Two passes around the holes with the laser will get rid of the rewelding issue.
A $1k Wheelchair
101–110 of 456 posts
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using…
I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending alumin…
>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#1031k for a wheelchair is unbelievable for me. In Bangladesh they cost about 7 to 9 thousands taka which is equivalent 60 to 100 USD. I don't understand.
>I don't understand.
Almost completely different products.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.
I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not…
The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues.
Their configurator has a very good model of what the chair will look like and you can see just how many knobs you can tweak and how that requires changing the core layout of the frame in a way that makes the kind of sizing system just not feasible. Scroll down on the Frame page to get to the fit sliders.
https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
edit: Did the math and there's something like 25k different configurations they're selling before accounting for paint colors, just in the frame measurements. Granted, that's not accounting for the improbability or incompatibility of some parameter sets but that's still going to be a couple thousand different configs to build and stock. It doesn't work like a bike.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.). I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.
> A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.). You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence. I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'…
There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.
It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.
It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#106It's cool how they get both capital and distribution from their YouTube channel. Are there any other "real" business started from YouTube like this?
The stuff Zack and Cambry are doing seems like it can exist even without the YouTube channel, once it reaches a point of awareness in the community and becomes self-sustaining.
Most of the other YouTube products I see seem like they'd die quickly without a YouTube personality to prop them up. They aren't really filling gaps in the market, or doing something new, they're just slapping their name on something as a way to diversify their income sources. Some do seem to put a good amount of effort into helping with the design, or even work directly with the manufacturers, but they're entering crowded and well served spaces, where their primary differentiation is their YouTube channel. Fans are their target market, and I find it unlikely that most will grow beyond their audience. I don't see LTT becoming the next Craftsman, or MKBHD becoming the next Nike.
Zack started out with the knife, which was a play on his YouTube success, but the various wheelchair adjacent things he's made stepped it up considerably. Others could do the same. It makes sense to test the waters and make some mistakes on something small before shooting for the moon. Time will tell how it plays out for all of them.
If nothing else, having some of these examples could inspire kids to want to start businesses making stuff instead of just wanting to be YouTube famous.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#107My former girlfriend gets powered wheelchairs through the Ontario Disability Support Program, and I witnessed and learned that the whole thing is such a fraud. Her powered chair was just over $20,000 and was a terrible piece of machinery. You were definitely not getting the "medical devices have to be reliable" premium. And any time the technician came out, we got a bill to forward to ODSP for thousands of dollars, e…
>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are forms of technology other than software, and wheelchairs are one of them. YCombinator has invested in dozens of medical device startups... including devices in the mobility category: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trexo-robotics
You expect too much of people.
Please stop. These cynical drive-by comments add nothing to the discussion.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending alumin…
>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000. We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.
Re: A $1k Wheelchair
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
for better or worse the entire Mr Beast empire and, to an extent, Logan Paul and his ventures (Prime, etc)
These never made it further than "I'm buying this because I like MrBeast/Logan Paul/etc." at least as far as I can tell. These wheelchairs are supposed to become good enough that any regular disabled person that can't walk* will seriously consider them even without knowing who makes them. *English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)
I ordered a Beast Burger on Door Dash without having any clue it was a Mr Beast thing until it showed up and was heavily branded. I wanted a burger and figured I'd try something new. I had never really watched any Mr Beast videos at that point. For whatever reason, he is never recommended to me.
The seasoning was so strong it was a bit hard to eat. I assumed it was covering up for lower quality meat or something. I have no desire to order one again.