21–30 of 86 posts
An ee that can program and do some simple mechanical design can do all that engineering himself.
Maybe for a simple box, but for an injection moulded curved enclosure like the headphone example? If you didn't get that designed by someone who'd done it before you'd be taking a huge risk.
Finding a talented EE for 75K/year seems like an impossible endeavor (if I read this correctly)
I've heard the fully-loaded cost of an employee is about 2x their salary, but I'm interested to know what the fully-loaded cost of a startup employee is. At the minimum, an employer would probably need to pay for health insurance, for example. Even if the benefits aren't very good, the cost is higher than someone's salary.
The article says the cost with overhead is 1.25x, but is that realistic?
An ee that can program and do some simple mechanical design can do all that engineering himself.
Maybe for a simple box, but for an injection moulded curved enclosure like the headphone example? If you didn't get that designed by someone who'd done it before you'd be taking a huge risk.
The subject at hand is a hardware kickstarter. That bridge has long been crossed and burned. If you had all the talent and resources at hand already, you'd probably have funding too.
This article made me think of Betteridge's law of headlines ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... ): "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." On a serious note, it surprised me that the BOM listed the shipping materials as being about as expensive as an assembled and flashed PCB. It's interesting that a cardboard box (which feels pedestrian) costs about a…
I personally don't think this is a good case of Betteridge's by the way.
Finding a talented EE for 75K/year seems like an impossible endeavor (if I read this correctly)
I know for a fact finding talented EE people is possible at $75k, and that same level talent would most likely cost $100k for a software dev. Interestingly, there is a decent supply of EE talent out there, however due the varying degree of hardware applications finding the right person is more difficult than it seems on the surface.
You're software start-up probably won't make you money either. At least for hardware, people don't have so many free options. The barriers to entry are also higher. Someone won't be developing hardware after a 12 week online course. To me it looks like a great time to build hardware. Kickstarter has really changed the game. These guys launched today, for example, and they'll probably be funded within 24 hours: https:…
Yes, you will likely fail if you've never done this before and you're trying to make a consumer-quality product. So get experience with an intermediate step or two.
This article made me think of Betteridge's law of headlines ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... ): "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." On a serious note, it surprised me that the BOM listed the shipping materials as being about as expensive as an assembled and flashed PCB. It's interesting that a cardboard box (which feels pedestrian) costs about a…
I haven't downvoted you but I think people are because they're tired of references to Betteridge's law of headlines in every single submission ending with a question mark. I personally don't think this is a good case of Betteridge's by the way.
Finding a talented EE for 75K/year seems like an impossible endeavor (if I read this correctly)
Finding an injection mold with tooling for 5K is also in the realm of impossible (and probably unusable if found), certainly for PCB enclosures.