Comment by kenhwang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenhwang | Hacker News Reader

Drop ran into the problem every other high quality retailer/manufacturer did before it, when you sell good enough stuff, you don't get repeat business fast enough because the original is still working, and eventually fail due to lack of new buyers to sustain the business.

I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard.

Going through my order history, everything I've bought from their early days are still in use or usable. Keycaps. Mics. Pocket knives. A leather belt. Titanium reusable straws. A couple of headphones and DAC/amps. Ultralight camping/hiking gear.

There hasn't been any reason I needed more of those things I already had, so unless Drop continuously expanded its customer base or product offerings, there wasn't a strong case for repeat business. Then the quality and uniqueness of their offerings dropped and I had even less reason to buy from them.

I don't know what the solution is for survival for retailers and manufacturers offering long lasting products, but I really hope someone figures it out because I really don't like how the world is racing towards disposable low quality junk. But disposable products leads to repeat business.

The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification. If you sell enough different things, and they are all of good quality, people will come back to shop for other things that you sell.

The manufacturer's problem needs more capital, because it is also solved through diversification. If the total market for space oscillators is 120,000 a year, with about a 2-3% annual growth, making the best space oscillators has a cap. You'll need to figure out how to turn your expertise in space oscillators into neighboring products - space modulators and electromagnetic oscillators, perhaps - each of which is an R&D investment itself.

> The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification.

Perhaps in a textbook economy, yes; but in the U.S. economy that Massdrop operated in, continued sales of products hinged upon wages being available to spend on optional desires. That economics assumption has not held: most people’s inflation-adjusted pay decreased over Massdrop’s lifetime while the inflation-adjusted costs of necessary goods increased (thanks, enshittification and shrinkflation!), and so their potential customer pool would have been steadily draining throughout their operating years. The private equity model of ‘diversify to generate horizontal revenue’ only functions in a wages-dropping economy for retailers selling necessary goods, such as Walmart; for Massdrop, whose goods are exclusively non-essential, they had little chance to survive by increasing product diversity. (And effectively none whatsoever, considering how small their niche was to begin with!)

Massdrop's original version is essentially what you are describing, they were a middleman that ran drops where you would pay for something upfront and once done they would collect the money and order it from the manufacturer before shipping it to you in a couple months. They used to sell a wide variety of things, but over time they moved more and more to their collaborations and Drop branded goods in the headphone and keyboard spaces and essentially became just another online retailer.

Wasn't that the entire premise of drop, though? Massive stock of quality, curated items. Not necessarily in a specific niche. The "what new drop is there today" is the appeal.

If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?

At first, the entire premise was facilitating group buying to meet manufacturer order minimums for unique or high-demand hardware, and discounts for meeting manufacturers' volume discount targets. Then it morphed into a general specialty/niche retailer for people with keyboard, headphone, "EDC" and began to also focus on "house brand" type merch.

Same; typing this on the same Drop CTRL keyboard I got when it launched.

I bought a few things via Drop in the early days, when it was still Massdrop and they weren't exclusively focused on keyboard and headphones. When they shifted their focus... I just wasn't their target audience anymore.

We definitely should not be incentivizing e-waste. I think the sign of long living product is a good product.

Still have my Sennheiser Massdrop headphones and never had to replace them, think ten years at least.

I mean even cheap keycaps won't wear out for many years for most people, so I don't think quality is a big factor. I got tons of keycaps from Ali Express which are just as good as the high quality stuff, in fact most of them are made on thre same machines...

So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set was super popular due to a similar one being used in the "Severance" show.

Keycaps were the expansion that came after the era of group buys and keyboard/headphones/audio/EDC curated niches. I'd say because the preceding eras weren't sustainable.

If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.

Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!

Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.

Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.

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