 It all started with Helium OG hotspots.
August 2021. Five friends in a Westmount office, a wall of SyncroB.it Helium hotspots stacked higher than the desk. We'd ordered them direct from the manufacturer because every reseller in Canada was sold out — and the ones with stock were charging double. That was the entire business plan.
Three years later, one trip to a Bitcoin conference changed everything — and turned us into North America's cheapest lottery-miner shop, shipping from 3 warehouses on 3 continents USA · Canada · Europe. Read the full story below
 / 01 · It all started with Helium
Five friends, a pile of Helium hotspots.
August 2021. Five friends in a small office in Westmount, QC, staring at a wall of SyncroB.it Helium hotspot boxes stacked higher than the desk. We'd ordered them direct from the manufacturer because every reseller in Canada was sold out — and the ones with stock were charging double.
That first shipment was the entire business plan: make it easier for normal people to actually get hardware — Helium boxes, in this case — at the price the manufacturer charged, not the price the middleman wanted.
We learned the supply chain the hard way. Sourcing direct from Shenzhen. Customs in Montreal. Drop-shipping in Texas. By the end of 2022 we were the largest Helium reseller in North America, and we knew exactly how the hardware game worked.
"We started with Helium because nobody else could get the boxes. Three years later, that's still the entire business — except the boxes are now Bitcoin miners."Founders · 2021
 / 02 · Nashville
We went to one Bitcoin conference. Everything changed.
July 2024. We bought tickets to Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville to learn. We left building a company.
Three days inside the LCC. Manufacturer booths from Shenzhen. Operators running 10-rig garages in Texas. People showing payout dashboards on their phones at the bar. By Friday we'd talked to half the lottery-miner industry — and realized two things at the same time:
One: the hardware exists. The supply chain exists. There's no shortage of miners.
Two: Every reseller between Shenzhen and a Canadian basement was tacking 30–50% on top. "MSRP" was a polite fiction. The real price was the factory price, and almost nobody got to see it.
"We walked out of Nashville with two boarding passes booked — Hong Kong, two weeks later. We were going to skip the middle."Founders · Day 1
 / 03 · Pallets, not boxes
We took manufacturers to dinner. Bought by the pallet.
By the end of 2024 we had a contract with a manufacturer in Shenzhen and a 1,200 sq-ft warehouse in Westmount, QC. Container loads, every 30 days.
The math was stupidly simple. Other shops in Canada and the US were buying 3–10 units from a regional distributor. We were buying 200, 400, 600 at a time, direct from the factory floor — after a few dinners with the manufacturers so we got priority on every drop.
The cheapest sticker price in North America wasn't a slogan. It was just the volume discount, passed through. Three years and 20,000+ units later, we ship from three continents — USA · Canada · Europe. |
