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The Sugru story

sugru.com

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Re: The Sugru story

#51

Post by freehunter »

stdbrouw wrote: post #12
ColinWright wrote: post #3

Such a familiar story: great idea, hundreds if not thousands of hours invested, clearly a strong market, no investor interested. Get some sales, suddenly investors come out of the woodwork expressing "passion" and "belief". Been there. Bankers will lend you an umbrella when you don't need it and demand it back when it starts raining. So many investors are similar. But not all. The good ones are better than brilliant.…

True enough, but you also have to take into account that for anything in the physical world the risk profile just goes up up up. It took them 8,000 lab hours to make what they wanted. It could've just as well taken them 16,000 hours to make a product that's only half as good as sugru is, not because of a bad team or a crappy idea but because molecules simply don't always do what you want them to do.

Is that 8000 hours from one person, or combined? It could be 5 people working 8 hours days for 6 months, which isn't an incredibly long R&D time.

Re: The Sugru story

#52

Post by flmyngo »

bialecki wrote: post #42

This is a such a great story. It's valuable for a lot of reasons, but I like it simply because it's a story of success from having a passion, working hard and persevering. Kind of the same way I don't think I could never watch too many inspirational movies (Remember the Titans, Miracle, Rudy, etc. come to mind), I don't think I could ever read too many stories like this. You can't read stories like this all day (at s…

Agreed, reading a great story like this is super motivating. So it's time now to stop reading and start doing.

Re: The Sugru story

#53

Post by lambada »

freehunter wrote: post #50
AkThhhpppt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food-safe? Not hardly: "no infection or irritation so far; in fact the site's doing pretty well, although i had to put superglue out of the toolbox in it yesterday. if all is still calm by next week, i will take it that Sugru doesn't cause major immediate damage to the interior of the human body" http://sapiensanonym.blogspot.com/2010/07/progress-bar.html

I have no idea what the context behind this is, but that man is completely insane. From reading a small amount of his site, he seems to think he's going to get a research grant for implanting magnets in his face and shoving things into his hands? He seems to think it's all safe, but every other post on his blog is about how sick he is, how his hard drive is wrecked (what do magnets do, again?), and how much pain he's…

Exactly what I was wondering.

Re: The Sugru story

#54

Post by adammacleod »

freehunter wrote: post #51
stdbrouw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True enough, but you also have to take into account that for anything in the physical world the risk profile just goes up up up. It took them 8,000 lab hours to make what they wanted. It could've just as well taken them 16,000 hours to make a product that's only half as good as sugru is, not because of a bad team or a crappy idea but because molecules simply don't always do what you want them to do.

Is that 8000 hours from one person, or combined? It could be 5 people working 8 hours days for 6 months, which isn't an incredibly long R&D time.

The going rate for just wages on a team that size for 6 months would be in the order of 100-200 thousand, plus all the lab equipment, supplies and whatnot.

Not to mention most investors would see the idea as some form of play-dough and balk at the idea.

Re: The Sugru story

#55

Post by ugh »

jjcm wrote: post #45
senthil_rajasek wrote: post #44

Why is this better than duct tape? I use duct tape for a lot of these things.

Duct tape doesn't generally provide structural integrity. I snapped some headphones (big over the ear ones) in half the other day. Duct tape wouldn't have held them together (or rather, it'd have just bent and not clenched my head like they should). Slapped some sugru on, it hardened up, and I was good to go.

Duct tape is also not aesthetically pleasing.

Re: The Sugru story

#56

Post by freehunter »

adammacleod wrote: post #54
freehunter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that 8000 hours from one person, or combined? It could be 5 people working 8 hours days for 6 months, which isn't an incredibly long R&D time.

The going rate for just wages on a team that size for 6 months would be in the order of 100-200 thousand, plus all the lab equipment, supplies and whatnot. Not to mention most investors would see the idea as some form of play-dough and balk at the idea.

Very good point. I was thinking in terms of hours and did not make the connection to dollars. Thanks for the reply.

Re: The Sugru story

#57

Post by mindstab »

lambada wrote: post #26

Sounds fantastic, although given some of the examples (child-proof camera, and dishwasher repair) the fact it's not certified as being food or child safe is slightly disturbing. I'd play down those two examples if it was me, until it did get certification from a reputable source.

Ha well a camera probably also isn't child safe if you break a piece off and eat it so I'm not sure you've made it any worse.

As for the tubing? That possibly a more interesting question, but I suspect it's being used in an underfunded medical facility or they would have replacements aplenty, and if if comes down to sugru-ed IVs delivering life saving medicine possibly tainted (but no obvious reaction) vs no medicine and probably rapidly apparent and dire consequences, well you can guess what I would (and the doctors/patient) choose. :)

Re: The Sugru story

#58

Post by sjs »

Hovertruck wrote: post #27
jannes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because whoever coded this page decided that it's a good idea to emulate "background-position: fixed" by updating the "background-position" of the #main element on every scroll event. Which seems quite stupid if you ask me.

This was almost too annoying for me to actually pay attention to the page.

I had to use this 'zap' bookmarklet[1] on it. It was way too distracting.

[1] https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

Re: The Sugru story

#59

Post by [deleted] »

maguay wrote: post #32

That may be the quickest a site has ever sold me on something ... I'd never heard of it before this, and just ordered a pack to Thailand, and the shipping was only £1.91 to Thailand. Now that's awesome.

[deleted]

Re: The Sugru story

#60

Post by nirvana »

Imagine if patents had been eliminated. They would have died once a big company like 3M got a sample back to their lab.

This company exists because they were able to patent their invention.

People say that patents are bad because everything relies on previous efforts. Well, they didn't invent silicon rubber. They didn't invent the volatile compound that allows their rubber to cure overnight. But they did invent a new thing.

Pretty analogous to software patents and combinations software-hardware patents like the iPhone's multi-touch.

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