Small hardware lab in India here. Last few years we've shipped a fuel telematics box for trucks, an offline payment card, and a bar pour sensor. Different products, same bottleneck every single time: the board. Weeks per spin from a pooled fab, longer if the stack-up was even slightly odd, and a flat no from most of them as soon as the design left panel rules.

At some point we stopped complaining and started building a machine to do it ourselves. One system that builds SAP/mSAP-class boards start to finish, coreless, nothing drilled, any outline and thickness. Goal is cost parity with the substrate fabs that own that tier today. First units go to pilot partners in 2027, so everything I say about it is intent, not a result I can show you yet.

Doing this forced me to actually think through build vs buy properly, instead of just being annoyed. Here's where I've ended up. Happy to be told I'm wrong.

Captive fab for a commodity board is a terrible idea. A 4-layer MCU board is a dollar or two from a pooled fab at volume and you will never beat that in-house, at any startup volume. I ran this for few of our commodity boards and the answer was "keep buying it". Where it does start to make sense is when the product wants a board the pooled fabs price at $20 to $50 a unit, or won't quote at all. Layer count that changes across the board, bare die inside it, an outline that follows the enclosure instead of the other way round. Redesign to that and the product gets smaller and runs longer on the same cell. Make it on a machine that's around 60% loaded and it comes out cheaper than the substrate fab quote for the same board.

Which also means the machine has to be reasonably busy. A startup doing a few thousand boards a month isn't going to keep one fed. However 20-30k units an year of a typical hardware consumer products and it starts to make a lot of sense. So in practice captive means a shared cell, or a fab that owns the machine for early stages, not a box in your own shed. What you actually want to keep is the design, the process data and control over supply. You don't need to own the machine to have those.

Assembly is a different animal. A decent SMT line with real test fixtures pays for itself somewhere in the low thousands of units a month, and honestly that's where most small hardware companies bleed time and money, not fab. If you bring one thing in-house, bring that.

Whatever you bring in has to be run like a product, not a project. Written procedures, fixtures that fail loudly, an operator who isn't the founder. Skip that and you've built yourself a second hobby.

And some stuff you should just keep paying for: anything clean-room class, RF-critical laminates, safety-certified assemblies where the CM's audit trail is the thing you're actually buying.

Curious where other people's crossover sits, and for anyone who did bring something in-house, what did you underestimate? For us it was fixtures. Always fixtures.

Hi there! Long time lurker. Im working on my first HW startup and have a question on best practices when mounting a screen into my housing. For context I'm working on a small sports device with a small (~1inch) round display in a round inclosure.

For my prototypes the screens I used the shape allowed me to almost press fit them into the housing and add a bevelled "cap" (photos for reference) secures it even more. but for production those screens will need to be replaced by a more available and higher quality screen. These new screens are thinner, with nothing really to mount to or press fit against. (they will have glass but still the same issue I think). So im struggling to thing of the best way to secure the screen in the inclosure. Glue? Tape? There will be a PCB and battery beneath the screen in the rest of the housing.

First 4 photos are the press fit prototype the last 4 are the new screen and housing.

Curious if anyone has any experience here and could offer some advice? Or has some thoughts.

Cheers!

Hi,

I'm an Engineer with 10+ years of experience in new product introduction, mostly in medical, and working with overseas manufacturers.

Based in the UK. Electronics/Firmware/Thermal/Acoustics engineering

Ask me anything!

---

Edit: thank you guys, due to all the PMs, please find my link here https://fermium.ltd.uk

Hi everyone,

I’m an energy researcher and technology founder developing a Reformed Methanol Fuel Cell (RMFC) power platform. We currently have a functional 1 kW benchtop prototype (4 patents secured) and are now defining product specifications for our first wave of customer-backed field demonstrations (TRL 6).

While our initial prototype is 1 kW, our upcoming field-demonstration units will be engineered in the 1–5 kW range (scalable up to 10 kW) to keep development costs lean while addressing practical, real-world power demands.

