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The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.

The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.

kilroy123 9y ago
I think there's still a ton of potential though. The right company just needs to come up with the right formula.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I hope there's potential? I thought the Fitbit looked good on certain women. Aesthetics aside, I don't know if I want anything on my wrist other than a nice mechanical watch. I repair watches. I've been following these watches since day one, and just been dissapointed. I just got a Waltham 17 jeweled moment running. The last service was inscribed on the case back. It was last worked on on '62. I washed, and oiled the movement. It's a few seconds fast. It just tells the time, and I like the way it looks. Done. Then again, I'm starting to like the Iwatch. When it first came out, I was very disappointed. But lately? It just doesn't look as bad? It's just looking better? It must be psychological? I still see it's the number one for sale watch on CL though. (My record for sentence fragments.) If anyone cracks the code, they will gave a real successful product. There's a lot of psychology behind a watch. I've noticed men are more interested in timepieces than women. I used to think it was just that women have more fashion choices. Now I don't know the reason.
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
> The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. So I haven't worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I'm not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now? Also, for what it's worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I'm convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don't count them as a failure yet. GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I'm less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they're a failure.
- stingrae 9y ago
  In 2014, there was piles of "success stories" for VCs to look at and the market was hot. Most of those successes have turned into down rounds or complete shutdowns in the last year.
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    It seems like the problem is whoever pointed them as successful... successful ideas, maybe, but not companies.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.
  - pcsanwald 9y ago
    honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can be copied, but I don't see that happening always.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      Because the magic in the iphone and ipod come primarily from software (and for the ipod, the music licensing relationships that apple alone had in the beginning.) Android hardware can be pretty good; the app ecosystem, the ecosystem in general, the clear love that Apple has for the iphone, and the control that is (generally) used in user-beneficial ways all make the iphone superior to android.
      - pcsanwald 9y ago
        in the case of the iPod I'm not sure that was true. remember, these were the days of everyone having a bunch of mp3s on their hard drive. The actual iPod software was extremely rudimentary, and basically barely integrated with iTunes. this was still in the days of windows, keep in mind, and before apple actually launched iTunes for windows. and still, it was immediately a dominant player and not one company was able to launch a competitor _before_ apple built iTunes for windows.
hammock 9y ago
Why do the big corps succeed (Google, Apple, Amazon) and the startups fail. I guess all three of those have had failed hardware products and successful one as well. So they can afford a failure? Startups just need more runway?
- luvandp3ace 9y ago
  The big companies have a lot more money and brand behind their products. Usually they've got a massive ecosystem to keep it afloat. It doesn't mean that they don't fail tho.
- stingrae 9y ago
  Big corporations are ok with costs of creating a low margin hardware product because it is loss leader to other products and services with higher margins. Bringing a hardware product to market costs a minimum of $7m in the US. At Seed/Series A, this is a huge amount of money for investors to swallow.
  - maneesh 9y ago
    Not true. We built a wearable device with 50,000 units sold, and raised way under a million dollars. It can be done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14717976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14717976 Our first Pavlok took about 2 years, and probably just over $1MM in total costs---but we presold units to cover the float.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  The big ones all caught a wave and rode it, while these startups tried to create the wave. (Actually, that's not quite true - all these hardware startups were riding the wave of cheap Chinese components and free trade. It's just that it turned out the bottleneck for a hardware startup isn't manufacturing, it's customer acceptance. Apple rode the same wave with the iPhone/iPad, but they also had a well-established core competency of knowing exactly what the customer wants.) There are still waves going on now, and there are probably some startups being founded right now that will get rich off of them. It's just that the waves probably aren't what VCs think they are.
