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Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

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Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#61

Post by reaperman »

konschubert wrote: post #25
greesil wrote: post #6

As someone who used to work at an IoT company the consumer space is brutal. Unless you've got something you can sell for 10x BOM, or there's naturally a subscription based model then it's not worth the blood, sweat, and tears.

10x BOM? Why is the bar so high for profitably? There are manufacturing costs, marketing and inventory risk. But still… what am I missing?

QA/QC is very expensive, especially for low volume. You send something out to a customer, they claim its broken, you ship out a replacement at your expense, maybe the customer eventually sends back the broken one, then it sits on the shelf for 2 years because you don't have the manpower to do a root cause investigation. Now you've sold 300 units and have replaced 50 of these and you have no idea why they're broken, what went wrong, and have to a a full validation of each one from scratch. Most of them seem to work fine in your test lab (maybe it was the customer's fault? But maybe your design is incompatible with their production environment?) and the rest all have unique problems which each take 1-5 full days of investigation to nail down a root cause.

Maybe 2-3 share a single root cause, and it's not clear how you'd prevent this from happening in the future.

If you're shipping large volumes, this can add 10% to the MSRP, but if you're shipping low volumes, $50-100/hr of weeklong diagnosis and investigation can easily add 50-300% to the price of each unit.

And that's if everything else is going perfectly. Which means you lucked out and found an amazing Chinese contract manufacturer who works with you hand-in-hand to fix any design bugs and manufacturing issues, and ensure parts availability.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#62

Post by konschubert »

Rafuino wrote: post #30
konschubert wrote: post #20

I am making and selling an eink smart screen. It can display a google calendar. You can also point it to any url that serves an image. Is it okay to post a link? https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale... I am planning to release more applications for it and I am opening the platform for 3rd party applications.

I'd love to get this but for iCal display. Any chance that's in the cards in the future?

It’s in the cards, pretty high in the stack, but I never make promises.

If you can write code and you don’t want to wait for me to add it to the default calendar app, you can build it and release it as a 3rd party app:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#64

Post by kfreds »

Tillitis AB

Our first product is the TKey - a new kind of USB security key - which we have been selling since May. TKey is very likely the most open source USB security key in the world, as well as the first one to feature unconditional measured boot, which we use as a method for key derivation.

Tillitis AB is a sister company of Mullvad VPN AB and Glasklar Teknik AB.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#66

Post by konschubert »

wiskinator wrote: post #47
konschubert wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x BOM? Why is the bar so high for profitably? There are manufacturing costs, marketing and inventory risk. But still… what am I missing?

NRE into the production line, especially hard tooling for plastic is huge. Plus all those things you mentioned, especially inventory risk are often underestimated. Don't forget that any manufacturing run itself is a huge risk. Tiny changes that need to be made to address anything from RF performance to fit and finish can invalidate a run and just burn up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars (depending on scal…

Yea, that’s why I’m not using plastics for my product.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#67

Post by samtho »

kokanee wrote: post #22

I work on software at a hardware startup that is designing and manufacturing a next-generation electrolysis plant for the production of green hydrogen. My personal experience has led me to believe that opportunities to participate meaningfully in climate tech are exclusively available at hardware companies. Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by…

> Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by others in the physical world, and at worst creating markets for corporate greenwashing.

I fully agree with this assessment and I would love to hear more about your product.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#68

Post by konschubert »

greesil wrote: post #54
konschubert wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x BOM? Why is the bar so high for profitably? There are manufacturing costs, marketing and inventory risk. But still… what am I missing?

The math is this: BOM + cost to acquire a customer + cost to sell the unit Otherwise you don't have a business. Please don't ask me how I know this. 10x is a rule of thumb, YMMV. You just need to make the above inequality evaluate to true. You can (maybe) raise money to deal with the various non-recurring expenses. Oh and you should pay your employees too.

:D

I’d love to get your advice, can I contact you?

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#69

Post by StephenSmith »

brk wrote: post #59
StephenSmith wrote: post #8

We make a camera system for construction sites. Using computer vision, we can identify when and for how long subcontractors show up as well as notify our customers of unwanted behavior on site. https://bedrockwireless.com/ Fun fact, we probably have the best port-o-potty detector in the world.

Looks neat, is your core product the AI for the construction site object detection?

We make the whole camera system because we couldn't find anything on the market that allowed us to do the AI we wanted. The value for the customer is all in the AI tracking and security detection as well as the ability to just login live and see what's happening on site. So, yes, our core product is our software, but we had to make the hardware to capture market share.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#70

Post by simlevesque »

We make physical advertising (DOOH) with real time bidding. If you have an image you want to advertise you just submit it and select the screens/locations where you'd like to end up and choose what you want to pay. Then we approve and rate your ad and if you are the highest bidder (ad quality is part of the equation too) you can end up on the screen right then.

The whole process can take 20 minutes, from signup to your ad being shown in businesses versus weeks to months for traditional advertising.

Also the minimum payment is only 20$. We have all sorts of non-profits, local bands, anything you can think of, on the network. I think we have the lowest barrier of entry of the industry.

https://oa.media/en/

If you'd like to discuss my email is in my profile.

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