I cannot believe I get to say this but that title is not a lie last year I formed my LLC started designing my first product and in the last 30 days we have sold nearly $40,000 in a month hello oh that's basically a salary right there freaking insanely good one too I quit my engineering job to do this and finally I'm seeing that I might not go broke after all in fact do you see that spike in sales I'll tell you how I managed to do that towards the end of the video but don't worry
there are a lot of twists turns to get there the product by the way is this uh it's called My TM jpen and you know a lot of you probably won't get it just remember there's never a such a thing as being too Niche but it's for people like me who deal with chronic jaw pain and tension to allow for simultaneous application of massaging pressure real heat and vibration specifically on head neck and jaw muscles look this is my little assembly line right here and this is episode 18 of the series where I literally take
you through every step of making it from idea to the hundreds of prototypes my first circuit boards my first sales everything it's actually really cool and I'm very happy that past me decided to do this so if you're looking for a binge go check it out anyways last episode we left off with a good amount of pre-orders piled up but no product at this point we were making like $88,000 a month so a lot happened very quickly all I was waiting for was the gosh darn circuit boards and fun fact they actually got Del delivered
the day after I uploaded that last episode and let me tell you I was pooping my pants inside thinking about the fact that if these things don't work I'd be delayed another 3 months and be out over $3,000 I literally remember procrastinating for two straight days procrastinating testing the boards that is but I finally got to it and holy [ __ ] stop let's [ __ ] go dude I was happy really happy on the surface the circuits worked but it would only be later when I was rewriting the code that I would discover something
that would potentially turn the entire batch of boes into trash so the excitement lasted uh you know for a day at most oh and by the way the whole reason I had to rewrite the code was because there were a couple important problems with my TMJ pen the first one being that my low battery shut off which was so supposed to happen at 3.3 volt would actually happen super early at like 3.6 volts as in the battery would be pretty much like half charged when it would shut off and this would happen when I would
turn on the vibration motor this actually ended up being a much bigger issue than I expected it's that whole issue I was foreshadowing before the second thing was a safety feature that probably will never get seen but you got to have it just in case basically I measure the massage tip's temperature with something called a thermost and if this somehow doesn't work the device might overheat and burn someone which is really not good I don't have to explain why that's why I designed and put in a bunch of backup systems so that at least two
separate things on the device would have to fail for it to overheat for example if the microcontroller fails there is a shut off that blows a resettable fuse that relies on the temperature sensor the thermost they call this a crowbar mechanism this also saves Us in case the heating control circuitry breaks on the other hand if the temperature sensor breaks like an open circuit the microcontroller senses that and shuts off while if the thermost breaks like a short circuit it wouldn't actually cause overheating because the device would think it's way too hot but the Crowbar
mechanism reads that as overheating and shuts the device off but there is a potential failure mode that only has one level of safety and that is what if the temperature sensor just doesn't contact the metal tip then it could just keep Heating well my safety system for that has been just checking forward in quality control it's something that is pretty clear but again you know it's better to be safe and sorry like what if someone twist the tip and like snaps it so what I did was log the temperature over time of the tip so
all I had to do was wait and if the tip didn't measure a high enough temperature past a certain time we would know that something is off with the measurement and therefore shut off the device pretty simple but effective and actually this timing thing revealed another issue that I've been programming the device at an incorrect clock frequency basically my timing was eight times too slow that was a couple of hours of fun debugging for sure but back to the battery thing that was uh potentially going to ruin everything basically I wanted to see how much
the voltage really dropped when I turned on the motor because the problem was clearly some kind of quick drop that made my device think it was out of battery and would lead to a shut off but holy J just things were a lot worse than I imagined with the motor on the pwm pulses that were supplying voltage to the motor were dirty I mean massive voltage swings I instantly got a pit in my stomach when I saw this on my oscilloscope like why the hell was this happening I had no idea but then I also
obviously checked to see if the last batch had the same issue and it did which is so weird I guess at some point between version three and six of the board I had changed the layout in a way that caused this my theory right now is that it is the layout of the Boost converter which admittedly is messy with the grounding but if it worked last time I guess it can work now so I took a deep breath and tried to think of like what is the actual problem here is it just that battery thing
where it shuts off too early you know maybe I could just work around that because what I could do is just take a couple seconds average of the battery voltage so that's what I ended up doing I added that into code it's funny I actually used up 100% of the memory of my microcontroller I had to squeeze the life out of that script but yeah anyways for the next batch I already redesigned the board to have four layers and be way less messy which I think will fix all these problems so stay tuned for next
episode to see how these prototypes work out but for now we could push forward all the parts were in place and it was finally time to start popping off prints oh and one small thing I changed the filament color from this dark brown that we were using to this dark gray bluish gray maybe took me a while to find one that didn't leak light but also look nice and I think the gray and the light blue are a bazillion times better than the brown and cheaper too and actually always in stock here's a real that
got more than a million views about my assembly process here's how I turned this pile into $110,000 it still blows my mind I can do this first things first I 3D print three parts of the device the casing caps and button covers my plans to be injection molding by batch number four but for now got to do what's not scalable to actually get my product out there next I can snap in the batteries followed by the circuit boards this is the easy part because the hard part is connecting the two next comes the vibration motor