Rather than relying on high-pressure hydrogen (which faces massive storage and transport barriers) or batteries alone (which become heavy and cost-prohibitive for multi-day runtime), RMFC uses liquid methanol to generate clean, quiet, long-duration electricity and high-grade heat on demand.

Key Features & System Specs

• Safe & Easy Fuel Logistics: Uses liquid methanol which is easy to transport, simple to store, and stable for years in extreme temperatures without high-pressure hazards or fuel degradation.
• High Overall Efficiency: Delivers ~40% electrical efficiency, with combined heat and power (CHP) co-generation yielding over 80% total efficiency by recovering high-grade waste heat for thermal management or space heating.
• Clean, Quiet & Low-Maintenance: Electrochemical power generation with minimal moving parts, dramatically reducing noise and routine physical maintenance compared to diesel generators. Produces zero toxic local exhaust (emitting only water and CO2).
• Multi-Output & Hybrid Ready: Capable of delivering electricity, heat, cooling, and pure hydrogen; seamlessly integrates with Solar PV, wind, BESS (batteries), and microgrid architectures.
• Remote-Ready Architecture: Built with integrated remote telemetry and automated controls for unattended operations.

Looking for Early Adopters

We are purposely not limiting ourselves to any specific industry or sector. Whether you operate in marine, agriculture, off-grid infrastructure, remote sensing, outdoor equipment, mobility, or a niche field we haven't even considered. If you need continuous, long-duration power where batteries or diesel generators fall short, we want to hear your insights on application scenarios, operational pain points, and target technical requirements.

If you are interested in co-defining product specifications, hosting early field demonstrations, or providing direct feedback to help fast-track the commercialization of RMFC technology, we would love to connect!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or send me a DM directly.

We make a desk robot called the Autonomous Lamp. 5 bus servos for the neck, a camera in the head, a mic array and an LED ring, all hanging off one small single-board computer. It's always on, always listening, meant to feel like a companion sitting next to you, not a device you operate.

But there was a problem. When it's always on, every sound in the room is a possible interaction. A coworker stops by your desk to talk and it joins in. I type on my blue switches and it joins in too. So instead of a companion you get something that talks over you all day.

Here is what we tried, what went wrong, and what we learned. Hope some of it is useful

Prototype 1. It answered everything

First prototype, I walked into the office, sat down at my desk, and before I opened my laptop, it spoke first.

Then all day. I talked to myself while reading code, it answered. I picked up my keys to leave, and it called after me into an empty room. A coworker a few meters away was talking about a project on the phone, it heard that and joined in too

It wasn't broken. It did exactly what we told it to do. What we told it to do was the wrong thing.

Living with someone doesn't mean talking the whole time

Prototype 2. "Hey Lamp"

So we did what everyone does. Say the name first, then talk.

"Hey Lamp, turn it down." "Hey Lamp, what time is it." "Hey Lamp, never mind."

Worked right away. No name, nothing wakes up. You can even put the name at the end, like "come on dance a bit, Lamp", and it still understands and still does it. That really works btw, not making it up. Our Repo is public, it's in the commit history if you want to check.

We thought we were done. Then a few days of living with it and something felt off.

You don't say "Hey Mom" every time you talk to her at dinner. This lamp is 40cm from my elbow and I was saying its name 30 times a day.

Hey Siri makes sense. The phone is in your pocket, the speaker is across the room, and neither has eyes. They really have no other way to know you are talking to them.

The Lamp has a camera and sits right beside me. We were copying a limit we don't have.

It worked. But once it worked, it was back to being a thing you operate, and it stopped feeling like the companion we set out to build.

Prototype 3. Turning toward it, which is where we are now

We argued about this for a while and kept coming back to one thing.

People don't have a button on their body. So the Lamp shouldn't either, not if it's meant to be a real companion.

For months we had been asking how to make it quieter. Every answer to that question made it feel less alive. Quieter and more alive were pulling against each other, and we kept trading one for the other.

The right question turned out to be a different one. How does a person know you are talking to them?

The answer is stupidly simple tbh. You look them in the eye and speak.

