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Ask HN: Have you ever sold a physical product?
I assume many readers here are creating digital products. But what about physical products?
Have you ever designed a physical product that was then manufactured for distribution and sale?
What made you choose something physical over something digital? How did you find a manufacturer?
Be great to hear some thoughts, stories and experiences. Thanks
- Gibbon1 8y agoTwo bits of advice. 1. Often takes 3-4 years to develop a functioning sales channel. In B2B companies will order samples and literature and then place no orders at all for a year or two. And then only place small sporadic orders for the next two years after that. 2. Going to scale is frightfully expensive. Developing the production process is 5-100 times more expensive than developing the product. This is where most small groups trying to develop hardware get stuck. 3. You can't fix hardware issues by pushing changes to a server. Consider Takata Corporation, shipped bad airbag inflators from one plant, went bankrupt as a result.