When hardware Kickstarters ship
engineering.koalasafe.com
When hardware Kickstarters ship
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#2Congrats on shipping! I would be very interested to know more details about what you learned from your experience with selecting a manufacturing partner. A former client of mine had his business destroyed when his manufacturing partner in China basically stole his prototype and cut him out of the picture. What steps did you take to vet the company you partnered with?
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#3As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product.
However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can innovate. Maybe it worked well for Koalasafe, which sounds like could have very well be built as just a modified version of OpenWRT with a simple installer. But it certainly wouldn't work for more than half of the other hardware projects out there. Look at the most succesful projects - Pebble, Coolest Cooler, The Micro, Dash - none of these could have gotten where they are without custom firmware.
Going back to KoalaSafe - the $100k they raised may sound like a lot of money, but it's certainly not enough to develop the kind of hardware they are using. It's enough maybe for the software part and some prototypes. You have to set your expectations straight too, and I do believe they did the best anyone could do with that money. Congrats on delivering!
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1635386542/anymote-home...
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#4Congrats on shipping! I would be very interested to know more details about what you learned from your experience with selecting a manufacturing partner. A former client of mine had his business destroyed when his manufacturing partner in China basically stole his prototype and cut him out of the picture. What steps did you take to vet the company you partnered with?
Thanks! The vetting was a process of of evaluation really. From initially being responsive, to shipping us demo units promptly, providing assistance when we had problems etc. When it came down to actually placing the order, we felt they'd already put in enough effort that it was genuine business relationship.
Wrt getting ripped off, we were advised very early on: "If you make anything in China, it will be copied". It's for that reason our software on the box is a very thin layer. The smarts are in the cloud and on the smartphone apps.
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#5As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product. However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can in…
Agree zrgiu - we were able to avoid the hardware design aspect, but the projects you mentioned certainly couldn't - that is their whole point of existing.
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#6As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product. However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can in…
I have used your app on HTC One. Liked it but unlocking the phone to use a remote app was more cumbersome than just grabbing the remote.
I like the approach Peel is taking. Show what's currently on TV and click on what you want to watch and it automatically switches the channel to that show. That's a real good use of the smartphone app, since flicking through channels on TV is really inefficient
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#7[deleted]
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#8As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product. However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can in…
I have used your app on HTC One. Liked it but unlocking the phone to use a remote app was more cumbersome than just grabbing the remote. I like the approach Peel is taking. Show what's currently on TV and click on what you want to watch and it automatically switches the channel to that show. That's a real good use of the smartphone app, since flicking through channels on TV is really inefficient
That's maybe a discussion for another medium, but we're actually updating the app right now with a customizable notification - so you have access to your commands from anywhere (including lockscreen) without any kind of intrusion.
Also, we already have a floating remote (facebook chathead-style) that shows on top of the lockscreen. Best of all - you can configure it to show only while you're on the home wifi.
Since they make money only with advertising, Peel is only focused on TV-watching. While we're going to have the same feature soon (tv guide with auto-switching), AnyMote is meant to do let you do much more than just control a TV and Set Top Box. It has all kinds of wifi lights support, receivers, media centers, etc.
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#9Congratulations, the final product looks sleek.
I have a comment about the blog post itself though. Your page took 90 seconds to load on my gigabit internet connection. The two culprits are your high resolution images of the product DSC_0031.jpg and DSC_0014.jpg. Each image is around 3MB. I would strongly recommend recompressing these down to something like 200KB or less.
Re: When hardware Kickstarters ship
#10Congratulations, the final product looks sleek. I have a comment about the blog post itself though. Your page took 90 seconds to load on my gigabit internet connection. The two culprits are your high resolution images of the product DSC_0031.jpg and DSC_0014.jpg. Each image is around 3MB. I would strongly recommend recompressing these down to something like 200KB or less.
Thanks, we assumed our blog engine compressed them for us.