9 ms·

Hardware Isn’t Hard, Competing with Apple Is Hard

75 points by tdrnd 9y ago

baybal2 9y ago
I don't get their line of thinking: >Do the opposite of what Apple would do Count how many Chinese companies just jack into Apple lookalike market or market for goods designed along the same line of thought. Take Rapoo for example, once an unremarkable company. What elevated them to the current level was a big bet of proper design. Their first red dot winning product was designed by an intern that they almost had fired for insisting on design that "does not look enough like apple". I also see no surprise if a company like Jawbone gets into "last mile operational impediment" what in reality was just the usual result of company not having engineering expertise. Here, I'd say lies the greatest rift in between SV style software startups that take quality compromise in code as something usual and a normal hardware company that knows that a broken product is literally simply broken with all resulting material losses
igama 9y ago
"Building a hardware startup is hard, but trying to build one that competes with Apple is nearly impossible." So what is it? Hard or not?
- michaelt 9y ago
  What the author is trying to say is: 1. Apple products are glossy and polished, aiming to capture the premium end of a large consumer market for very complex products. 2. Doing this better than Apple is very difficult. 3. However, other less difficult business opportunities exist.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible. Apple steers a pretty clear course, and they don't like to take risks on niche products. They're not like Google where, on a whim, they might make an IoT blender for reasons that nobody can explain. Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom. Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model. It worked for Nest. It worked for Tesla. It could work for you.
    - phlipski 9y ago
      "They're not like Google where, on a whim, they might make an IoT blender for reasons that nobody can explain." Ha - classic!
    - IBM 9y ago
      >I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible. You just made the case against this. The fact that they won't make an IoT blender is why they're hard to compete with. Apple is the polar opposite of Google in so many ways but a big one is their organizational mentality of "more wood behind fewer arrows". Apple is the batter in a no-called-strike baseball game (to borrow a Buffett quote) which means they're only going to swing when they get a fastball right over the plate. Apple has high margins but it's actually because they have the lowest costs. In Porter's terms, they're the benefit leader but they're also the cost leader. >Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model. This isn't actually competing with them then. This advice is probably valid, but you're basically saying to just be the Apple of some other industry (like Keurig or Nespresso).
      - astrodust 9y ago
        I'm saying Apple has amply demonstrated a business model others can apply, and it's not like Apple singularly invented this model. They just borrowed from other companies like Nikon, Canon, BMW and others, adapting and perfecting it for the business they operate in. There's a lot of other industries that need an Apple and don't have one. Who is the Apple of toilets? Of mattresses? Of 3D printers? Of blenders? Some have leaders that succeed not based on having a superior product, but by their crushing marketing pressure and omnipresent retail representation. They're ripe for disruption.
    - tbomb 9y ago
      > Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom. This is what companies like Anker and Aukey are doing too. They compete directly against Apple's accessories with a well polished, durable product, for cheaper than what Apple charges.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  it's easy on a new market that doesn't really exist
SonOfLilit 9y ago
“We fucking started a hardware business! There’s nothing else to talk about. We shouldn’t have done that.” What I hear in this quote is "we went into a technological field we know nothing about with the intention of making money. We shouldn't have done that". Nothing wrong with going into hardware if you have experience end-to-end bringing a hardware product to market. It's just that less people have that than in the software world, and us software people get used to being able to figure out everything JIT. Probably don't go into chemistry either, or algotrading, or practicing law, thinking "eh, I'll figure it out as I go".
- hua67 9y ago
  This is what the mgmt of Twitter/Youtube/FB/Uber etc are internally crying about helplessly. This "we'll figure it out as we go along" mentality, is deeply rooted in leadership culture at the moment whether its politics, wall street, silicon valley etc. It did some useful things, but it needs to evolve.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Also, the current trendy management practices in software like: "Move fast and break things," "Release crap early and iterate," and "QA is a useless cost" don't transfer over to manufacturing hardware.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Nope; a lot more rules and regulations you have to respect, certifications for e.g. electrical safety, etc. Mind you there's a few similar things in software, things like security requirements when handling payments, EU privacy laws, cookie banners, that kinda thing. But they're a lot easier to either outsource (use a payment processor service) or implement (cookie banners range from a notice that says "by using this site you agree to cookies", which probably isn't enough for the law but reasonably user-friendly, to full off-site cookie walls.)
dmitriid 9y ago
There's another important aspect: No, You Can’t Manufacture That Like Apple Does https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I wonder if there's manufacturers that are offering this kind of techniques to other parties nowadays. I did hear that Apple bought all of the output of a German CNC machine maker for the iphone and/or macbook bodies for a long time just to be able to ramp up production.
- toast0 9y ago
  This article doesn't mention it, but if you follow all their guidelines, not only did you lower your expectations if fit and finish, but you also lower the expectations of the whole product for people who buy it. That's actually a good thing. First revision hardware is going to have issues and building a beautiful product and putting in a beautiful box will set you up for disappointed customers.
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  Bolt's blog is a treasure trove. I link to another of Ben's pieces in the story. Either do what MakerBot did, and embrace the DIY enthusiasts as your first market, or do what Misfit did, downplay the tech features in favor of a more fashion forward aesthetic. But running headlong into the buzzsaw that is Apple seems like a recipe for failure.
jasonmaydie 9y ago
I think the competition is on par with Apple, maybe it should be titled "Copying Apple is hard". Ultimately, have been a lot of innovation by the competition long before Apple did it, like QI charging, large screen, multiple usability improvements etc.
- macintux 9y ago
