Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP said “hardware”.
This is meaningfully hardware adjacent, stop being a stick in the mud.
Stop allowing irrelevant comments in a thread that clearly says "hardware" startup.
Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
331–340 of 726 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#332I help out at Hardware Park, Birmingham’s coworking space for hardware startups.
hardwarepark.org
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price is insane man. The best of the best car seat according to lots of reviews(Cybex Anoris-T) is "only" £599, your thing is significantly more and I don't see why it's any better. Edit: sorry, let me rephrase that - not insane, just hard to justify.
Thanks, though, for taking a look! I used to know some of the Cybex people (it was a European company), and they congratulated us on beating their best safety scores at the time. Now Cybex is owned by an Asian conglomerate (Goodbaby). The Kioma difference in materials quality and performance is both quantifiable and qualitative. We have to charge a price that covers our work in design and production costs. But I comp…
You can tell that guy's not a parent, haha. It's a shitload of money, but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it. It's very easy to piss away a fortune on badly-made Chinese plastic trash in the world of baby accessories.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#334We make edge AI cameras. After focusing on services for a while, it has been a different type of journey to switch to the product. We did an open source pilot product on esp32, and got surprisingly more interest than we thought, so now we are working on a high performance (4k, 60fps, AI chip) device. Lite-esp32 camera https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite Source-code: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-p…
Could you please clarify what you mean by ‘AI’?
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#335Aura is sort of a hybrid: we’re building a photo sharing network but the destination is our digital frames, so now that we’re running at scale we spend at least as much energy on software as hardware: https://auraframes.com/careers
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#336Earlier 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.
The more 0s you add the closer you get to how Apple prices its products I guess.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#337I work for a hardware startup in NYC and HK called Looking Glass (www.lookingglassfactory.com). We create light field displays. Coming from a primarily software background, I quite agree that hardware is harder. We are venture funded but we are very lean due to the challenges of bootstrapping a display business and the capital requirements needed for manufacturing. We only have about 10 software engineers that are split across plugins, drivers, firmware, production tooling, our web platform, and solutions development. On the bright side, the technology presents extremely interesting problems.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#338We are building the world's highest temperature heat pump. It can reach 1000℉, when other commercial heat pumps usually reach a maximum of 320 ℉. It is a big deal because factories have to rely on polluting natural gas to produce their process heat. We estimate that it represents 3% of the world’s annual CO2 emissions and a $10B+ annual market opportunity. We are currently building a 5kW prototype at 480℉/250C to coo…
Those chips should come in special packaging saying they're eco friendly
plastic packaging, of course
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do these compare to the Luxonis cameras? https://www.luxonis.com/
Not OP, but I'm very familiar with both. Luxonis is way more powerful and has an Intel VPU (Movidius). It's not really meant to be a standalone platform, so it needs a host board (Linux SBC like the Pi). It takes a lot more power, but it can do 60fps on small Yolo models. Its resolution is a lot higher as well. ESP32-S3 has a pretty small memory capacity, and doesn't have H264-H265 hardware encoding, so you'll be on…
The ESP32-P4 has hardware accelerators for media-encoding, including H.264. Might want to check it out.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
$1000 is too much for Target and Walmart, but for Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, etc. that's nothing. If your living room has space for a Peleton bike, this will fit right in.
You don't put your Peloton in your living room like some peasant if you're buying a $1000 car seat.
What if you live in a $9000/month 900 square foot condo in the bay area?