What every hardware startup needs to know about hardware startups is that if you need to read a blog post to know about these issues you better get someone onboard who has hardware experience.
Actually, someone who carefully studies Bunnie Huang's blog will end up with a better knowledge of these matters than many practicing EEs have.
Frankly, there's not really that much to know, other than "Don't pay full retail" and "Don't believe any promises that don't come with a FedEx tracking number and/or a report from your own incoming test facility." The rest of the details simply expand on those two admonitions.
I don't understand what this means in the context of business to business deals. Also, sometimes component suppliers have you over a barrel, and they know it. You'll end up paying way more than whatever retail used to be because you need that component.
Experience shipping hardware. Not much happened to me that Bunnie didn't warn me about, directly or indirectly. (I've followed his blog for a long time.)
I don't understand what this means in the context of business to business deals.
"Full retail" meaning "buy production inventory from DigiKey." The manufacturers' reps are usually able to cut you a much better deal than DigiMouse(tm).
Sure. A couple of blog posts and everyone is an expert.
Physical products encompass a very wide range of disciplines. You would be monumentally wrong to think that component purchasing is the most difficult aspect of bringing physical products to market successfully.
It's almost like saying that money is the only variable in building good websites, or the choice of a language or framework. The fact is that software development is a very complex art, often requiring expertise in a wide range of disciplines.
Yes, I know, in my prior post I said "software is easy" and now I am saying the exact opposite. I meant it in relative terms. An individual or a team with the right skill set can hack away and create a world-class software product with free tools, in their bathrobes, in a dorm room. They can deploy it to thousands of people, modify, fine-tune, fix and even pivot the product with little if any cost. College kids right out of school (or even before) can develop and offer significant software products.
Hardware or physical products are not like that. It is rare to have recent grads or drop-outs have the necessary skills to complete such projects. They require a lot of money and multi-disciplinary expertise. These days this generally means expertise in mechanical, electrical and software engineering as well as manufacturing, supply chain management, quality control, testing and more. Depending on what you are doing each of those disciplines often require domain expertise in sub-specialties. For example, electrical engineering ranges from analog and digital design to signal and power integrity --crucial for high-speed designs.
In addition to that, hardware products require expensive specialized tools and often years of expertise using them. Laying out a 12 layer circuit board for an FPGA board with signals ranging into the GHz range isn't something one is going to do with a free PCB layout tool and a handful of online tutorials. The machine I am typing this on has somewhere close to $50,000 in software tools installed --EDA, CAD, CAM, FEA, Field Solvers, Compilers, etc. The cost of the PC itself is a rounding error when compared to the cost of the software, the annual licensing and support agreements as well as the training costs.
Outside of that, depending on what you are doing, you might need tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in standard and specialized test equipment and tools.
Let's put it this way. YC funds startups to the tune of $15K to $20K to develop the first incarnation of a software product. Just one of our DSO's (Digital Storage Oscilloscope) costs nearly twice that much. The point isn't to boast --we are small potatoes-- but rather to try to impress upon you that the hardware game is very, very different than doing software and the variables involved go far beyond how and where you buy your components or whether your Excel spreadsheet with your BOM is formatted correctly.
I could go on. The point is that in relative terms software products are easy. And that's what I meant.
Actually, someone who carefully studies Bunnie Huang's blog will end up with a better knowledge of these matters than many practicing EEs have.
Frankly, there's not really that much to know, other than "Don't pay full retail" and "Don't believe any promises that don't come with a FedEx tracking number and/or a report from your own incoming test facility." The rest of the details simply expand on those two admonitions.