  The point is that starting a new company to compete with Apple is effectively suicide, not that an existing business with billions in capitalization like Samsung et al can't do it.
debacle 9y ago
Hardware is hard in ways that software will never be. * The cost model is different. * The hiring model is far more interdisciplinary. * You can't apt-get your supply chain. * There's near zero real world A/B testing. * You're at the mercy of far more external factors. Relative to SaaS, hardware seems Sisyphean.
jackyinger 9y ago
As a HW designer I’d like to contest the title; hardware is hard. Mistakes always happen on any project, but with hardware they’re very expensive to find and fix. Test equipment like oscilloscopes and bus analyzers are in the $100k range, furthermore building your hardware will cost $100k++. Hardware is hard. Software tools are generally free and fixes only cost engineer’s salaries. Not that this keeps me from thinking HW ideas, and SW is great too.
- wyc 9y ago
  Great points. Hardware is definitely hard. There are more variables, abstractions, and processes to worry about. In software, you can write a function that doubles big numbers perfectly until it hits limits of CPU and memory in about one line of code. If you try implementing the same function in an analog circuit, you'll encounter compounding noise depending on heat, ambient EMF, adjacent components, etc. Upon identification of a critical bug in your SaaS product, one `git push HEAD` is all it takes to get the fix to your millions of users. Hardware is not anywhere near as forgiving--your batch is usually lost. These characteristics require a different approach for developing hardware-leaning products. Everything needs to be far higher quality before release, because small hardware mistakes can have several order of magnitudes higher of costs than software bugs. That's why it's harder: you have to land a rocket on a planet with fewer chances to correct your course.
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  Hey there, I'm the writer and I'm definitely guilty of exaggeration on the title. My goal was to push back against this popular narrative that it's something intrinsic about hardware that kills these startups, not strategic errors or poor execution. Hardware is less forgiving, but I'm not sure it's meaningfully harder to build a new gadget than take on Facebook or Google in social or search. My first job was at an HW startup and I launched a dozen hardware products. It's tough. A screw-up at a single soldering station in Shenzen can screw-up a deal years in the making with Walmart. Overordering materials means you have to lay off friends. But saying "Hardware is Hard" is an oversimplification. When we say that to explain the failure of HW startups, we miss a lot of important nuances. Hardware is hard, but that's not the primary reason most HW startups fail. Almost all of the high-profile failures we see in hardware are companies that are trying to be the "Apple of X." In this post, there are two hardware startups, valued at nine-figures, that are essentially bootstrapped. Hardware was hard for them too, but they managed to win with very little in the way of resources.
canuckintime 9y ago
> Dopplr’s product was ambitious, gorgeous, and by all accounts, it worked well, but it didn’t provide the magical experience the Airpods did. Almost no startup could! That “magic” is the cumulative product of decades of R&D and manufacturing expertise. Nope. The "magic" of Airpods (I own a pair) is quick synced pairing. Startups like Dopplr can't provide that "magic" for iOS/Mac users because Apple doesn't enable the requisite access on their software. Dopplr, Bragi etc are better than Airpods but Apple controls many of the devices they need to interface with so they are fucked. The lesson is don't design your hardware to match Apple and primarily at Apple users. They will cut the legs under you
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  Is it so hard to sync up bluetooth headphones? I've done it once per headset I bought on my phone and it was a simple process. Children do it everyday. I suspect Doppler Labs failed to thrive for other reasons. I just stopped by their site and saw their farewell message. I could 50+ people in the photo. That's 50 salaries this startup had to absorb every month. If we assume 100k real cost per head (recruiting, pay, benefits, etc) then we're at $5m per month on salary alone. If it took 2 year from idea to product, then you're in the hole $120m. If you sell these headphones with a markup and post-everything margin of $30 per set, which seems reasonable, then you need 4m in sales to break even. That's a serious amount of sales to push through.
  - naweeni 9y ago
    $5m per year, not month.
    - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
      Thanks, pre-caffiene thinking at work here. The numbers look more reasonable now, but ultimately its a hard sell especially when Apple doesn't actually need to make a profit for its accessories, but you do. Even then, what's the market look like for this without an Apple. I suspect not very large and its Apple's own marketing efforts that have gotten people interested in these tiny wireless earbuds anyway.
tzhenghao 9y ago
Hardware is hard imo due to: 1. Cost and pricing models. This is very difficult especially when you're not big enough to place larger production runs. You don't have economies of scale here. It's expensive to manufacture just a few boards at a time. 2. Manufacturing/supply chain points of failure. 3. Hardware points of failure (buggy vendor chips etc.) which could easily derail a project. Hardware isn't as malleable as software too. 4. Long product development times. Your first version of the product can quite easily stretch out to many months or even years. This is a huge risk from a shareholder's perspective. To gain some context into hardware manufacturing, I recommend reading: The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew Bunnie Huang.
digi_owl 9y ago
Never mind that Apple has a long running inside track with MSM, and do some serious marketing. I recall being virtually unable to go a commercial break without seeing at least one iphone feature demo ad right after launch in my part of the world. With Apple it is just as much about attention as it is actual products. They have managed to make the choice of phone or computer into a lifestyle signal that their competitors can only dream about. Oh, and i recall the Palm CEO talking about how when they were designing the Pre they constantly ran into Apple having bought up whole factory outputs of part Palm wanted to use. End result was that Palm constantly had to go with their second best choice.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fpgaminer 9y ago
I was part of a hardware startup for nearly a decade. Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument. When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for real hardware companies. I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded hardware startups get so much public attention. But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit. Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale. Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them. I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way around the world. In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.