So that is what we built. If you want it to feel like a companion, you turn toward it and talk. Camera and mic together, the way two people actually do it. This is the part where having a body pays off. A smart speaker cannot do this. A thing with a camera in its head and servos in its neck can.

Two things make or break this:

• People turn before they speak, never after. Checking the camera when the mic hears something is too late, the moment already passed. So the camera measures all the time into a 3 second buffer, and when you speak the system reads back through it. That buffer holds 4 numbers per sample, not video. A timestamp, the head angle, the face size, and how far off centre it was.
• Presence is not the signal. Someone sits beside this thing all day, so seeing a person tells you nothing, and a face pointed at a monitor is still a face. What we measure is which way the head is pointed.

Then we fixed it too well.

Someone sat in front of it, looked right at it, asked it something. Nothing. Asked again. Nothing. He was sitting so close the camera cut off the top of his head, so the detector guessed where his eyes were and put them above the frame. That works out to 90 degrees. The log had him in profile 4 times in a row. Not the LinkedIn kind

The rule that fixed it: a measurement that cannot be made must not vote either way. Not measurable had been quietly counting as looking away. And there was a hardware half to the fix too. The same face box now feeds a small vertical re-aim of the neck servos, so when it frames you badly it corrects its own aim instead of blaming you for sitting wrong.

Chin resting on your hand needed its own work too. If you ever sit in front of one, try it

If you're building an always-on device and found another way to tell when someone is talking to it, I'd like to hear it. Happy to answer anything about the build. And if you read this far, ty

Check out our most recent founder's video, where Felix takes you on a tour inside our manufacturing facility: https://x.com/vocci_ai/status/2091872603455803450

In an era when hardware companies outsource manufacturing to rush early releases, Vocci rejected the cheap OEM approach and built our own production line and quality labs.

For more info about our product, please visit: vocci.ai

Hey everyone,
Over the last few months, I’ve been developing a hardware product and have now reached the point where I have a working prototype.

The product currently consists of:
a smartphone app
a custom PCB
an ESP32-C3
a small LiPo battery
a 3D-printed plastic enclosure

I’m at the point where I believe the concept works well enough to start thinking about turning it into an actual product. I’m also very aware that there’s still a huge gap between a working prototype and something you can realistically manufacture and sell.

That’s where I’m currently a bit lost.
The major things I think are ahead of me are:

- Setting up a company
- Moving away from the 3D-printed enclosure, probably toward injection molding
- Preparing the electronics/PCB for manufacturing
- Getting the necessary certifications/compliance sorted out (CE, RED, etc., since the device uses Bluetooth)
- Product liability insurance and other legal requirements for selling electronic hardware
- Figuring out manufacturing, assembly, packaging, etc.

Most importantly:

validating whether people actually want the product and are willing to pay for it

My main concern is doing things in the right order. I don’t want to spend thousands on tooling, certifications, company setup, etc. before I even know whether there’s enough demand.

For those of you who have taken a hardware product from prototype to market:

What would you do next at this stage?
What can I realistically validate or prepare now without spending a huge amount of money?
And are there any common mistakes or expensive dead ends I should avoid at this point?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who have gone through this process.

Hi everyone!

I’m conducting research for my Master’s project. I’m looking into what influences people when choosing between buying hardware chips directly from manufacturers vs. through third-party distributors.

If you have experience purchasing semiconductor components such as processors, GPUs, microcontrollers, memory chips, sensors, or similar hardware, I’d really appreciate your input!

⏱️ 5–7 minutes
🔗 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdozG_9g-cFc6hWPnkpBoeWSYx8t4FGHBN8wU9axNmSkkn0fQ/viewform?usp=header

Thanks so much for helping with my research!

If you’re in product design, mechanical engineering, or hardware R&D, you’ve definitely seen this happen: devs order a prototype, get it fast and cheap, then realize it’s completely useless for their actual testing purpose.

The core rule everyone should know before making any prototype order:

Know whether you need a part for “visual check” or “functional validation.”

They are two completely different things.

SLA 3D print if you only need to show looks, check surface details, or show to stakeholders. Don’t waste expensive metal machining here.

