(this is from a throwaway to avoid naming the company I worked for) I worked at a startup with a hardware product in 2011 (nb: I didn't work on the hardware pe

(this is from a throwaway to avoid naming the company I worked for) I worked at a startup with a hardware product in 2011 (nb: I didn't work on the hardware personally, but was aware of the difficulties we faced), and the issues you describe are all very familiar. It may be the case that the technologies you describe allow you to push the problems to later in the product development cycle, but from what I observed, they all still happen once you try to transform that product into a consumer product that can be manufactured and sold at a viable price-point. It's true for example, that the hardware engineer founder built a prototype relatively quickly using off the shelf components, but the resulting product was so large, the housing so ugly, and those components so expensive that it would never have been economically viable. Once they were past the prototype stage, they faced all the problems you describe: parts manufacturers and suppliers only willing to deal in huge quantities and make sales well in advance; finding manufacturers who can make plastics that are of high quality and meet safety standards is surprisingly difficult and slow [1]; much of the tooling for small, cheap, low-power-consumption microcontrollers seems to be from the dark ages [2]. What made it even worse was that many VCs we spoke to seemed to be unfamiliar with or unwilling to take the risks associated with hardware startups: much higher up-front costs to scale the business, and much longer product development times. It's possible the company I worked for didn't take advantage of all the modern developments available to hardware startups, or that they had the wrong strategy (trying to scale too fast or seeking the wrong customers, for example), but I certainly have enormous respect for the challenges hardware startups must overcome, even in these times. 1: Some anecdotes I remember from the plastics saga: the first overseas manufacturers they tried in an early attempt to make the housings cheaper absolutely would not, and maybe could not produce a housing in the correct shape. We would send them models in a form designed to be structurally sound and aesthetically appealing, and they'd come back as basically ugly square boxes. We ended up using a much more expensive US-based manufacturer for a long time because of this. (IIRC, they were more expensive mostly because their facility was really meant for rapid development and not mass production.) I also remember a significant delay at a crucial time because we couldn't get the fireproof coloring agent we needed in the right color. 2: One of the hardware engineers spent a grueling couple of weeks hunched over an oscilloscope looking for a particular pulse that would indicate that the microcontroller had found and booted our company's software on the chip.