quaunaut 9y ago
GoPro is a failure?
- stingrae 9y ago
  It IPO'd at $24/share and is now $8/share. They are having a hard time releasing products and when they finally do make it out they are inferior to the competitors. (see karma drone)
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  GoPro closed today at 8 a share, a $1.1bn valuation [1]. They went public in 2014 at 24 (about a $3.3bn valuation) after raising a round in 2012 from Foxconn at a $2.25bn valuation. Their revenues are falling and their operations losing cash. They have $75 million of cash on their balance sheet, less than their Q1 2017 net loss. [1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGPRO&ei=fNBeWcCjCcXEe9iImNAP https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGPRO&ei=fNBeWcCjCc...
  - jlarocco 9y ago
    It's not fair to say GoPro has failed simply because investors and traders had unrealistic expectations. The "action camera" market was already saturated in 2014, and it's hard to imagine how they would continue growing at their previous rate when they're selling replacements and minor upgrades. It's possible they're in the process of failing, but it wouldn't surprise me if trying to meet unrealistic expectations caused a large part of their problems. I think at this point the worst case scenario is that they get bought out by a bigger electronics company because their name brand alone is worth quite a bit.
    - bschwindHN 9y ago
      Agreed that it's unfair to call it a failure. GoPro is what most people think of when you suggest filming something sports-related. They made a product which does what it says it does, and has become a very recognizable brand for action filming. Nothing lasts forever, I'd mark their efforts a success.
yueq 9y ago
Smart hardware belongs to big players only. A hardware company needs to deal with, Design, Engineering, Marketing, Production, Sales, Customer services, etc... If any of those step is messed up, the product is over. This is why I don't recommend anyone to get involved in this kind of business.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  In other words, hardware is not for children attempting get-rich-quick exit-plans.
- joshvm 9y ago
  The reasons that these products fail is usually feature creep. Whether due to Kickstarter stretch goals, or pressure from VCs, people don't know when to draw the line and ship. That's followed closely by underestimating costs and under-pricing products. After that you have the risk of developing the product you want, not the product that everyone else needs. I would never suggest anyone starts a hardware business until they've worked in one to get a feel for cost estimation. This is no different to software, but it's a lot more problematic with hardware. Unless you plan very well, patching hardware is expensive and/or impractical. You're often much better off releasing a basic, but very functional product (i.e. your MVP) and iteratively addressing customer demands with later version. The second is that selling complex products to consumers is really hard. If you sell stuff to industry the benchmark for smartness is often much much lower.
  - ineedasername 9y ago
    As a complete outsider, my sense is that things like under costing are partially the result of modern tear-down cost estimates. Where you get a new phone, open it up, and write an article that the $700 msrp iPhone "only costs $135 to build!". No mention of scale to get those component costs, labor cost to assemble, labor cost to design, lengthy prototype phases to idepedently test new ideas and then integration test... just cost of parts. It would be like costing a cloud startup from idea to product solely based on your expected AWS charges.
replicatorblog 9y ago
I'd ascribe the failure to the commodification of the fitness tracker and increasingly platform-driven smart speaker space. Here are some companies that have raised big rounds recently: + SimpliSafe raised $57M from Sequoia + Ring raised $100M+ from DFJ + Formlabs raised $50M from Foundry + Sphero raised $23M in April + Anki raised $52.5M in PE I'm not sure what the future holds for Anki/Sphero, but the first three examples have what GoPro/FitBit didn't — a clear recurring business model. This is a good blog post on the subject: https://blog.bolt.io/the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-connected-hardware-startups-32fbf59506e5 https://blog.bolt.io/the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-c...
- stingrae 9y ago
  I would argue that Ring is the primary consumer success that the VCs are looking at right now. Everything else is not looking good. Simplisafe raised the $57m in 2014 and seems to have been able to make a sustainable business without VC money. Form Labs is seemingly (with the rest of 3D printing) moving away from consumer to B2B focus. I find Sphero/Anki raises surprising and wouldn't be surprised if they had Chinese Funds leading the rounds.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >SimpliSafe We use SimpliSafe at work. It solves far more problems than the "commodity hardware" issue. It solves the alarm ecosystem and shitty contracts that legacy carriers like ADT trap you into. It's definitely a good model going forward, as you noted. EDIT: Additionally, it solves a "boring" problem, which not many companies want to tackle. Yet there's tons and tons of stable recurring revenue in this space that requires almost no additional innovation. Just stability, no-bullshit, and good customer service.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    > Just stability, no-bullshit, and good customer service. VC mechanics are the opposite of this, they are built for hype-based financial engineering to sell companies to richer and richer investor groups. Product and revenue is secondary.
