Reactive Boards — Story of a slow startup
Hi there. I’m Bob, your every day programmer. My business partner is Sorin, also daytime programmer. This is the story of how we started a business.
One sunny summer day I had my bike stolen from in front my house. After such an incident our best idea was to build an alternative urban transport mode.
With that being said we started to build our own DIY e-board with off the shelf RC parts. After the first prototype we decided to construct our own CNC machine, to make the aluminum holders parts. We started working in Sorin’s garage. The place got crowded fast so we rented a tiny room. Unfortunately the place turned out to be too small for our growing needs. And again we moved, this time, in an old hat factory. Winter came and we discovered that there was no heating so, we moved again. This time the place was warm and big.
Meanwhile we finished the CNC, bought a 3D printer and gathered all kinds of devices and supplies one needs in a serious workshop. Also we made a couple of e-boards prototypes that we started using and gave to our friends to test. We met with a really cool and young designer that wanted to help our effort to change the way citizens commute. And some friends told us that they would like to try some marketing in this spare time, so our team grew to about 5 people.
All this was done after work. We all have steady jobs but we all have a passion to build and ride e-boards. We never intended to be a business company. We just wanted to build cool things to ride to work but it’s been 2 years and we all learned a lot. That is why we decided to start a blog about how to start a small business after working hours, how to Model, CNC ,3D print, design PCBs and products, maybe even marketing plans. We had no experience on any of these when we began and we are far from experts but if you would like to help or keep track of our progress, you are more than welcome to follow us on Facebook or have a look at our website reactive-boards.com.
