Launch diary: the first production run

This week the first real run of Good Energy came off the line, and we want to write it down while our hands are still shaking a little.

Cherry goes first

Three flavors exist — Cherry, Orange, Key Lime — but Cherry is the flagship and it earned the first full run. Deep cherry, clean finish, no syrup, no burn. The label came back from print looking better than the mockups, which never happens, and the volt-yellow tab against the red is exactly the shelf presence we sketched on a napkin a year ago.

Twenty-five thousand codes

Every can in the run needed its own one-of-one QR code, which meant minting twenty-five thousand cryptographically unique codes and printing every single one under a tab. Watching a spreadsheet of random strings become physical objects that pay people money is a strange, great feeling.

We checked the scan on maybe two hundred cans ourselves. Phone out, tab up, scan, SOL lands. It doesn't get old. The two-hundredth time felt like the first.

What went wrong

Plenty, because launches are like that. A pallet showed up a day late. One box of labels had a color shift we caught at the dock. The first ZIP of QR files was so large it briefly beat our own laptops. All of it fixable, all of it fixed, all of it going in the playbook for run two.

Run two, by the way, is already being planned. If the first cans find you — scan the tab and welcome to the board.