Any Indiehackers working on hardware?
Hi all,
just a quick question: Where are all the people thinking about hardware products?
SaaS is defenetly more fitting for indie hacking, however there is plenty of room for clever hardware improvements or new solutions. Hardware development is way more expensive to handle and to compete with big players is not possible as a bootstrapped founder. That's true. But building hardware product for niche applications might be worth considering.
So who is working on what? What do you "copy" from SaaS or code based indiehacker projects and what do you do different?
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I had a hardware company (Indie Hackers style) and even had a successful launch on Kickstarter. We fulfilled the units on time, but decided not to go forward with the company.
After looking at the numbers which went from COGs being 40% of rrp to less than 10% profit margins (and that’s with a very conservative customer acquisition cost extrapolation) after import/sales Tax, shipping, CAC. I just realised that the amount of risk I’d have to take on for such a small return wasn’t worth it.
The company was: www.typified.io and there were some particularly tricky details to it, like 10 different suppliers, new combination of technologies and a large 1.6kg physical product to post. It was an amazing experience though, and having dealt with some of the massive problems it involved it has helped my business confidence for sure. If something goes wrong with hardware there’s no ‘undo’ button and often things do go wrong due to PCB complexity and supply chain nonsense.
If I had any advice it would be; keep the product simple enough to be manufacturable by just a few suppliers and make sure you build in a cost of goods much lower than your RRP, preferably 3-4x at least! Shipping, taxes, returns and CAC are not insignificant!
Oh this sounds like a great experience :) Thanks for sharing. I can still remember seeing the smart poster on kickstarter. You got good attention on the product and the kickstarter campaign right?
Yeah, hardware development is expensive. And as you say, bootstrapping it is almost insane, as the risk is to high. So price calculation and price monitoring is far more important, and also far more transparent then in SaaS products?
Did you do it all by yourself?
What are you working on nowadays?
Ah, that’s nice to hear that you remembered the Kickstarter.
Yeah I agree with all that you said. Hardware is just really expensive. I’m still optimistic that it’s possible, but I think it needs to be positioned really premium or really niche(probably enterprise), so it’s possible to have very high margins despite the lower volume.
Yeah, I did it on my own and my girlfriend helped with fulfilment. I found learning circuit-board design hard, but possible. The software side wasn’t too bad, mostly Python and Linux bash. There was loads more to learn, but all possible.
My current venture is a Shopify app, built using Ruby on Rails. I’m having a great time with it to be honest. It’s still hard sometimes, but a lot less stressful than Typified.
+1 would be curious to see some hardware projects out here
I can start with a experience I made at proglove, which is a scanner startup from Germany.
As it is no typical indiehacher company, Proglove scaled a lot of things effectively.
Some facts:
What are your stories?
@atmos4_ak I'm thinking of doing more in hardware -- would you be down for me to ask you a few qs on this area? :)
Sure. just text me or do it here. Let's go.
Thanks :) How did proglove get started? How did the initial startup founders get the idea and test the idea on the market?
One of the founders was an employee at a big car company. And while he was around the assembly line quiete often, he notice the struggle with the heavy barcode scanners.
With their first prototypes, they went to the people they knew in the manufacturing industry and offered testing. The first prototypes were lend to the industry partners for test periodes of several weeks. :)