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What “Hardware is Hard” Really Means | eclecticc

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I was chatting with a new hardware entrepreneur recently who asked an excellent question: What does “Hardware is hard” really mean?  It being time consuming and expensive to iterate on, not being able to ship patches, requiring specialized skillsets, and having access to a smaller pool of investors are all reasons commonly mentioned.  These all relate, but at its core, what makes hardware hard is that you don’t get second chances. Pick the wrong audience target, go to market strategy, feature set, pricing, production forecast, manufacturing methodology, manufacturing partners, or logistics partners, and you will run out of money.  Worse, you can get all but one of those things right and still never make it off the ground.  Startups require setting a bold hypothesis and then charting a narrow course to proving it.  In many software and service businesses, you can set short milestones to test and iterate with target audiences closed-loop, course correcting rapidly to find product market

I was chatting with a new hardware entrepreneur recently who asked an excellent question: What does “Hardware is hard” really mean? It being time consuming and expensive to iterate on, not being able to ship patches, requiring specialized skillsets, and having access to a smaller pool of investors are all reasons commonly mentioned. These all relate, but at its core, what makes hardware hard is that you don’t get second chances . Pick the wrong audience target, go to market strategy, feature set, pricing, production forecast, manufacturing methodology, manufacturing partners, or logistics part

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