  - 9y ago
flylib 9y ago
Lily and Pebble also were VC Backed and each raised 15+ million https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pebble https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pebble https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lily-robotics#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lily-robotics#/entit...
- maneesh 9y ago
  Money tends to be spent. The more you have, the faster you spend. Hardware companies take it the worst, because new founders don't know what they don't know.
shas3 9y ago
I think the problem with hardware startups is more subtle. Unless you open up a fundamentally new market segment or find a niche application, your product is asking to be commodified. Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win. There really is no distinguishing feature for Jawbone or Fitbit. Other hardware startups like Anki are doing stuff that's niche and novel in areas unlikely to be ever entered by Apple/Google/etc. The technology component of Jawbone or Fitbit was, even in 2007, very very basic and hardly novel. There is literally nothing in Jawbone or Fitbit that is super novel: their sensors aren't ground breaking, their algorithms are (presumably) meh, etc. VC's hope that these companies will mature to become superstars and achieve the level of tech quality of Qualcomm, FB, GE, Intel, Google, etc. in their respective markets. This didn't happen with Jawbone or Fitbit.
- brlewis 9y ago
  See https://www.fitbit.com/technology https://www.fitbit.com/technology for a partial and outdated list of novel Fitbit technology.
  - Naritai 9y ago
    There are 3 items on that list, and all 3 have been present in all of Fitbit's competitors for years. Even if Fitbit was first mover on these technologies, they've long since lost any unique ownership of any of these 3.
    - brlewis 9y ago
      Read the details. Yes, Apple Watch has some form of heart-rate monitoring. But what's described on that page is continuous all-day monitoring. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer. Yes, you can tell Apple Watch what kind of workout you're about to do and it will record it. But what's described on that page is automatically detecting and recording a type of workout based on motion. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer. Yes, you can track sleep with a third-party Apple Watch app if you're careful about when you recharge the device. But that page says "your Fitbit tracker can record your time spent in light, deep & REM sleep, as well as your time awake, then distills that information in easy-to-reach graphs in the Fitbit app." There have been niche products that supposedly tracked sleep stages but they've been reviewed as inaccurate. Fitbit has unique ownership of this technology and major players haven't even claimed to compete with it.
jamesfnewell 9y ago
The best hardware startups are really "software wrapped in plastic". This provides the opportunity for more a business model that supports repeat transactions. Dropcam is just one successful example.
bane 9y ago
It's kind of turned out that many of these things have turned out to just be features or sets of features of more capable hardware.
tommynicholas 9y ago
And I don't think is totally a bad thing! Huge rush of money the last 3 years seeking new opportunity as costs to starting up had dropped (but still high). I believe there will still be some winners that will shake out of that, and in a few years some funding will be back with many lessons learned. I suspect hardware as a way into selling recurring 100% margin software subscriptions will be the move, ala Ring, Simplisafe, Latch, etc. TBD!
m-j-fox 9y ago
Hadn't heard about Hello. Their product sucked but I assumed PT was in for more than one hand to prove his point.
hellokarma 9y ago
I worked at a hardware startup, working on software for said hardware. Much smaller company than Jawbone, but a more unique and niche product. The logistics of manufacturing and selling hardware as a small company are truly a nightmare.
outericky 9y ago
To be fair, Jawbone predates all these companies and raised a good chunk of money in the process. Consumer hardware is hard. I had jawbone stuff many years ago - all the best to Hosain. The Jawbone story has been long, and his perseverance is unparalleled.
outericky 9y ago
To be fair, Jawbone predates all these companies and raised a good chunk of money in the process. Consumer hardware is hard. I had jawbone stuff many years ago - all the best to Hosain. The Jawbone story has been long, and his perseverance is unparalleled.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Sounds kind of like software startups!

