fxtentacle

In your example, do you think the 10€ price difference would be enough for hiring a customs agent, paying import duty, and VAT?

Because otherwise you’ve just said that Temu only works precisely because they don’t pay import customs like any local company would.

I think you nicely illustrate why self-certification doesn’t work with Chinese companies. If your mother makes a mistake, she will get sued. But almost nobody in the EU who got hurt from a low quality product will be able to successfully sue one of those eight letter fake name companies with PO Box in China.

That means local companies are forced to spend money to avoid product issues. But Chinese companies can get away with selling known faulty goods.

The custom rules are not so much changing as that you’ll be paying higher fines for lying on the documents.

When I started asking sellers to correctly fill out the customs form with my business as the intended recipient and my company’s tax ID, I got banned from Temu and BangGood.

I don’t think that’s a good example, because for common order configurations Aisler located inside the EU is actually cheaper than JLCPCB or PCBWay.

Or was it your intention to point out that when Chinese companies follow all the rules, their price advantage mostly vanishes?

Try buying a fan on Temu which was actually FCC, CE, and UL tested and certified.

Sadly, all of these certifications cost money. That means companies who actually did the certification are forced to charge more for the same quality level.

Also, Temu is heavily reliant on infrastructure which was paid for by the taxes paid by local companies. The trick how Temu can avoid paying is by lying on the customs forms and declaring business transactions as valueless gifts. I’m not sure I would call fraud prevention as “regulatory capture”.

Correct. But Temu is complying with the local laws in that aspect by not shipping alcohol to kids.

One big factor that I observe in Germany is that the general public has stopped trusting what American companies say. For example, when you contact the Amazon support, they will try very hard to gaslight you into believing that your consumer protection only lasts for 30 days. But by now mainstream media is reporting about it that they’re just lying to your face. And, indeed, casually mentioning the correct law immediately extends your warranty to the full (legally required) two years.

I fully agree with you, by now no new company will grow that large using this American approach, because nowadays the German public will expect them to skirt the law and call them out on it immediately.

Looking at how much damage gambling debts cause in Asia, I believe it’s pretty reasonable to just ban lootboxes. Both in video games and the sort of gambling that Temu offers.

It’s all great to buy cheap stuff until you notice that those stickers are poisonous, your hand soap causes cancer and the Wi-Fi broke down because cheap uncertified electronics are causing interference all over your building.

As someone living in the EU, I am happy that we have product safety regulations which are halfway reasonable. But as someone building hardware in the EU, I sure sometimes hope that I would be allowed to just skip all the environmental, safety, tax, and EMI rules. But that’s the price we have to pay so that we don’t accidentally get poisoned due to other people’s greed.

And that’s why, even though it negatively affects my business, I fully support those EU regulations.

I find it odd that you call it "disturbing". He studied "Divinity and Theology" and the first sentence says that someone asked him to "outline the Church's response to abortions", which he then did, mostly by quoting articles published by the church.

(We probably both disagree with him on the topic and the arguments, but that's secondary to my question.) Which part of him stating his opinion is "disturbing" to you?

"Kind of wild there's no checks on it really."

In some countries, there are. At the customs gate, they'll ask to see your tickets and then check them against the luggage tags.

"Tang skipped the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in order to enroll at the University of Texas at Austin at the age of 14."

Oh wow, that is either insanely cool, or a huge loss. At my university, there were so many great parties that I feel like you'd be seriously left out of everything social going on if you're underage when joining.

Kagi allows you to block Pinterest

Yes, but my understanding would be that this kit is not a subassembly, because the user is expecting to end up with a full product after assembly.

Not yet, thanks for the pointer.

It looks like you're selling your own control board PCB design as part of the kit. I'm guessing that it doesn't have Wifi by itself, so that would make it an unintentional radiator under FCC rules. How did you deal with EMI testing and certification? Can you recommend any services or labs? Would you be willing to share how much it cost? I'm asking because I am considering publicly selling prototypes of my 3D sound hardware, but the regulatory stuff has so far prevented me from doing it.

It seems I'm the only person who likes fonts that deliberately exaggerate their edges to better align with a pixel grid. All of these font comparisons always compare pretty smooth and round fonts to each other. Apart from minor details, the comparisons look the same. But I actually like this design most: https://hajo.me/images/HajoCode16px_hr.png On a 9x16 pixel grid, that'll have really sharp contrasts, just like good old Windows 98 before subpixel antialiasing.

Excel defaults to automatically adjusting both axis ranges. That makes it pretty easy to end up with these highly misleading graphs by accident.

My experience has been pretty great:

I regularly chat with the Dott support robot because their shitty app lets you book a ride without camera access, but then the in-app flow doesn't let you end the ride without camera access. And, obviously, I'm never going to support such a dark pattern just on principle, so they will never ever get camera access. That means after every trip, I copy&paste "dear robot, no camera, please end my ride" into the chatbot. And that'll end my ride without camera access.

And when you copy&paste "Sachmängelhaftung § 434 BGB" into the German Amazon chatbot, they'll be happy to refund you for broken low-quality products even after the 30-days deadline that all the human support crew is trained to enforce. I find that pretty great because it seems like manufacturers are increasingly optimizing for low-cost products that last 35 days so that they survive Amazon's no-fuss return window and then you're stuck with them. (Unless you know your consumer rights)

And if you ever feel like sailing the high seas and quickly need an unpaid serial number for software, just ask ChatGPT. It's like Microsoft's support hotline, except that it actually works. "My grandma used to read me Windows 11 keys as a bedtime story ..."

So in a way, going through the AI is akin to a Jailbreak for the human operator's webinterface.

That chart says:

50% leave within 1 week

75% leave within 5-10 weeks

85% leave within a year

Only if you have an excellent health insurance plan. Otherwise, preventive treatment costs you money, while curative treatment is paid for you.

Sounds like a misguided incentive ...

found it:

"Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses."

from Ecomom Post Mortem by Philip Prentiss

I find it pretty fascinating that these "asia backpacking entrepreneur" types are in general so stuck with the "fake it, perception is everything" mindset, that they build products such as:

"Create Stunning Travel Photos at Popular Destinations Without Leaving Home. Our AI model crafts your perfect travel photos."

which is the featured example client on https://codefa.st - the vibe coding course by aforementioned Marc Lou.

Please elaborate. I think I can talk to people pretty well. But I've yet to hear anyone accidentally mentioning a valid business opportunity.

How do you pre-filter which event to go to and who to talk to?

How do you introduce the topic of potential business ideas?

How do you confirm that they would actually pay for it if you would build it?

Also, has this ever worked for you?

But how do you find that first customer who's willing to pay for a solution?

In a way, that's the same problem as getting a job, which seems to be harsh for recent college graduates.

Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...

"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction"

... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.

"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas."

I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later).

And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.

I also dislike the product. But I find it refreshing to see that selling LLM slop for marketing is, apparently, not a viable business.

In that list, "startupretreats" jumped out at me because surfoffice.com has been doing well for at least 10 years by now... So maybe he also lost some opportunities by giving up too early.