alt Hacker NewsRather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
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Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.
You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.
So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.
You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.
I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:
* is well designed
* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing
* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability
* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit
If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
This isn't unique to China, it's just the nature of modern manufacturing. The only reason China stands out is because we offshored our manu there, so it's where we see it happen.
I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.
The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.
But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
Isn't that basically the reason patents exist? If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Isn't this why patents exist?
>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
I wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.
Idk if I’d hold GoPro as an example of a company launching amazing things anymore…
> I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.
I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.
In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.