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Ask HN: Successful hardware startup in entertainment. How can we go consumer?

• brk 15y ago
  Find a key person who knows the retail end of the consumer market. Having been there before, just the time invested in building simple relationships can be a major resource suck if you're starting from zero. Plus, navigating all of the oddities of dealing with consumer products (from potential certification/testing stuff) to packaging/distribution/channel sales and so on is a world of its own. Based on my experience, also be prepared to give away a ton of product to buyers at potential outlets and spend lots of time discussing little nuanced things that will likely drive you insane :) Your other option is to setup a retail oriented website and sell direct. It will take longer to get from Point A to Point B, but will be less resource intensive. If you can generate some basic demand in that avenue, then you can pursue QVC or some of the "As Seen on TV" marketing companies for a distribution deal.
  • sigil 15y ago
    > Find a key person who knows the retail end of the consumer market. Where's a good place to start? Most of our contacts are in live entertainment or distribution for live entertainment. We've gone to some industry conferences like LDI, but there's not much of a consumer focus. > Your other option is to setup a retail oriented website and sell direct. We're definitely considering this. If you had to do it over again, would you start here and move to retail channels later? Great advice, thanks!
    • brk 15y ago
      Talk to an executive headhunter that specializes in the retail market. Look for people who have launched roughly similar (eg electronics, not fashion) products into large retail channels. Don't know enough about your product and company cash position to comment on the second question. If your product has the potential to hit huge sales, you have just enough time to hit stores in time for the Christmas shopping season. That would most likely be the ideal case. Another option I was just thing of could be the summer concert series. It sounds like you might have an ideal product for pre-concert shopping/food/drinks concession kiosks. This could also be a good test market.
• anigbrowl 15y ago
  I don't think going consumer is the ideal outcome, certainly not in the short term. Does the Blue Man group have a successful line of facepaint products or wacky musical instruments? HELL NO. They have an entertainment franchise. They perform shows that reliably draw an audience, and pair up with people who operate theaters, bars and restaurants. There are multiple BM groups; in fact, I see they were holding auditions in San Francisco just yesterday, and they also have a large backing staff of musicians, creative developers, marketers and admin people. Right now, your show is the product. If you gave me the gear I could probably figure it out in an evening, and it happens that I quite like dancing, but I don't have a darkened stage to work with or loads of time to spend on it. People who go to raves and nightclubs for pleasure want to have fun and/or meet attractive strangers, so the market there is likely fairly small. Additionally, they're just as likely to throw something together on their own with an Arduino if their tastes run that way - otherwise you could just load up a truck and sell to everyone at Burning Man. Kids are a more likely target market, and more likely to spend on an affordable social toy, but to reach them you're going to have to develop manufacturing and retail pipelines, defend your IP from ripoff artists (who may well have better marketing and retail pipelines already in place, especially for a moderately simple technology like this), and pretty soon you find yourself spending 3 months of the year travelling between toy sales conventions and sweating over the consumer confidence index as you enter Q3. I think you would be way better off licensing it to an established toy company, especially considering that any product like this is more Amazon than etsy, if you see what I mean. As far as licensing goes, your negotiating power is obviously going to be proportional to the strength of your brand, and I'm inclined to think that right now your job is to burnish the hell out of that. Finally, don't be in such a rush to put it in the hands of the public. If you do then you diminish your own achievement, because you'll just be classified as a bunch of nerds with a clever marketing campaign for a cheap gimmick. People don't value what comes to them too easily. The reaction of the host (whose name I always forget) to the mention of software engineering was that it was so clever as to be intimidating. Well, that's just fine for now. Get used to the idea of being/doing something so special that people ought to pay money to watch it. Work on getting famous. When devices like 'e-luminate' with oddly-similar looking models on the packaging start to appear, then you can launch the Official iLuminate Kitz and charge a premium for them, and devote 20% of the profits to STEM scholarships for high schools or so. For now, you want to be thinking about developing and franchising the act, whether you want to performing on New Year's Eve in NY or go on tour with Daft Punk etc. etc..
• curt 15y ago
  Feel free to email me, I'll be glad to point you in the right direction. I'll need quite a bit more information though before I'd be able to give you the correct advice. If it's really good and appropriate I'll even make some intros. Just answered a similar question in another post, take a look a my manufacturing guide. There is a big difference between being engineered well and being mass producible. As an aside, I've moved from hardware to web/mobile software (taught myself iOS, php, and rails) because I got tired of dealing with all the new regulations and hurdles. So be warned before starting a project. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840896. PS: if you are looking to get it out this year you only have a month or two at most to act.