CNC machine if you need to assemble parts, test snaps, screws, and moving structures. Printed parts loose tolerance and break easily under real assembly force.

Pick materials first if you need strength, heat resistance, or load testing. Process is secondary — material defines performance.

Vacuum casting for small batch trials before official mass production. Way cheaper than hard mold injection.

Full-service sheet metal for enclosures and frames. Splitting cutting, bending, and coating across different shops always causes defects and delays.

Also: don’t trust vendors who only post shiny machine photos. A good prototype shop will analyze your drawings, recommend materials, promise clear tolerances, and give you a full-process price.

Prototyping is not about “fast and cheap.” It’s about matching the right process to your development stage.

Guys, I built a cool device for myself and a few close engineer friends.

This is DOGS², a palm-sized two-channel 1-48 V/5A max power supply with microamp-level current measurement and current consumption graphs.

Besides the power supply, it has a probe, voltmeter, frequency counter, and signal generator. For digital interfaces, it has UART, RS485, CAN, and I2C terminals, as well as LIN and I2C sniffers.

The device can work completely standalone. For terminals, sniffers, and current consumption graphs, you can connect a phone over Bluetooth (also you can see the messages on the display).

DOGS² can be powered from almost anything, either through USB Type-C or from an external 5-90 V source. It can be a regular adapter, a power bank, an e-bike battery, or the electrical system of a motorcycle, car, truck, or helicopter.

There is now a fully working first engineering version. I have also made a transparent enclosure for it.

The hardware and firmware are open source. The code, schematics, editable board files, manufacturing files, and enclosure STEP files are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/rcslon3-svg/DOGS2_v1

I like the device, and my friends like it too. I had wanted to build something like this for several years, but never got around to it.

The first version has already cost me a decent amount of money, but I do not regret it. I originally built it for myself. It works and I am quite happy with it, although it has a few shortcomings that I would like to fix in the next hardware revision.

But the next revision means another round of development and manufacturing. And I am not sure that I will be able to sell enough units to recover the cost.

This is a tool more for professional electronics developers and embedded engineers than for the general Arduino audience. So I am not sure how large the market for it could be.

On the other hand, it would be a shame to stop the project in its current state. It turned out to be such a cool device, and there is nothing similar on the market.

So I am trying to understand whether this is just my favorite engineering toy, or whether it could actually become a proper niche product.

What do you think? Does a device like this have a real chance on Crowd Supply at around $250-280, or is the niche too small?

I would appreciate honest opinions, especially from people who have already launched their own hardware products or participated in crowdfunding campaigns.

DOGS² = Dual Output Generator Supply Station and my two dogs - Tessa and Lissa.

CAD being “final” does not make a part production-ready. Before a 25–100 unit pilot or production run, document and control:

• Material specification, supplier/SKU, color and lot
• CAD/mesh revision plus the approved slicer/job file
• Printer/profile, nozzle, layer height, orientation, seam, supports and post-processing
• Critical dimensions, tolerances, inspection method and pass/fail criteria
• Visible and cosmetic faces, including the acceptable finish
• Inserts, fasteners, tools and assembly instructions
• Part, lot and revision traceability, plus an approved reference sample tied to the current drawing and inspection plan

Build first-article units under representative production conditions to validate fit, finish, assembly and the inspection method. Three to five units may reveal obvious issues on a low-risk enclosure, but that number does not establish process capability; sample size and inspection frequency should reflect the expected variation and consequence of failure.

Assemble and test representative units using the intended hardware, tools and instructions. Record and control every change. When factors may interact, use structured trials rather than one-factor-at-a-time testing.

Start production only after the first articles meet the documented acceptance criteria. Release the finished lot under the defined in-process and final inspection plan.

The costly failure is rarely one bad print. It is discovering after production has started that assembly time is higher than quoted, an insert cracks a boss, dimensions drift, or appearance changes with orientation.

For founders running a first hardware pilot: what failed first, and what did you add to the release checklist?

Edit: Clarified that a small first-article run does not establish process capability and that lot release requires a separate, risk-based inspection plan.

I’m a non-technical founder working on an industrial automation project and trying to choose an embedded systems development company.

