Happy new year! It’s the start of our eighth year producing AutoTrickler and ShotMarker. We pushed hard to ship as much as possible before Christmas, and everyone took some well-earned time off over the holidays. I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what has happened in 2022, reach out to everyone with a detailed review of our status, and consider priorities for 2023.

ShotMarker is now popular all over the world. As much as AutoTrickler changed how we make our ammo, ShotMarker has changed how we shoot. It’s easy to lose track of the real world impact that ShotMarker has had on the competitive shooting community since 2018. The product is solid, the design is stable, there are no major issues, and it’s been going very well.

We also have a 6 month lead time on production, and it competes for assembly time with AutoTrickler. Trying to build two products at the same time definitely adds to the management challenges. Most ShotMarker orders are customized in some way, and batches take 3-4 times longer to complete, so it operates with a very different production plan in parallel.

In 2022, I changed the ShotMarker sensors. A new MEMS microphone became available which has a much higher acoustic overload point, meaning the sensor is better able to discern between on and off target shots. This results in less interference from shots which are more than a couple targets away, leading to less missed shots overall in multi-target environments. It took a few months of circuit design and testing work, but it makes the product better in the long run and I believe it was worth it. The new sensors are a direct replacement, they are now standard, they appear the same, the price hasn’t changed, and there are no compatibility concerns.

We’re currently in the process of ordering a new large batch of ShotMarker electronics, and one change I am making is the capability for the Sensor Hub to detect if sensors are connected. I’m not sure exactly how this will turn out in terms of user experience, but it should be possible for a light to blink and/or a message to display in software to indicate that a specific sensor is not connected. Whether you have a bad cable, a dirty connection, or it’s not plugged in correctly, you’ll know before you start shooting. Unfortunately this is a hardware change so it cannot be retroactively applied to Sensor Hubs built with existing electronics.

Another project I have in the pipeline is software for users to design their own custom target faces. We hired a part time developer last summer who laid out the foundation, but it will take some time to polish it, make it available for all, and support / maintain the tools in the future. While it can be difficult to spend time on requests for custom targets to ShotMarker, and a better solution is needed, I decided to delay developing this software tool while we have been focusing so hard on our production process.

The most recent official release of the ShotMarker software itself is from April 2020, and largely that is because not much has needed to be changed. I have made some changes internally, to add pair-fire support and plot-o-matic, and I will provide that unreleased version to anyone that emails to request it. However the new settings page is pretty confusing so I have been resistant to officially release this version until I am able to take another stab at the layout and updating the user manual.

Finally, I am working on writing a detailed guide for larger clubs running regular competitive matches. I think we have reached a stage where many shooting clubs are learning from each other or have enough experience on their own that problems running larger matches with ShotMarker are few. The hardware design is reliable and redundant enough that if any strange problems do appear, it will not shut down the event. More instruction is not necessarily critical, however I believe it will help in the long run to have a proper and well documented guide, at least for reference. Until there is information published, if you have questions, please feel free to ask.

It’s fair to think that with a massive backlog of orders, a company such as ours should accept external investment to scale up quickly, outsource production, raise prices, and hire more people to brute force the problem. These are all the things I won’t do. Laura and I built this company around an efficient product, and we will continue to grow an efficient company. As the numbers increase, we won’t make compromises on quality. We will find ways to do more.

It’s surely a downside that we have a 6 month lead time. We are opening the door for competition and losing sales because many people just can’t wait that long. However, this is just another short term problem to be solved. If we can improve production by 30%, which is absolutely within our current capacity, we will catch up within months, not years.

I have other ideas for new products / add-ons that I won’t talk about yet, but I’m waiting to have more time before seriously starting on new things. ShotMarker has potential in areas other than competition shooting, and we’d like to have time to pursue that. I’d like to travel a bit more, keep competing worldwide in F-Class, go to trade shows and visit customers. However, with production the way it is, we just have to keep our heads down and focus.