In a prior life, I spent much of my days tweaking and making sure different elements on websites worked the way they should- collecting and collating customer feedback and then making sure that what was broken got fixed. A month ago, an old friend, Dmitry (who I know from our days at Facebook India) the co-founder of last mile delivery service, Tortoise came calling and wanted to launch his mobile tap to pay robot with Bake Sum pastries inside. We were one of the first test businesses to trial and worked with the team to figure out how to sell our pastries on the go and in places all over the bay area. There was a learning curve for everyone involved but it got smoother each time we went out. Once they work out all the last little details, then the sky is the limit! Just imagine how many things could go inside - candy, chips, beverages, ice creams etc.
We think he's pretty cute. I'm thinking of calling him "Leonardo" because he is after all, a tortoise. While we are still testing and piloting the tortoise, he'll be making appearances outside our store, up and down the peninsula and in San Francisco. Let us know where you want to see him next and what we should name our pet robot.
Running a business is hard and running a successful business is even harder. The tortoise gives us a bit more flexibility than we would have otherwise to continue selling in different locales and at varying times. We hope that this extra level of convenience and access to Bake Sum will be nice for folks that don't typically make it to see us in Oakland and have never heard of us before.
We even got a neat shout out from Stripe's co-founder on twitter. How Silicon Valley of it all!