2024 in review: 32 shipments, two pivots, one big lesson

2024 was the year Vive Tennis went from "10 units to 10 friends" to "32 units to real customers across two countries." It was also the year we made two pivots we didn't see coming a year earlier.

The shipments

32 units in 2024, on top of the 10 we shipped in 2023. The pace tells the story:

• Q1 — 4 units. All to people we knew personally. Slow on purpose. We needed real feedback before scaling.
• Q2 — 6 units. First "real" customers (people we'd only met by email).
• Q3 — 11 units. First Toronto-club orders.
• Q4 — 11 units. First U.S. orders. First repeat customer (he bought one for his doubles partner).

Pivot 1: The gripper

We started 2024 shipping the Gen-2 roller design. By June we knew it wasn't going to scale — the foam rollers were wearing out faster than we wanted to support. We pivoted to a conveyor design (Gen 3) in Q3, then to the hybrid (Gen 4) by year-end. Each pivot cost us about three weeks of build downtime.

It was the right call. The Gen-5 design we now ship is descended from this stretch of experimentation.

Pivot 2: The go-to-market plan

We were planning to launch on Indiegogo in summer 2024. We had the page mocked up, the video shot, the rewards tiers drafted. In May we paused it — because the direct-sale conversations we were having were actually faster, simpler, and better economics. The Indiegogo and Kickstarter rounds are now planned for 2026, on a more mature product and at a higher scale.

I wrote a longer post about this thinking: A hardware crowdfunding playbook.

The big lesson

Scope your hardware MVP smaller than you think. We spent most of 2024 building features (session analytics, multi-court support, automatic-charging dock) that nobody asked for. The thing customers wanted, throughout, was: pick up the balls, don't break, and look nice on a shelf. We delivered that. The rest is roadmap.

Onwards to 2025. The plan: 250+ shipments, the production unit standardized, and the lab on Yonge Street finally fully kitted out.

— Behzad