Publishing a Handwritten Newspaper

Hi there! I am building a computer that safeguards its user’s attention. It’s called Flying Car. If you wish to follow my journey, you can subscribe to my newsletter and watch my videos on YouTube.

This week I finally received a few replies from some of the labs I contacted regarding electromagnetic compliance (EMC) testing. It seems that the key was to ask for help with pre-compliance testing rather than the full tests which lead to certification. The former is more appropriate for early prototyping and development stages. I assume that the latter puts a lot more responsibility onto the lab.

In other news, the manufacturer of the development board told me that the minimum order size is 1000 units at $18 per piece. On top of that, I would need to handle all the shipping and logistics myself. Super. What’s interesting, however, is that one can still easily buy individual units from their AliExpress store. The store page claims that there are 500 units available for sale.

I may have to start stockpiling the boards by ordering them from AliExpress in small batches in preparation for the assembly run. Upon receiving each order, I would need to individually test and inspect each board to make sure that the components did not change.

But before any of this can take place, I must verify that the development board actually meets the emission standards as the manufacturer claims it does.

This brings us to the matter of cost. I need to budget 10.000 EUR (11,000 USD) for testing and certification alone.

As a bootstrapping operation, it would be much better to have some initial cash flow rather than sending the company’s books into the red right from the start.

Fortunately, a few precedents quickly sprung up in my mind. I remembered that early on in their journey the AirBnB team sold cereal boxes after they maxed out their credit cards. Elon Musk sold flamethrowers. Steve Jobs sold the dream.

I had to think of something that I can sell to raise funds and continue growing the community. As I mentioned before, I do not have the right to accept pre-orders.

What I do have are pencils, pens, and ideas about the future which I wish to share with the world. Working with the post office while mailing the SD cards reminded me of how great it feels to send and receive mail. The fact that there are people who read my blog and newsletter leads me to believe that they want to read more of what I write and enjoy the accompanying illustrations.

All of my posts were written in my Flying Car. What better way to dogfood my own product than to use it to publish a newspaper?

It will be written and illustrated by hand and then photocopied, so you can be sure that generative AI did not type it. Until Flying Car has an accompanying Flying Printer, this is the most foolproof way of getting your ideas out into the real world.

What’s better is that after I set up mail handling, I can start accepting contributions from readers. Some rules would need to be put in place to uphold the ethos of the publication. For example, the contributions will need to be handwritten and mailed in. When a person handwrites something, seals it in an envelope, and mails it, they mean it.

For inspiration, I look to The Economist, Exposition Universelle of 1878, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs references in his Stanford University commencement speech. And finally, Benjamin Franklin contributed to his brother’s newspaper under a pen name, Silence Dogood, before starting his own print shop. I would be in good company.

I hope that everyone will be able to find something of their own in this publication.

Using a simple form to collect mailing addresses worked great for the SD cards, so I will do the same in this case. Use this form to enter your mailing information. I will send you a payment link separately.

The price of a 1-year subscription (12 issues) is 120 USD. That’s 10 USD per issue. The subscription will not be automatically renewed. If I sell 100 subscriptions, then I can at least cover the EMC testing fees.

Everyone who ordered an SD card gets a free subscription as a way of saying thank you for keeping me company on this journey. I hope that you are enjoying it as much as I am.

Look for the première issue of The Flying Car Magazine in print.

Until then, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

In my next post, I write about the mistakes I made and where to go from here.

Follow along on my adventure by subscribing to the mailing list!