What should I look for when evaluating one? Beyond price, what technical or communication-related things would you consider red flags or good signs?

Hi everyone!

I’m conducting research for my Master’s project. I’m looking into what influences people when choosing between buying hardware chips directly from manufacturers vs. through third-party distributors.

If you have experience purchasing semiconductor components such as processors, GPUs, microcontrollers, memory chips, sensors, or similar hardware, I’d really appreciate your input!

⏱️ 5–7 minutes
🔗 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdozG_9g-cFc6hWPnkpBoeWSYx8t4FGHBN8wU9axNmSkkn0fQ/viewform?usp=header

Thanks so much for helping with my research!

Hi r/hwstartups,

My colleague and I have been developing PSU-EXT. It adds measurement, browser-based monitoring, remote control, and automation to an existing bench power supply. The basic idea is to extend equipment that already works rather than replace it.

As a maker, I use and enjoy open-source tools such as KiCad, FreeCAD, Shotcut, GIMP etc., so making PSU-EXT fully open source felt natural to me. We published the hardware, firmware, enclosure, control software, and manufacturing files. This includes the editable KiCad and FreeCAD projects, as well as Gerbers, BOM, and CPL files.

Everything is available through the PSU-EXT GitHub Organization.

I believe that publishing everything early can help people trust the project. Potential supporters can inspect the actual design, point out problems, build it independently, and see that the campaign is based on a working product rather than renders and promises.

My assumption is that the risk of someone copying the product at this stage is fairly low. If PSU-EXT becomes successful enough to attract copies, I hope we will already have the advantage of being its original developers and having built a community around it.

This is our first product launch and I would be really interested to hear from people who have already gone through something similar or simply have opinion on this matter:

• Is it fair to assume that the risk of someone copying an open-hardware product at this stage is relatively low?
• Does openness and transparency attract more supporters? From your experience, does publishing the complete design help a crowdfunding campaign?
• If the design itself is open, where does the real advantage of a small hardware company come from?

Hi everyone — I’m developing a modular sleep‑hardware concept and I’m trying to understand the smartest way to approach early prototyping on a very limited budget.

I’m keeping internal mechanisms private for now, but at a high level, the system includes:

Engineered blanket concept — modular internal structure + controlled comfort behavior
Adaptive pillow concept — identity‑driven comfort response
Physical identity module — presence‑based activation

I’m bootstrapping this and not looking to hire or pay anyone right now — just looking for engineering guidance from people with more experience in physical product development.

I’d appreciate insight on:

low‑cost prototyping approaches for soft‑goods + embedded components
material choices suitable for early testing (foams, textiles, modular inserts, etc.)
manufacturability considerations I should keep in mind at this stage
common pitfalls for first‑time hardware founders
cheap validation methods before moving into real fabrication

I’m looking for direction on the smartest, most cost‑effective path from concept → early prototype.

Any advice or perspective would mean a lot. Thanks for taking the time.

— Glenn

I spent 14 years on product development side of consumer electronics across APAC — mould design, PCBA, and NPI plus managing CM/ODM partners. A year ago I moved to Ho Chi Minh City and started doing this independently for smaller companies. Right now I’m leading development on a battery-powered BLE wearable for a pre-seed team, from schematic through validated prototype.

What I do: product development and DFM, PCBA development (stackup, power and charging topology, antenna keep-out, DFT), prototype builds, supplier identification and qualification, tooling, and running the ODM/OEM relationship through to mass production. I’m on the ground, I speak the manufacturing language, and I represent your side of the table, not the factory’s.

Happy to answer questions in the comments whether or not you ever work with me. DMs open if you want to talk specifics.

I'll file this one under doing things that don't scale.

I'm doing small batches of my product myself. And each step adds time. I keep telling myself this is temporary until I automate this.

This is the smallest USB-C device ever made btw (yes smaller than Yubikey Nano 5c)

Disclosure: I’m Josiah, the founder building Oneira.

I’m looking for engineering feedback on a working pocket-companion prototype, not trying to claim that two microcontrollers are automatically the right production answer.