75 points by tdrnd 9y ago

I don't get their line of thinking: >Do the opposite of what Apple would do Count how many Chinese companies just jack into Apple lookalike market or market for goods designed along the same line of thought. Take Rapoo for example, once an unremarkable company. What elevated them to the current level was a big bet of proper design. Their first red dot winning product was designed by an intern that they almost had fired for insisting on design that "does not look enough like apple". I also see no surprise if a company like Jawbone gets into "last mile operational impediment" what in reality was just the usual result of company not having engineering expertise. Here, I'd say lies the greatest rift in between SV style software startups that take quality compromise in code as something usual and a normal hardware company that knows that a broken product is literally simply broken with all resulting material losses

igama 9y ago

"Building a hardware startup is hard, but trying to build one that competes with Apple is nearly impossible." So what is it? Hard or not?

michaelt 9y ago
What the author is trying to say is: 1. Apple products are glossy and polished, aiming to capture the premium end of a large consumer market for very complex products. 2. Doing this better than Apple is very difficult. 3. However, other less difficult business opportunities exist.
- astrodust 9y ago
  I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible. Apple steers a pretty clear course, and they don't like to take risks on niche products. They're not like Google where, on a whim, they might make an IoT blender for reasons that nobody can explain. Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom. Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model. It worked for Nest. It worked for Tesla. It could work for you.
  - phlipski 9y ago
    "They're not like Google where, on a whim, they might make an IoT blender for reasons that nobody can explain." Ha - classic!
  - IBM 9y ago
    >I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible. You just made the case against this. The fact that they won't make an IoT blender is why they're hard to compete with. Apple is the polar opposite of Google in so many ways but a big one is their organizational mentality of "more wood behind fewer arrows". Apple is the batter in a no-called-strike baseball game (to borrow a Buffett quote) which means they're only going to swing when they get a fastball right over the plate. Apple has high margins but it's actually because they have the lowest costs. In Porter's terms, they're the benefit leader but they're also the cost leader. >Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use their business model. This isn't actually competing with them then. This advice is probably valid, but you're basically saying to just be the Apple of some other industry (like Keurig or Nespresso).
    - astrodust 9y ago
      I'm saying Apple has amply demonstrated a business model others can apply, and it's not like Apple singularly invented this model. They just borrowed from other companies like Nikon, Canon, BMW and others, adapting and perfecting it for the business they operate in. There's a lot of other industries that need an Apple and don't have one. Who is the Apple of toilets? Of mattresses? Of 3D printers? Of blenders? Some have leaders that succeed not based on having a superior product, but by their crushing marketing pressure and omnipresent retail representation. They're ripe for disruption.
  - tbomb 9y ago
    > Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom. This is what companies like Anker and Aukey are doing too. They compete directly against Apple's accessories with a well polished, durable product, for cheaper than what Apple charges.
agumonkey 9y ago
it's easy on a new market that doesn't really exist

