the end of the month and they told me it was just impossible… but I’ve now learned how this works: in Shenzhen nothing is impossible (okay, you can’t produce magic either, but you get what I mean). So I made a deal: hit the date, and you get a “bigger” production order. Now, what they didn’t know is that the bigger order was the intended order. I just wanted leverage, and therefore requested a smaller order quantity at the very beginning. And guess what? Of course they hit it.
A few things I’ve learned about keeping leverage:
Keep the money in your bank as long as possible, while showing you have what’s needed.
Promise the PO, tied to a milestone.
Negotiate at the table too. I pushed prices down hard and, yes, out-drank them at dinner. That got us an extra 4% discount.
What helps most is that the factory owner and I like each other. I swear this guy can be a pain in the A$$, but he is a cool uncle-like man. Mutual respect goes a long way, especially when I need to tell his engineers to work harder.
I spent more than 4 weeks in China past two months. Little brainpower goes into planning my days while I’m there: get up, walk to the office, work, eat, ping pong, work, the occasional factory visit to push the engineers, sleep and repeat.
If it were just software that we were building, I’d stay home in London all cosy and push an update when something breaks. Hardware unfortunately blows up your carbon footprint with back-and-forth flights. The factory’s productivity triples when I’m there. I show up and complain, so no wonder they get more shit done. But again, there will be quiet moments: ordering components, sending files to be redesigned for production, and just the wait time it takes to get an electronic board ready for mass production. Which is one of the reasons why I don’t live in China, along with the fact that I ain’t a big fan of Chinese food, and that I think I would go crazy if I stayed between factory walls any longer than I already do.
October: 28 hours of flights for 3 days in China
With the freshly born badges in the field, being tested by real users, we received great feedback that urgently needed to be addressed. We had to make these important changes and push them out in a new firmware. But with the distance, not seeing the engineers in China locked in on this, and our timeline being tight, everything just felt slow from London. So I was like, fuck it, this is a priority after all, and took a 14-hour flight back to China, having only just landed in London, for just 3 days. The badges were wandering around London streets, and the whole team was busy ensuring this was going smoothly, removing bugs and ensuring the app-badge compatibility was there while collecting testimonials.
So, while drinking a nice neat glass of whiskey, I asked an old friend from uni, an engineer, to take his last 3 days of 2026 holiday from his job and come with me to help out. Poor guy though, he really got the full-on experience of what a mess working with factories can be when you’re rushed for time. If you were to ask him how it was, his facial expression would say it all.
We spent those 3 days forcing for firmware updates, chasing antenna reports and debugging until the product ran with no crashes. All that with jet lag and barely any time to sleep. My friend had to wear earplugs and a sleep mask so my typing on my laptop until 4am wouldn’t disturb him. The usual… This is now my 8th trip back and forth this year, and no joke, I’m starting to recognise the cabin crew.
Everything that isn’t the hardware
While I push the hardware so Alex and the software team have a working product to play with, there’s everything else a founder needs to do. Here is a little bit about the behind the scenes that most people have no idea is happening. Neither did I, to be fair. You go into a store, buy, say, a toothbrush, and don’t think twice about all the 100s of tiny decisions that needed to be made.
Start with the attachment. After idk how many iterations throughout the year, I spent September improving the clip and re-prototyped it 7 times. Too soft a spring and the badge falls off. Too hard and it’s a pain to clip it on.
Then the magnetic attachment and the lanyard. How long the string is, how you adjust its size, the feel and material of the string. I had my team order 15 samples, then tested them and picked one.
Then packaging, where we evaluated 4 suppliers, got samples from all of them, pushed for a unique black material (pretty cool, you shall see soon) and redesigned it entirely 3 times. I think I’m the pain in the ass here, and too much of a perfectionist sometimes.
Then there’s the product manual with all the compliance text, the pouch where we need to choose colour, size, closure and material, and the logistics behind labels, tracking codes and serial numbers.
And on top of all this, the launch itself adds to the workload:
Onboarding the monitoring centre and connecting it to our servers
Product and company certification
A website where every design decision matches our brand, and all the text is the best it can be
T&Cs, privacy and cookies
Payment page setup
The FAQ for those who have questions
Getting summoned to film a product video
Lending my face for the marketing team’s cringe videos
Underneath, admin never stops. Bookkeeping, VAT claims, salaries, and every legal doc the team needs: consultancy agreements, reviewing new contracts, ambassadors onboarding, etc.
I no longer know if I’m an engineer, a product lead, a lawyer, an accountant or in ops… but now, I guess this is what it is to be a founder.
And my inbox agrees. In September and October I received nearly 70% more emails than my average for the rest of the year. in October alone, I ticked off 200 items on my task log. It’s important to track what you’ve done, so you feel better and don’t lose your mind with a to-do list that just never ends.
Keeping the body going
Sleep is something you must manage in these situations. I can work on 5 hours, be efficient on 7 and recover on 9, so I jump between them. But every hour you don’t put in, every message you’re late on, pushes the delivery date. Those days add up in the end, and it’s something you don’t want to push too much when you know you are the main dependency for when your users receive their product.
As someone who loves and needs his daily gym sesh, I went from 4 to 5 times a week to 1.5 these last two months. And my parents and friends complain they don’t hear from me. I can’t cook and sometimes need to be okay with beurk fast food, but it’s the game I decided to play in my life. And I must admit, I’m not Elon Musk. I can’t focus 100% of my time. Like most humans, I need a daily break, or I overstimulate my brain and forget important things.
What keeps me going is my circle. A message from an old professor I hadn’t heard from in years, showing love to our project and mission. Daily calls with the people I care about. And my flatmate, who brings dinner to my desk when I’m working late. If you recognise yourself here, thank you.
November 3rd
eNO is officially going live on November 3rd. Pre-orders are soon to open on the official new website (yet to be posted at this exact moment): enobadge.com. For now, the badge is exclusive to the UK, but interested parties are welcome from anywhere in the world.