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What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

chipweinberger.com

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Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#141

Post by 999900000999 »

Very very cool!

It’s actually not hard to hack this together as a .net application and run it on a laptop, but I suspect your target market has a bit of money to spend.

Learning piano is already largely an upper middle class active and after that what’s another 200$ or 300$.

A higher end digital piano is easily over 2k.

Making sure your target market has money is the key take away.

Not sure if this is in scope, but I’d love an easy way for the community to share midi files. I can somewhat do very basic piano progressions, but I still can’t play well.

I’d be grateful if someone would share midi files for me to plugin to my music software. Of course I’d provide full credit

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#142

Post by vee-kay »

skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

[dead]

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#143

Post by nubinetwork »

Intermernet wrote: post #90
chipweinberger wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with having watched ~100 hours of EEVBlog :) Electronics, PCBs, CAD, injection molding was all new to me.

I'm in the middle of my first hardware project right now and I can recommend the videos on the "Phil's Lab" channel on YT. He mostly uses Altium, but he has a few videos on KiCAD which really helped me. He also has generally good throwaway comments in his videos with regards to PCB design / component placement, as well as the order of operations for good PCB design.

The only problem I have with these tutorials is that they're already outdated... I don't think anyone covers kicad 10 yet, and its quite a bit different than 9. (Individual dialogs might not have changed, but where they're located etc might have)

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#144

Post by Archit3ch »

Fordec wrote: post #127
bloggie wrote: post #79

Hardware isn’t hard if the hardware is easy? There’s very few components, one of which is a pre made module, and it took 3 years to make essentially a text logger.

And the RF is a pre-certified module. Of course hardware is easy when you've offloaded the hard part to the supplier. Not to mention, a three year turn around? For this? Three months, six max with mistakes and reworks would be industry expectations "pre-LLMs". Everything is easy when you have 6x to 12x the timescale your competitors expect.

"Do things that don't scale!" is standard founder advice for a reason. The fact that no one else has put in the work means you get to sell $150 MIDI recorders... for a while. Which, fair enough, might just sustain a one-person business.

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#145

Post by Archit3ch »

dofm wrote: post #111

A question: Are you still below any significant scale thresholds and are there any you dread crossing? I ask this because I tend to find things are simple until they are not. e.g. it's easy to write an e-commerce platform until you have to deal with shipping, duty, tax, tax on shipping, etc., for multiple countries. There are scale thresholds I am aware of in hardware that I have not yet run up against. For example I…

Having too many orders is a good problem to have (unless it gets cloned). Worst case, you pay an external contractor to sort compliance/fulfillment/whatever.

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#146

Post by stefan_ »

bloggie wrote: post #79

Hardware isn’t hard if the hardware is easy? There’s very few components, one of which is a pre made module, and it took 3 years to make essentially a text logger.

Yeah I mean this hardware isn't hard because its a fricking breadboard.

(Although I spy an SD card slot, a favorite of the "hardware isn't hard" faction that will explode in their face)

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#148

Post by pineaux »

missinglugnut wrote: post #117
chipweinberger wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely disagree. Just one sample point. But there are certainly much more simplistic hardware products out there. I'm often envious of them. Here's a good example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brick+smartphone+blocker&ia=web

Hey man, you made a successful product, wrote a great article, and are now getting attention for it. You don't need to respond to every person who wants to nit pick at your title :) I think there's a lot of people talking past each other here. Sourcing parts internationally, preventing counterfeiting, slow iteration time, inventory management...all this logistical stuff is hard enough that the conventional wisdom in…

I wanted to ask the exact same question. 2500 is a very low order size for injection molding am I wrong?

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#149

Post by sudo_cowsay »

skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

> impossible to find because a factory in Indonesia is on fire

Has that happened to you?

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#150

Post by zbentley »

skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

Firmly agree. A lot of the lessons you mentioned have been discussed previously on HN threads for hardware startups. This is one of my favorites:

https://www.simonberens.com/p/lessons-learned-shipping-500-u...

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848876

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