When I built my first hardware startup I was able to complete all of the electrical engineering, …
… When I built my first hardware startup I was able to complete all of the electrical engineering, firmware/software engineering, mechanical and had a pretty solid grounding in manufacturing. In looking at the profit statement for the OP's startup, I see $360K in costs that could have been avoided. That is, payroll, electrical engineering and web design. That's a ton of money. My guess is the raw materials costs ($330K) likely is high as well. Hard to say without having greater visibility into the design. I'll say this, I would not be surprised if the cost could be cut in half by going to a reputable contract manufacturer in China. That's just reality, sorry. The first quarter my product went on the market we (I) sold $650K of that product. The website didn't look particularly great, but it worked. I got better at web design over the years and improved it, eventually handing it off to someone else. At that point we were nicely profitable and I had several employees. The point is, if the product solves a problem the website almost doesn't matter. …
Original discussionMy Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder161 source comments · at import