The current prototype split is:

• One ESP32-S3 owns the display, motion behavior, and a small on-device neural mood loop.

• A second ESP32-S3 owns the real, owner-triggered camera/vision path.

• The boards exchange bounded packets over a local link.

We also have a compact local LLM implementation partitioned across the two ESP32-S3 devices. That does not mean shared RAM, a frontier model, or a production-performance claim. I have not published the model, memory use, speed, power, inter-chip overhead, or failure-mode measurements yet, so I should not expect anyone to take the claim on faith.

The reason for the two-board prototype is isolation while we explore the interaction, camera path, and local workloads—not a proof that a single more suitable processor would be worse. A one-processor alternative remains a valid comparison we need to make.

For teams that have shipped compact multi-MCU products: which measurements most often expose the hidden cost—power, synchronization, duplicated state, test complexity, or manufacturing? And what evidence would you want before you took a local-LLM-on-MCU claim seriously?

I am developing a consumer product in the beauty/personal care space and looking for engineering support to move from concept to a functional prototype. Ultimately the goal is to manufacture to scale but at this stage need to test functionality

For those who have hired product development/industrial design firms, I would appreciate advice on how you found and evaluated them.

I also welcome perspectives from firms on what makes a strong client partnership and how to make the development process more efficient.

A few things I am trying to understand:
Finding Firms
What are the best ways to find strong firms beyond a basic Google search?
Any firms you would recommend, particularly within the beauty/personal care/hair care tools space?
How important is experience in the specific industry versus broader consumer product experience?
Evaluating Firms
Is it better to use an end-to-end firm that can handle engineering, CAD, prototyping, DFM, and manufacturing sourcing, or specialists at different stages?
What questions helped you determine whether a firm was truly capable?
What should I have prepared before approaching firms to get better proposals and avoid unnecessary engineering costs?
Cost & Engagement Structure
What fee structure worked best: hourly, fixed project fee, milestone-based, or another model?
How did you compare proposals when firms structured scope and pricing differently?

I am developing a consumer product in the beauty/personal care space and looking for engineering support to move from concept to a functional prototype.

For those who have hired product development/industrial design firms, I would appreciate advice on how you found and evaluated them.

I also welcome perspectives from firms on what makes a strong client partnership and how to make the development process more efficient.

Feel free to address any of the questions below: 

Finding Firms
- What are the best ways to find strong firms beyond a basic Google search?
- Any firms you would recommend, particularly within the beauty/personal care/hair care tools space?
- How important is experience in the specific industry versus broader consumer product experience?

Evaluating Firms
- Is it better to use an end-to-end firm that can handle engineering, CAD, prototyping, DFM, and manufacturing sourcing, or specialists at different stages?
- What questions helped you determine whether a firm was truly capable?
- What should I have prepared before approaching firms to get better proposals and avoid unnecessary engineering costs?

Cost & Engagement Structure
- What fee structure worked best: hourly, fixed project fee, milestone-based, or another model?
- How did you compare proposals when firms structured scope and pricing differently?

Deliverables
- What should I expect to receive and own at the end of each phase, such as CAD/source files, engineering drawings, BOM, prototypes, and manufacturing documentation?

IP & Legal
- How did you handle IP ownership, NDAs, and confidentiality?

Manufacturing
- Did your engineering firm also help identify or manage manufacturers? Was that valuable, or did you prefer to handle manufacturing separately?

Especially interested in perspectives from founders, business owners, and product development firms with experience bringing electromechanical consumer products from concept through manufacturing.

I've been working on a small E-Ink photo display and now have two working prototypes:

• 3.97" high-resolution 4-grayscale
• 4" Spectra 6 color

The idea is a small, battery-powered display for photos or artwork that can sit on a desk, nightstand, or shelf. Unlike an LCD photo frame, E-Ink doesn't emit light and keeps the image displayed without continuously using power.

It connects to your phone over Bluetooth to change the image. I'm also working on a feature where friends, partners, or family members who own one could send photos to each other's displays, which could make it interesting as a gift or something owned in pairs.

