Last weekend, a friend asked me "so when did you guys start?". I looked at the calendar, thinking, "it must be about 6 or 7 weeks now since we shipped our first orders". To my surprise we had not even done a month. But what a month it has been. 

The biggest satisfaction was being able to send out all our pre-orders to customers. We have all heard the horror stories about pre-order or crowdfunding projects that go awry, and the products never make it into the customer’s hands. The jury was always going to be out until we did it. Could we take an idea and get to the point where customers are actually building, sitting in, turning their wheel and racing with their new PRO SIMRIG setups?

I would be lying if I said it went without a hitch. We had some interesting delays in getting the products into our facility. Delivery attempt number one of our first 1.1 metric ton order resulted in the driver not being able to get the pallet off the truck. To see stock arriving from Denmark after months of preparation, and then leaving again fifteen minutes later was frustrating to say the least. Delivery attempt number 2 saw the pallet truck fail meaning we were going to have to do it by hand. Having to offload over 1 ton of material in 60kg boxes by hand was an initiation none of us were ready for. All I can say is, I wish I had limbered up beforehand. But we finally had stock! We actually shipped orders to customers the very same day which made it all worthwhile.

The main point of this blog post is to say a huge thank you to the patience shown by our pre-order customers. They have been fantastic supporters of our project and have been our biggest motivation to keep going. They have been sharing photographs of their handiwork in the PRO SIMRIG Discord server. We are over the moon that they are over the moon about their purchases.

We also received our first handful of Trustpilot reviews. As we introduced on our “About Us” page, we believe that feedback will be at the heart of everything we do here at Race Anywhere. We are not saying that things will never go wrong, they inevitably will. Rather, we are committed to making things right for our customers when they do go wrong and learning from our mistakes and building a better company day by day.

Another great milestone was to see repeat custom. People liking the experience and products so much that they trust us with yet another purchase shows that we must have done something right first-time round.

We also saw brand new customers arrive who had never heard of us before. Gaining that trust and their confidence again boosted our spirits. A lot of these new customers heard of us through Dave Cam and the YouTube video he did on our Triple Monitor Stands and Top Monitor Stands. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out.

What’s more, the PRO SIMRIG sim rig mat we supplied to Dave is getting a lot of attention too, featuring in the backdrop of his videos (honestly, this was not at all planned!)

Just what every sim rig needs... 🤔 pic.twitter.com/YmUX5gIQaH

— Dave Cam (@Davey_Cam) October 11, 2020

The video was the cause of Race Anywhere’s first major “out of stock” announcement. We had not anticipated such a demand after that video aired. We were able to get things back in stock quickly and after a week everything was ready to go again. This is a key principal of our business model. We know customers do not want to wait weeks or months for their purchase to arrive. Whilst a premium sim rig or monitor stand is rarely an impulse purchase for most of us, it does not change how quickly we want to get our hands on it and use it. Amazon and other companies have shaped the way we think about shipping and delivery of products. I think once you have made that big decision to click “Buy” on something like a sim rig, you want it as soon as possible. Again, we are not saying we will never run out of products again, but we will do our utmost to keep products in stock and ready to go. We are as impatient as you, so we get it.

Where next is the obvious question to ask. Improve everything. We’re learning every day about what people like, what they don’t and what people want us to ultimately be. Here’s looking forward to the next 6-7… I mean 4 weeks!