and some of you remember how long I spent trying to fix its rattling but after months of optimization Motors are actually a breeze now and after plugging them in I can take out the heating element and do the same this is where my genius zip tie comes into play it holds down the vibration motor and the wires then I'll bring out the aluminum tips and insert the heating element and temperature sensor after which I can tighten down the zip tie snip it and go right ahead with programming every single board then I can finally snap
on the cap and button cover but this right here is actually the biggest problem in my design the tolerances are way too tight for 3D printers so unit to unit I have to pick out the right combination of stuff to make sure that there isn't rattling or extra space with the buttons and cap and after tight in everything down with just two screws I set them all up for quality control tests and boom you have my TM jpen the portable heated massager for jaw muscles by the way I did end up solving that issue with
the button covers see how straight that is and all I did was add this little snap off support piece in my casing so that the walls don't uh separate out and they can actually hold a top cap in so yeah although there was another problem as I showed you guys last episode a big step up for this batch of product is that I'd be sh shipping in real Nic looking packaging because I want to sell it to people that basically have no knowledge of my organic social media efforts you know let the product speak for
itself but I realized I [ __ ] up once again I had pretty much just ordered the custom boxes and they were going to be ready to ship by December 2nd and we had selected CA shipment which would at least take 30 days but could be delayed for like 60 or more so I had to come up with a plan because that was way too long to just sit on my ass so I decided that I would contact them and Airship 119 out of the 500 boxes which would only arrive in 12 days which is
better in fact it would also let me ship in time for Christmas but it would cost $400 more so the plan was to instead of using the boxes that I Airship early to ship past pre-orders because those people were technically expecting them to ship later like by February so instead I would bring my TM jpen back up to full price take it off back order and just ship orders as they came in until the rest of the boxes came and we ran out those boxes quick but I got lucky and the C shipment didn't get
delayed making it in time to ship orders from the new year as well so they came in around like January 2nd I honestly have no idea how to express how awesome it felt to be packing my very own product into the boxes and then packing those into mailers printing a 100 shipping labels and dropping them off in the mail room this has literally been my dream for a a decade it actually makes me a little sad that I didn't start doing all this when I was younger but you might be wondering how did I get
$440,000 in sales this month sure I have the Instagram which we're up to like 33k followers now but you saw that was you know this section so what caused the uptick well that my friends is the infinite money glitch that they call Meta ads although don't worry as always there are problems I'm not going to get too into the weeds all I did was watch a Davey forgery video or however you pronounce his name on how to set all this stuff up and if you're just starting I didn't know this but you can literally go
into something called Facebook ad library and look up every single ad that's running right now all you got to do is copy your competitors but here's where my advantage came in I've uploaded like 400 re on Instagram so I literally just dumped a ton of them into the ad set and let meta do all the work I was blown away by what performed well as an ad this started to work insanely well getting return on ad spense of almost 4.0 on their end but on my end like 10 that means that for every dollar I
spend meta gives me $10 in return imagine if we weren't production constrainted right now I could scale this up and just print money and we definitely are production capped right now we only got like 200 devices worth of stuff left and I only just ordered that circuit board prototype along with all the other components meaning at this rate we'll probably have a month or two-ish of going back to back order also kind of related but I came into an issue with my 3D printer that led me to order a second one this re kind of
explains it by the way it got 6 million views and for some reason a lot of hate check it out I invented these in college but 496 days later my entire business is crashing down because of one stupid stupid fan just 6 days ago I got production running again after 2 weeks of my only 3D printer being broken which I vowed would never happen again because not only did I replace the broken fan but also bought a spare except this morning I wake up to the worst notification of all time that once again the only
part that completely puts the printer out of commission has broken once again but this time it's worse so much worse because it means these aren't just flukes something is deeply wrong with my printer and production is coming to a screeching halt with no solution in sight there's one hope for at least damage control and it's that replacement fan that I ordered so I I check I apparently it's been delivered so I go down to the package room it's not there what the [ __ ] I check all my boxes all my apartment it's not there
what the [ __ ] why is this happening to me we have a trade show coming up by the end of the month we have a backlog of 80 orders I need to ship why then then I remember thank God maybe maybe it's in the mailbox not the package room and Hallelujah I found it so I quickly put it back together and put on a print but honestly guys when this fan breaks I have no idea what I'm going to do follow for part two I guess obviously I ordered more fans and an extra printer
but the problem is that I need maximum production now especially because of that trade show next week but of course there's actually a much much bigger problem here they call this a disaster in the health and wellness space and there's a good chance it ruins my plans for growing this business so so apparently at the start of 2025 meta will with one Fell Swoop destroy the entire industry's ability to advertise on their platform and unfortunately I decided to be a part of that industry when I quit my engineering job to design and sell my TMJ
pen so what the hell am I going to do basically what's happening is meta will stop letting health and wellness Brands Target people with specific health problems TMJ included and to be quite honest I have no real plan like I started running ads 2 weeks ago and so far the results are a literal infinite money glitch I really wish it stayed that way My Hope Is that when the update drops someone will discover some workaround or another way to advertise maybe I'll just have to double down on organic and influencers or maybe cold calling will
work the most important thing is that we'll figure it out so follow to stay updated on my progress I post every day that's right my account will get flaged and my ads won't Target people with TMJ anymore I seriously have no idea what the plan to sell is going to be but I will say it is January and we're fine for now so we'll see you should subscribe and follow my Instagram if you don't want to wait another month for an update I post shorts and reels twice a day at this point so happy New
Year I'm really excited for what 2025 is going to bring
