[daehee]

That's a great point. We didn't put our product on Amazon until we reached a high level of customer satisfaction. In the early days when we first started, we had to hustle when we had upset customers. We fixed the problems really fast to avoid them writing about a negative experience. As an example, we've provided complimentary upgrades to our new versions of the bed to previous customers.

[tieTYT]

If you avoided amazon, didn't this severely limit the feedback you could get? How did those initial customers discover your product?

[daehee]

Yes we definitely did experience limitations in the beginning. We heavily relied on our dotcom sales for initial traction and feedback. To test our idea, we carefully trickled in traffic for some long tail keywords from SEO and Google AdWords. We still don't do any advertising besides some branded placements on AdWords and Facebook.

Listing our product on Amazon.com created additional sales and a new market which was great. But we realize this is a 3rd-party platform which we can't control and don't want to become dependent on it.