SonOfLilit 9y ago

“We fucking started a hardware business! There’s nothing else to talk about. We shouldn’t have done that.” What I hear in this quote is "we went into a technological field we know nothing about with the intention of making money. We shouldn't have done that". Nothing wrong with going into hardware if you have experience end-to-end bringing a hardware product to market. It's just that less people have that than in the software world, and us software people get used to being able to figure out everything JIT. Probably don't go into chemistry either, or algotrading, or practicing law, thinking "eh, I'll figure it out as I go".

hua67 9y ago
This is what the mgmt of Twitter/Youtube/FB/Uber etc are internally crying about helplessly. This "we'll figure it out as we go along" mentality, is deeply rooted in leadership culture at the moment whether its politics, wall street, silicon valley etc. It did some useful things, but it needs to evolve.
ryandrake 9y ago
Also, the current trendy management practices in software like: "Move fast and break things," "Release crap early and iterate," and "QA is a useless cost" don't transfer over to manufacturing hardware.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Nope; a lot more rules and regulations you have to respect, certifications for e.g. electrical safety, etc. Mind you there's a few similar things in software, things like security requirements when handling payments, EU privacy laws, cookie banners, that kinda thing. But they're a lot easier to either outsource (use a payment processor service) or implement (cookie banners range from a notice that says "by using this site you agree to cookies", which probably isn't enough for the law but reasonably user-friendly, to full off-site cookie walls.)

dmitriid 9y ago

There's another important aspect: No, You Can’t Manufacture That Like Apple Does https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I wonder if there's manufacturers that are offering this kind of techniques to other parties nowadays. I did hear that Apple bought all of the output of a German CNC machine maker for the iphone and/or macbook bodies for a long time just to be able to ramp up production.
toast0 9y ago
This article doesn't mention it, but if you follow all their guidelines, not only did you lower your expectations if fit and finish, but you also lower the expectations of the whole product for people who buy it. That's actually a good thing. First revision hardware is going to have issues and building a beautiful product and putting in a beautiful box will set you up for disappointed customers.
replicatorblog 9y ago
Bolt's blog is a treasure trove. I link to another of Ben's pieces in the story. Either do what MakerBot did, and embrace the DIY enthusiasts as your first market, or do what Misfit did, downplay the tech features in favor of a more fashion forward aesthetic. But running headlong into the buzzsaw that is Apple seems like a recipe for failure.

jasonmaydie 9y ago

I think the competition is on par with Apple, maybe it should be titled "Copying Apple is hard". Ultimately, have been a lot of innovation by the competition long before Apple did it, like QI charging, large screen, multiple usability improvements etc.

macintux 9y ago
The point is that starting a new company to compete with Apple is effectively suicide, not that an existing business with billions in capitalization like Samsung et al can't do it.

debacle 9y ago

Hardware is hard in ways that software will never be. * The cost model is different. * The hiring model is far more interdisciplinary. * You can't apt-get your supply chain. * There's near zero real world A/B testing. * You're at the mercy of far more external factors. Relative to SaaS, hardware seems Sisyphean.

jackyinger 9y ago

As a HW designer I’d like to contest the title; hardware is hard. Mistakes always happen on any project, but with hardware they’re very expensive to find and fix. Test equipment like oscilloscopes and bus analyzers are in the $100k range, furthermore building your hardware will cost $100k++. Hardware is hard. Software tools are generally free and fixes only cost engineer’s salaries. Not that this keeps me from thinking HW ideas, and SW is great too.

