Incredibly, it has been over a year since our commercial launch (May 4th, Star Wars Day, 2021). At that time, our humble company consisted of just two people. Fast forward 14 months later, we have eight full-time staff and are double-digits deep into delivering production models of the PhyzBatch-9000 - our card sorting robot. It has been quite the journey! In case you weren’t around for these last 14 months, they've been rather eventful: a never-ending pandemic, a global supply chain crisis, a land war in Europe, and now a looming recession. Even in the best of times and without these impactful phenomena, there has never been a clear roadmap for building a successful business, and so we have navigated as best we can.

This entire endeavour has been a massive learning experience for our team, and each new customer interaction brings with it further knowledge, insight, and wisdom into how we can better conduct our business and improve our product. Initial results from the first five production machines in the field have been tremendously positive! In just three weeks, these machines have collectively processed more than 2.8 million cards (that’s nearly six tons of cards!), which is unreal. It is worth pointing out that there were some hiccups with these first few machines, but our customers were very accommodating and worked together with us to get their equipment running smoothly. To this end, we would like to offer some more clarity on exactly where we are at with our business, and what can be expected of our product at this juncture.

Our Business

We are not Amazon! We are still a small company, and we are not yet able to offer product support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, our Support Team is available 40 hours of each and every week, Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (Mountain Time), which we believe is pretty reasonable for a company of our size. We are growing rapidly, with our staff increasing by an additional 50% over the next two weeks so that we can catch up to our production backlog. While a good thing, rapid growth brings with it many logistical and administrative challenges. It will take time for us to find our footing with respect to production, product support, and development.

Our Product

We are in the midst of assembly and delivery for our first few dozen production PhyzBatch-9000s, and there are still some kinks to be worked out. Every time an issue is brought to our attention, we are able to find a solution for it, leading to continuous improvement of our product and processes.

With production having been our primary focus of late, there has not been time to work on the development of our card recognition software, so not much progress has been made in that realm over these past few months. Once production is running smoothly (~end of August), card recognition will once again be our top priority, so improvements to both speed and accuracy are forthcoming! That said, here’s what you can currently expect in terms of:

Speed

The maximum speed of the PhyzBatch-9000 is 100 cards per minute. This is not its average sorting speed! Average sorting speeds for our production machines can be expected to fall between 60 and 80 cards per minute, depending on what type of cards are being sorted. At times, you will see the machine’s speed exceed this range and also fall below this range, but taken in aggregate you can reasonably expect sorting speeds between 60 and 80 cards per minute.

Accuracy

With our activated production machines currently in the field, we are seeing card recognition accuracy above 98% (on average 2 cards out of 100 will end up in the “Unidentified Bin”) and identification accuracy above 99.9% (on average one card out of 1,000 may be misidentified). Once we have implemented optical character recognition (OCR) as a secondary means of identification, these numbers can be expected to improve.

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All this to say: please be reasonable and patient with us. We are new to this whole “Automatic Card Sorting Machine Manufacturer / Service Provider” role, and there is still much for us to learn. We understand that being asked for further patience after having waited many months is frustrating, but please trust that we are moving as quickly as we can to get machines built - but never at the expense of quality. We are putting a very complex product out into the world, and we need the cooperation and collaboration of our customers to ensure that this product becomes all it has the potential to be. All caveats aside, we are very excited indeed to finally be delivering our production machines!