4 ms·

I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physic

I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.

7777332215 8mo ago
What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?
- alangibson 8mo ago
  airtite.shop Stuff for old men like me
alex_suzuki 8mo ago
But… distribution is so much harder?
- alangibson 8mo ago
  There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though. That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.
  - alex_suzuki 8mo ago
    A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
gordonhart 8mo ago
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
- bwfan123 8mo ago
  > Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales. There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
- rithdmc 8mo ago
  > Only the marketing and distribution matter Don't forget liability & compliance :)
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it. There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.
Debeli 8mo ago
Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.

7777332215 8mo ago

What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?

alangibson 8mo ago
airtite.shop Stuff for old men like me

alex_suzuki 8mo ago

But… distribution is so much harder?

alangibson 8mo ago
There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though. That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.
- alex_suzuki 8mo ago
  A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!

gordonhart 8mo ago

Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.

bwfan123 8mo ago
> Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales. There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
rithdmc 8mo ago
> Only the marketing and distribution matter Don't forget liability & compliance :)
SoftTalker 8mo ago
And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it. There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.

Debeli 8mo ago

Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.