Taking over a Dead IoT Company
blog.kchung.co
Taking over a Dead IoT Company
1–10 of 213 posts
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#2Seems down, mirror here: https://archive.is/dIbYd
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#3This was a really good read. It's part IOT security, part story about startups gone wrong.
The WayBack Machine has it https://web.archive.org/web/20230109144459/https://blog.kchu...
As does Google
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:71rSDb...
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#4Nice analysis. I think the author really hit on the key problem: expensive BOM due to poor engineering choices.
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#5Towards the end of the article the author mentions not wanting to pursue this as a business as there are so many cheap programmable signs out there already.
As someone who would love to buy one of these and customize it for myself does anyone have experience or recommendations with any of these?
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#6Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions!
My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#7Similarly, see https://tidbyt.com - RGB LED matrix desktop appliance to show weather, sports scores, etc.
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#8"As we discussed earlier, even at $300 the product is too cheap. The sign should have likely been selling at $600 from the very beginning."
Even at $600 - there's a screenshot saying the company had three engineers and a marketer.
If your 4 employees earn $25k per annum, with the $150 parts cost you'd have to sell 222 signs at $600. And if the employees were on $100k, that's 888 signs a year.
That's a heck of a lot of signs, at the price. And you'd have to keep hitting those sales targets so long as you wanted the API to stay up.
It would make much more sense if the business was a one-engineer passion project - someone who had a day job and did a few hours a week maintaining this as a side project would have much more achievable sales targets!
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#9I build something similar https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/ but with way less BOM and I keep getting asked that I should sell them. The primary reason I don't is because I don't want to support something like that for the next 10 years...
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#10Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
I just want to say that I love that you did this. You have great skills and you used them for good. I've never seen such a clearly white-hat hack :)
People's stuff will work again thanks to you and you should feel great about it!