kilroy123 9y ago

I think there's still a ton of potential though. The right company just needs to come up with the right formula.

icantdrive55 9y ago
I hope there's potential? I thought the Fitbit looked good on certain women. Aesthetics aside, I don't know if I want anything on my wrist other than a nice mechanical watch. I repair watches. I've been following these watches since day one, and just been dissapointed. I just got a Waltham 17 jeweled moment running. The last service was inscribed on the case back. It was last worked on on '62. I washed, and oiled the movement. It's a few seconds fast. It just tells the time, and I like the way it looks. Done. Then again, I'm starting to like the Iwatch. When it first came out, I was very disappointed. But lately? It just doesn't look as bad? It's just looking better? It must be psychological? I still see it's the number one for sale watch on CL though. (My record for sentence fragments.) If anyone cracks the code, they will gave a real successful product. There's a lot of psychology behind a watch. I've noticed men are more interested in timepieces than women. I used to think it was just that women have more fashion choices. Now I don't know the reason.

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

> The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. So I haven't worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I'm not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now? Also, for what it's worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I'm convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don't count them as a failure yet. GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I'm less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they're a failure.

stingrae 9y ago
In 2014, there was piles of "success stories" for VCs to look at and the market was hot. Most of those successes have turned into down rounds or complete shutdowns in the last year.
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  It seems like the problem is whoever pointed them as successful... successful ideas, maybe, but not companies.
Hydraulix989 9y ago
It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can be copied, but I don't see that happening always.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    Because the magic in the iphone and ipod come primarily from software (and for the ipod, the music licensing relationships that apple alone had in the beginning.) Android hardware can be pretty good; the app ecosystem, the ecosystem in general, the clear love that Apple has for the iphone, and the control that is (generally) used in user-beneficial ways all make the iphone superior to android.
    - pcsanwald 9y ago
      in the case of the iPod I'm not sure that was true. remember, these were the days of everyone having a bunch of mp3s on their hard drive. The actual iPod software was extremely rudimentary, and basically barely integrated with iTunes. this was still in the days of windows, keep in mind, and before apple actually launched iTunes for windows. and still, it was immediately a dominant player and not one company was able to launch a competitor _before_ apple built iTunes for windows.

hammock 9y ago

Why do the big corps succeed (Google, Apple, Amazon) and the startups fail. I guess all three of those have had failed hardware products and successful one as well. So they can afford a failure? Startups just need more runway?

luvandp3ace 9y ago
The big companies have a lot more money and brand behind their products. Usually they've got a massive ecosystem to keep it afloat. It doesn't mean that they don't fail tho.
stingrae 9y ago
Big corporations are ok with costs of creating a low margin hardware product because it is loss leader to other products and services with higher margins. Bringing a hardware product to market costs a minimum of $7m in the US. At Seed/Series A, this is a huge amount of money for investors to swallow.
- maneesh 9y ago
  Not true. We built a wearable device with 50,000 units sold, and raised way under a million dollars. It can be done. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14717976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14717976 Our first Pavlok took about 2 years, and probably just over $1MM in total costs---but we presold units to cover the float.
nostrademons 9y ago
The big ones all caught a wave and rode it, while these startups tried to create the wave. (Actually, that's not quite true - all these hardware startups were riding the wave of cheap Chinese components and free trade. It's just that it turned out the bottleneck for a hardware startup isn't manufacturing, it's customer acceptance. Apple rode the same wave with the iPhone/iPad, but they also had a well-established core competency of knowing exactly what the customer wants.) There are still waves going on now, and there are probably some startups being founded right now that will get rich off of them. It's just that the waves probably aren't what VCs think they are.

quaunaut 9y ago

GoPro is a failure?