wyc 9y ago
Great points. Hardware is definitely hard. There are more variables, abstractions, and processes to worry about. In software, you can write a function that doubles big numbers perfectly until it hits limits of CPU and memory in about one line of code. If you try implementing the same function in an analog circuit, you'll encounter compounding noise depending on heat, ambient EMF, adjacent components, etc. Upon identification of a critical bug in your SaaS product, one `git push HEAD` is all it takes to get the fix to your millions of users. Hardware is not anywhere near as forgiving--your batch is usually lost. These characteristics require a different approach for developing hardware-leaning products. Everything needs to be far higher quality before release, because small hardware mistakes can have several order of magnitudes higher of costs than software bugs. That's why it's harder: you have to land a rocket on a planet with fewer chances to correct your course.
replicatorblog 9y ago
Hey there, I'm the writer and I'm definitely guilty of exaggeration on the title. My goal was to push back against this popular narrative that it's something intrinsic about hardware that kills these startups, not strategic errors or poor execution. Hardware is less forgiving, but I'm not sure it's meaningfully harder to build a new gadget than take on Facebook or Google in social or search. My first job was at an HW startup and I launched a dozen hardware products. It's tough. A screw-up at a single soldering station in Shenzen can screw-up a deal years in the making with Walmart. Overordering materials means you have to lay off friends. But saying "Hardware is Hard" is an oversimplification. When we say that to explain the failure of HW startups, we miss a lot of important nuances. Hardware is hard, but that's not the primary reason most HW startups fail. Almost all of the high-profile failures we see in hardware are companies that are trying to be the "Apple of X." In this post, there are two hardware startups, valued at nine-figures, that are essentially bootstrapped. Hardware was hard for them too, but they managed to win with very little in the way of resources.

canuckintime 9y ago

> Dopplr’s product was ambitious, gorgeous, and by all accounts, it worked well, but it didn’t provide the magical experience the Airpods did. Almost no startup could! That “magic” is the cumulative product of decades of R&D and manufacturing expertise. Nope. The "magic" of Airpods (I own a pair) is quick synced pairing. Startups like Dopplr can't provide that "magic" for iOS/Mac users because Apple doesn't enable the requisite access on their software. Dopplr, Bragi etc are better than Airpods but Apple controls many of the devices they need to interface with so they are fucked. The lesson is don't design your hardware to match Apple and primarily at Apple users. They will cut the legs under you

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Is it so hard to sync up bluetooth headphones? I've done it once per headset I bought on my phone and it was a simple process. Children do it everyday. I suspect Doppler Labs failed to thrive for other reasons. I just stopped by their site and saw their farewell message. I could 50+ people in the photo. That's 50 salaries this startup had to absorb every month. If we assume 100k real cost per head (recruiting, pay, benefits, etc) then we're at $5m per month on salary alone. If it took 2 year from idea to product, then you're in the hole $120m. If you sell these headphones with a markup and post-everything margin of $30 per set, which seems reasonable, then you need 4m in sales to break even. That's a serious amount of sales to push through.
- naweeni 9y ago
  $5m per year, not month.
  - drzaiusapelord 9y ago
    Thanks, pre-caffiene thinking at work here. The numbers look more reasonable now, but ultimately its a hard sell especially when Apple doesn't actually need to make a profit for its accessories, but you do. Even then, what's the market look like for this without an Apple. I suspect not very large and its Apple's own marketing efforts that have gotten people interested in these tiny wireless earbuds anyway.

tzhenghao 9y ago

Hardware is hard imo due to: 1. Cost and pricing models. This is very difficult especially when you're not big enough to place larger production runs. You don't have economies of scale here. It's expensive to manufacture just a few boards at a time. 2. Manufacturing/supply chain points of failure. 3. Hardware points of failure (buggy vendor chips etc.) which could easily derail a project. Hardware isn't as malleable as software too. 4. Long product development times. Your first version of the product can quite easily stretch out to many months or even years. This is a huge risk from a shareholder's perspective. To gain some context into hardware manufacturing, I recommend reading: The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew Bunnie Huang.

digi_owl 9y ago

Never mind that Apple has a long running inside track with MSM, and do some serious marketing. I recall being virtually unable to go a commercial break without seeing at least one iphone feature demo ad right after launch in my part of the world. With Apple it is just as much about attention as it is actual products. They have managed to make the choice of phone or computer into a lifestyle signal that their competitors can only dream about. Oh, and i recall the Palm CEO talking about how when they were designing the Pre they constantly ran into Apple having bought up whole factory outputs of part Palm wanted to use. End result was that Palm constantly had to go with their second best choice.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

fpgaminer 9y ago

I was part of a hardware startup for nearly a decade. Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument. When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for real hardware companies. I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded hardware startups get so much public attention. But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit. Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale. Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them. I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way around the world. In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.