Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

Just a one man show for now but this is my current side project:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/product/apds

The idea is that this replaces a many of the components you'd normally use to build out a 12V electrical system for a van or 4wd truck. Just plug everything in to the WAGO connectors, no bus bars, fuse blocks or difficult crimp connections required.

Perhaps if the gold rush is a scam? But if it is real, then it is honest work.

More like 18 months or less based on the height and weight limit, completely impractical pricing

Yeah, but you'd be amazed how few people do that basic arithmetic!

Very high complexity, long slog (7+ years) food automation robotics venture here. We actually moved to Shenzhen (from elsewhere in China), then moved out of Shenzhen as we matured to a point where additional industrial space was required: large blocks of land around Shenzhen are prohibitively expensive. For us, in-house manufacturing and all that goes with it are firmly in-scope.

We maintain a presence for supply chain, but EOY 2022 moved operations out of China owing to an alignment of operational challenges under the current domestic environment, macro-political conditions, venture maturity and correspondingly changing needs. Managing that move alone was an extremely complex challenge involving all manner of curveballs - more than enough for a decent film.

We anticipate raising in the US 4Q this year for 2024 US go-to-market.

Coming from software, hard is an understatement. Purely on the R&D front we've had to successfully innovate in fields as varied as electrical and power engineering, electronic engineering, global cross-market food regulations, HVAC, hydraulics, mechanical engineering, process engineering, refrigeration. On the business front we've had to tackle - as an early stage venture - the many challenges of cross-border operations including cross-border financing, HR, intellectual property, legal, a shifting array of visa rules, supply chain (chipageddon, shipageddon), etc. The team has waxed and waned up to over a dozen full time and back down to two at present. Over this time I've seen countless tangentially-aligned investment fads and trends come and go: Chinese 'New Retail', YC's short-lived move to China (flew me to Beijing to interview with the partners), COVID-fuelled global overinvestment in last-mile food delivery, drone delivery, ghost kitchens, 15 minute groceries, etc. Right now there's a huge number of ventures failing in related spaces, but we remain very confident.

We persist largely because we started from a good place (already spoke fluent Chinese, knew China, could self-fund), have focused on a genuinely venture-scale business strategy, maintained a low burn rate, stuck to fundamentals, ignored the trends, and I am personally lucky enough to have both a hugely supportive family and early stage investor sharing my high conviction plus enough residual resources from a prior exit to continue to invest personally. At this point, our technology is genuinely best in class globally by multiple objective metrics (eg. footprint, cost per location, degree of automation), and we are correspondingly well placed for aggressive venture-scale growth and returns. We therefore look forward to securing significant US funding, leveraging our China supply chain, and consolidating US hiring and operations to achieve go-to-market. But damn, has it been a trip!