Albany sits in the middle of the Willamette Valley, between Salem and Eugene, and it is the kind of town where if you sell somebody something that falls apart you are going to see them again at a breakfast meeting.
That is a design constraint and I am treating it as one.
Where they come from
Every clip in the First Run is printed here, a short drive from this desk, on printers I can go and stand in front of. That is not a romantic detail, it is the reason the First Run exists at all. I can print fifty, hand them out, find out what is wrong with them, change the file and print fifty more in the same week.
You cannot do that with a mould. A mould is a decision you make once, for several thousand dollars, and then live with. So the printed version comes first, on purpose, and it costs less because it is the version that is still learning.
Who is getting the first ones
The Chamber, and the Greeters, which if you are not from a town like this is a group of local business people who turn up weekly and visit each other and are relentlessly, structurally incapable of being polite about a bad product.
I am handing clips to people who will tell me. In person. Possibly at length.
That is a slower way to launch something than running ads at strangers, and it produces something ads cannot: a first hundred users who are all within driving distance and all have my phone number.
Chapter 001
If you have one of the early clips, the insert with it is numbered by hand and says Charter Member, Chapter 001, Albany, Oregon.
Chapter 001 is not a marketing device I invented to make a number sound small. It is literally this town, because this town is the only place the thing exists yet. When it exists somewhere else, that will be Chapter 002, and I would like whoever is running it to be as rude to me as the Greeters are.
What this is not
It is not a factory, it is not a team, and I am not going to describe it as either. It is one person, a set of printers, a rig for testing the clips, and a bin of the ones that did not work.
The bin is the honest part. We will get to it.
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