stingrae 9y ago
It IPO'd at $24/share and is now $8/share. They are having a hard time releasing products and when they finally do make it out they are inferior to the competitors. (see karma drone)
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
GoPro closed today at 8 a share, a $1.1bn valuation [1]. They went public in 2014 at 24 (about a $3.3bn valuation) after raising a round in 2012 from Foxconn at a $2.25bn valuation. Their revenues are falling and their operations losing cash. They have $75 million of cash on their balance sheet, less than their Q1 2017 net loss. [1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGPRO&ei=fNBeWcCjCcXEe9iImNAP https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGPRO&ei=fNBeWcCjCc...
- jlarocco 9y ago
  It's not fair to say GoPro has failed simply because investors and traders had unrealistic expectations. The "action camera" market was already saturated in 2014, and it's hard to imagine how they would continue growing at their previous rate when they're selling replacements and minor upgrades. It's possible they're in the process of failing, but it wouldn't surprise me if trying to meet unrealistic expectations caused a large part of their problems. I think at this point the worst case scenario is that they get bought out by a bigger electronics company because their name brand alone is worth quite a bit.
  - bschwindHN 9y ago
    Agreed that it's unfair to call it a failure. GoPro is what most people think of when you suggest filming something sports-related. They made a product which does what it says it does, and has become a very recognizable brand for action filming. Nothing lasts forever, I'd mark their efforts a success.

yueq 9y ago

Smart hardware belongs to big players only. A hardware company needs to deal with, Design, Engineering, Marketing, Production, Sales, Customer services, etc... If any of those step is messed up, the product is over. This is why I don't recommend anyone to get involved in this kind of business.

crispyambulance 9y ago
In other words, hardware is not for children attempting get-rich-quick exit-plans.
joshvm 9y ago
The reasons that these products fail is usually feature creep. Whether due to Kickstarter stretch goals, or pressure from VCs, people don't know when to draw the line and ship. That's followed closely by underestimating costs and under-pricing products. After that you have the risk of developing the product you want, not the product that everyone else needs. I would never suggest anyone starts a hardware business until they've worked in one to get a feel for cost estimation. This is no different to software, but it's a lot more problematic with hardware. Unless you plan very well, patching hardware is expensive and/or impractical. You're often much better off releasing a basic, but very functional product (i.e. your MVP) and iteratively addressing customer demands with later version. The second is that selling complex products to consumers is really hard. If you sell stuff to industry the benchmark for smartness is often much much lower.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  As a complete outsider, my sense is that things like under costing are partially the result of modern tear-down cost estimates. Where you get a new phone, open it up, and write an article that the $700 msrp iPhone "only costs $135 to build!". No mention of scale to get those component costs, labor cost to assemble, labor cost to design, lengthy prototype phases to idepedently test new ideas and then integration test... just cost of parts. It would be like costing a cloud startup from idea to product solely based on your expected AWS charges.

replicatorblog 9y ago

I'd ascribe the failure to the commodification of the fitness tracker and increasingly platform-driven smart speaker space. Here are some companies that have raised big rounds recently: + SimpliSafe raised $57M from Sequoia + Ring raised $100M+ from DFJ + Formlabs raised $50M from Foundry + Sphero raised $23M in April + Anki raised $52.5M in PE I'm not sure what the future holds for Anki/Sphero, but the first three examples have what GoPro/FitBit didn't — a clear recurring business model. This is a good blog post on the subject: https://blog.bolt.io/the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-connected-hardware-startups-32fbf59506e5 https://blog.bolt.io/the-3-business-models-that-matter-for-c...

stingrae 9y ago
I would argue that Ring is the primary consumer success that the VCs are looking at right now. Everything else is not looking good. Simplisafe raised the $57m in 2014 and seems to have been able to make a sustainable business without VC money. Form Labs is seemingly (with the rest of 3D printing) moving away from consumer to B2B focus. I find Sphero/Anki raises surprising and wouldn't be surprised if they had Chinese Funds leading the rounds.
icelancer 9y ago
>SimpliSafe We use SimpliSafe at work. It solves far more problems than the "commodity hardware" issue. It solves the alarm ecosystem and shitty contracts that legacy carriers like ADT trap you into. It's definitely a good model going forward, as you noted. EDIT: Additionally, it solves a "boring" problem, which not many companies want to tackle. Yet there's tons and tons of stable recurring revenue in this space that requires almost no additional innovation. Just stability, no-bullshit, and good customer service.
- manigandham 9y ago
  > Just stability, no-bullshit, and good customer service. VC mechanics are the opposite of this, they are built for hype-based financial engineering to sell companies to richer and richer investor groups. Product and revenue is secondary.
- 9y ago

