#4 Sometimes when you move fast you actually break things

Move fast and break things is an R&D slogan popularized by Silicon Valley. It’s one that resonates with me as a rallying call for experimentation. But, sometimes you actually break things, and when that happens, there might be painful consequences. Moving fast on Black Friday, I broke Just Mystic’s connection to the internet. I wanted to play around with custom URLs and didn’t take the time to understand the significance of a Domain Name Service (DNS) change, in this case, from GoDaddy.com to TinyURL.com. While GoDaddy rightly blasted my screen with a warning about the severity of the change, I didn’t think justmystic.com would actually be unavailable for very long. I was very wrong. It was down for 48 hours. On the biggest shopping weekend of the year. That learning hurts, but I have a renewed appreciation for the consequences of actions.  

#5 Shopify is as relentless as Amazon but with a Canada nice vibe

Did you know that relentless.com redirects you to Amazon? Check it out. Must be one of Jeff’s complexes. That aside, I don’t think there’s enough attention on the inexorable rise and reach of Shopify. While they make it easy for new businesses to get out of the gates, they extract value at many turns, squeezing margins on shipping, payments, and fixed costs like monthly services fees. Imagine that across millions of small businesses. That’s relentlessness, in the Canada nice variety. (If you’re curious, about 16% of small businesses globally are based in the U.S. and Canada, their core markets, with an increasing number requiring Shopify services.)

#6 Shipping is complex! And expensive 

Shipping is the most complex part to build in the first 15-45 days of an apparel DTC business. 

It’s one of three core steps of fulfillment, commonly heard in industry jargon as pull, pack, and ship. Each step has its own complexity, but shipping demands the most attention, with decisions around geographies, carriers, weights, and pricing. But jumping into this business, I was mostly excited about the product, and filling a gap in the market, which I assume excites most founders. My attention on the product, I didn’t anticipate the complexity of shipping. And that’s merely for shipping in the continental U.S. As we expand internationally, I have to assume that the complexity will be amplified. 

Pro tip for pull, pack, and ship: create a checklist, and execute that checklist for every order. If surgeons and pilots are using checklists, I want to use checklists too. In our current state, we have about five sub-steps for the pull step, 10 for pack, and 15 for ship. A lot depends on how deep you want to go. 

📸 : Jake Green