Title: About 12 months ago we founded a bed company called Tuft &amp; Needle. The HN community has been a great source of inspiration&#x2F;education and we&#x27;re proud to share our progress. We recently reached the #1 &quot;Top Rated&quot; rank in Mattresses and #2 in Furniture on Amazon.com.<p>Website: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuftandneedle.com&#x2F;
Amazon.com: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;top-rated&#x2F;home-garden&#x2F;3732961&#x2F;<p>Problem: Painful shopping experience and extremely high margins in the mattress industry.<p>Solution: We make a good bed without any gimmicks. It is comfortable, safe and attractive without falsely advertised features or fraudulent discounts.<p>Business: We launched with a MVP and a simple landing page to test our ideas. Then about 4 months ago, we listed on Amazon and it&#x27;s caught up to be a significant sales channel on its own. In the last quarter we&#x27;ve had 100% month-over-month growth. We don&#x27;t spend on advertising, and more than half our sales are from word-of-mouth referrals and social media.<p>Technical: We take a pragmatic approach with everything including the storefront, sales tools, inventory tracking and fulfillment processes. We use 3rd-party services for payments (Stripe), bitcoin (Coinbase), shipping labels (EasyPost), CRM (Intercom), etc. Stack: Rails+AngularJS+Heroku.<p>Lesson Learned: Our primary success factor was starting with a rough draft. We didn&#x27;t like our v1 much—an all cotton tufted mattress—but that didn&#x27;t keep us from launching with it. This gave us a chance to experiment with problem&#x2F;solution and to start collecting feedback right away. We had to do quite a few returns at first but we iterated constantly until our customer satisfaction was high enough for us to start getting referrals.<p>We would really value the community&#x27;s opinion. We want to get as much feedback as possible to make sure we&#x27;re going in the right direction.<p>JT &amp; Daehee at T&amp;N
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