How startup life is different when you’re building stuff, not apps

I used to work for a company that manufactured hardware (I wrote firmware for them) and manufacturing was a constant headache and bottleneck, from getting all the parts on time to picking, placing and waving the boards with a high yield to finally assembling the end product.

Building a successful hardware business is much more difficult than building a successful software business (and thus more risk and less glamour). You have all the same problems in terms of solving a problem, finding a market, and getting traction but you have the additional problems of manufacturing, shipping and retail logistics. Those are probably more challenging to solve profitably than the shared problems.

P.S. Mad props for the companies in Asia that so reliably manufacture the computers that we use every day.

Hardware companies really have a strong sense of pride in what we create. It's something tangible that goes out the door, and we have to get it right pretty much the first time.

I encourage every software person to work in a company that makes hardware. It broadens ones' experience wonderfully.

Glad to see hardware startups getting press.

Hardware startups like these, being bound largely by physics, don't get to boast vanity metrics like traditional web-software startups. It's refreshing to see numbers that translate pretty closely to the health/viability of an early stage startup (ie Romotive reporting an increase of 6 to 26 sales per day).

The startup I work for is filled with boxes of Arduino parts, Enterprise devices in different stages, and anything we find on the interwebs that makes a cool demo (e.g. shit that flys and has an Android SDK) -- I wouldn't have it any other way. We don't manufacture these devices, but being able to build software for something physically tangible is much more gratifying, I think.

I don't think of Las Vegas as a place for much startup culture. But it's cheap to live here: buy a cheap house for the price of two months studio rental in SoCal, no income taxes, and if you can have a business reason like the local print shops then it's a nice business opportunity. And the low rent, I think, (and maybe the sales-to-tourists opportunities) leads to a thriving artist culture that could be convenient to tap into. Of course, that cheap house comes with a mandate for some good locks on doors and windows, keep the car in the garage, never leave the house during Summer months.

I guess a hustler might be able to get some Las Vegas Money to "gamble" on their startup to raise some capital, I don't know about that much though.