flylib 9y ago

Lily and Pebble also were VC Backed and each raised 15+ million https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pebble https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pebble https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lily-robotics#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lily-robotics#/entit...

maneesh 9y ago
Money tends to be spent. The more you have, the faster you spend. Hardware companies take it the worst, because new founders don't know what they don't know.

shas3 9y ago

I think the problem with hardware startups is more subtle. Unless you open up a fundamentally new market segment or find a niche application, your product is asking to be commodified. Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win. There really is no distinguishing feature for Jawbone or Fitbit. Other hardware startups like Anki are doing stuff that's niche and novel in areas unlikely to be ever entered by Apple/Google/etc. The technology component of Jawbone or Fitbit was, even in 2007, very very basic and hardly novel. There is literally nothing in Jawbone or Fitbit that is super novel: their sensors aren't ground breaking, their algorithms are (presumably) meh, etc. VC's hope that these companies will mature to become superstars and achieve the level of tech quality of Qualcomm, FB, GE, Intel, Google, etc. in their respective markets. This didn't happen with Jawbone or Fitbit.

brlewis 9y ago
See https://www.fitbit.com/technology https://www.fitbit.com/technology for a partial and outdated list of novel Fitbit technology.
- Naritai 9y ago
  There are 3 items on that list, and all 3 have been present in all of Fitbit's competitors for years. Even if Fitbit was first mover on these technologies, they've long since lost any unique ownership of any of these 3.
  - brlewis 9y ago
    Read the details. Yes, Apple Watch has some form of heart-rate monitoring. But what's described on that page is continuous all-day monitoring. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer. Yes, you can tell Apple Watch what kind of workout you're about to do and it will record it. But what's described on that page is automatically detecting and recording a type of workout based on motion. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer. Yes, you can track sleep with a third-party Apple Watch app if you're careful about when you recharge the device. But that page says "your Fitbit tracker can record your time spent in light, deep & REM sleep, as well as your time awake, then distills that information in easy-to-reach graphs in the Fitbit app." There have been niche products that supposedly tracked sleep stages but they've been reviewed as inaccurate. Fitbit has unique ownership of this technology and major players haven't even claimed to compete with it.

jamesfnewell 9y ago

The best hardware startups are really "software wrapped in plastic". This provides the opportunity for more a business model that supports repeat transactions. Dropcam is just one successful example.

bane 9y ago

It's kind of turned out that many of these things have turned out to just be features or sets of features of more capable hardware.

tommynicholas 9y ago

And I don't think is totally a bad thing! Huge rush of money the last 3 years seeking new opportunity as costs to starting up had dropped (but still high). I believe there will still be some winners that will shake out of that, and in a few years some funding will be back with many lessons learned. I suspect hardware as a way into selling recurring 100% margin software subscriptions will be the move, ala Ring, Simplisafe, Latch, etc. TBD!

m-j-fox 9y ago

Hadn't heard about Hello. Their product sucked but I assumed PT was in for more than one hand to prove his point.

hellokarma 9y ago

I worked at a hardware startup, working on software for said hardware. Much smaller company than Jawbone, but a more unique and niche product. The logistics of manufacturing and selling hardware as a small company are truly a nightmare.

outericky 9y ago

To be fair, Jawbone predates all these companies and raised a good chunk of money in the process. Consumer hardware is hard. I had jawbone stuff many years ago - all the best to Hosain. The Jawbone story has been long, and his perseverance is unparalleled.

outericky 9y ago

acjohnson55 9y ago

Sounds kind of like software startups!