Hasta La Ideas

While Kickstarter has lowered the cost of entry for young upstarts and industry veterans alike, there’s something to be said for working hard and saving up so you have some ‘liquid assets’ in the ol’ rainy day fund when inspiration strikes. That’s what Aaron Panone and Joshua Resnikoff did to realize their wildly successful Cuppow, which has since proven its usefulness by facilitating the production of this very publication, via daily doses of caffeine.

Today marks the launch of the second model of the Cuppow, which has a smaller outside diameter to fit regular mouth canning jars—the original is designed to fit wide-mouth jars—as well as the new diamond-shaped “Straw-Tek” spout. (They’ve also got some sweet lifestyle shots to accompany the product photos.)

But it takes a lot of legwork to get a chicken Cuppow into the hands of a happy customer, as Aaron learned over six months of self-guided enterprise:

Joshua and I went into this project with a combined $3,000 to invest and without really knowing what to expect. Both of us are engineers/designers, and I had released a few small products in the past, but neither of us knew anything about really “producing” something in a sustainable way or running a business or high-volume manufacturing logistics.

We’d initially planned to produce Cuppow as a relatively short run product, but then when we sold out—in two days—of the initial 500 pieces, we realized that we needed to scale production very quickly. In scaling, we didn’t want to lose any of the production quality or make anything overseas, or give up any of the elements of the supply chain that made it something that we were proud to produce.

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