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Maybe it’s very North American of me but I cringe when the author says “bad team”. Objectively, they didn’t have the skills, experience, or advisors to do this
by neilk 4y ago
Maybe it’s very North American of me but I cringe when the author says “bad team”. Objectively, they didn’t have the skills, experience, or advisors to do this thing. And if the money truly disappeared, then someone crossed over into “bad” territory.
But hardware startups are brutal. Kickstarted hardware is torture.
Even experienced and well capitalized tiny teams go through this. A friend did one, rapidly realized the only option was to somehow get Chinese manufacturers excited about a small run of a strange product. Then two years later was trying to QA injection molds from across the ocean and switched manufacturers two times.
They delivered, but only after years of what must have felt like crawling over broken glass.
Maybe the NYC Train Sign team realized they couldn’t profit from the sign itself, but, unwilling to let the viral moment pass, were going to use it to establish themselves in consulting. You know… sell pickaxes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iamflimflam1 4y agoIndeed, I enjoyed the article, but felt the snarkiness was bit too much. Startups fail all the time, and hardware startups are a minefield. If they had succeeded then we'd be singing their praises on how they started off with a scrappy product built from off the shelf parts and then managed to productionise it and outsource the manufacturing to china...
- closetohome 4y agoI agree completely about the difficulty of a hardware startup, but being "good" means knowing in advance what kind of challenges you'll face, or at least knowing who to consult about it, and when to listen to their advice. I guarantee that at several points in the development of their product, someone pointed out the high BOM cost and the math required to become profitable. At this point Kickstarter has been around for long enough that even people without direct experience in hardware development should have enough case studies to know what they're wading into.