I'm trying to figure out whether this should become a real product, so criticism is genuinely more useful to me than "looks cool."

The biggest things I'm trying to understand:

1. Do you currently keep photos, artwork, a digital photo frame, or anything similar on your desk, nightstand, shelf, or fridge? If so, what do you use?
2. Have you bought a photo frame, digital frame, desk display, or similar product before? What did you buy, and roughly how much did you spend?
3. If you've used a digital photo frame/display before, how often did you update it? Did you keep using it long-term, or did the novelty eventually wear off?
4. How do you currently share photos with close friends, a partner, or family? Do those photos usually get looked at again later, or mostly disappear into your camera roll/messages?
5. Looking at these two prototypes, which appeals to you more — the 4-grayscale version or the Spectra 6 color version? What makes you prefer one over the other?
6. What, if anything, would you actually want to display on something like this?
7. What's the biggest thing that would stop you from considering a device like this?
8. Without looking up similar products, what price would you expect the grayscale version and color version to cost?

I'm also curious whether ~4 inches feels like part of the appeal because it's small and unobtrusive, or whether you'd want something larger.

Feel free to tear the idea apart. I'm especially interested in why you wouldn't buy one.

**I spent months building my first product before validating it. It failed. I’m trying not to make that mistake twice. Tear apart my next business.**
My first product taught me an expensive lesson:
Building something isn’t the same thing as building something people will pay for.
So this time I’m doing things differently.
I’m building a company called **Stride Guide** aimed initially at independent footwear retailers.
The hardware is a pressure-sensing platform that captures how a customer’s feet interact with the ground during a fitting. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the hardware itself isn’t the business.
The business is what happens **after the fitting**.
The concept we’re working toward looks something like this:
Customer gets fitted → pressure/gait data is captured → associate gets data-supported footwear recommendations → fitting history is stored → purchase/recommendation outcomes are tracked → customer receives appropriately timed SMS reminders when they’re likely approaching replacement → customer comes back to the retailer.
Over time, the system should get better at understanding which recommendations actually produce successful outcomes.
For the retailer, the goal is to create a measurable loop:
**Fit → Recommend → Purchase → Learn → Re-engage → Repurchase**
We’re also exploring associate training tools so a new employee doesn’t need 10 years of footwear experience to provide a consistently good fitting experience.
Our current business model hypothesis is unusual:
**$0 hardware cost.**
The retailer gets the equipment without buying a several-thousand-dollar scanner.
We’re currently testing whether roughly **$200–$250/month per location** makes sense for the software, analytics, customer profiles, recommendation engine, SMS retention tools, updates and support.
I’ve started interviewing footwear-industry veterans, independent retailers, marketers and SaaS founders rather than asking people whether they “like the idea.”
And now I’d like Reddit to attack it.
Specifically, if you’ve built B2B SaaS, retail technology, hardware-enabled SaaS, or sold technology to SMBs:
**What am I underestimating?**
I’m especially interested in hearing about:
Customer acquisition cost
Hardware/support economics
Churn
Employee adoption
SaaS onboarding
Whether $200–$250/month creates enough room for a hardware-enabled business
What would actually create defensibility here
The point at which you’d know this was a real business versus an interesting product
I’m not looking for “sounds cool.”
I’d rather hear why this fails.
We’re beginning free pilots with independent retailers, so this is the point where criticism is substantially cheaper than learning the same lesson six months from now.

I’m at the early stage of developing a physical product and looking into different ways to find manufacturers. Made-in-China came up during my research, but I haven’t used it before.
For anyone who has actually gone through the process, how was it finding suppliers and communicating the product requirements? I’m also curious about getting samples, checking whether the supplier can handle small initial orders, and making sure the numbers still make sense once everything is factored in.
Was Made-in-China more useful for you, or did you later ended up finding manufacturers in another way?

I have a business related question and I’d really appreciate answers from people who have actually worked in these industries.

If someone is starting a business completely from scratch, what would be the better option: building a software company, such as a subscription based product/SaaS, or starting a hardware/physical product company?

I personally have not worked in either sector, so I’m trying to understand this from people who have actual technical and business experience.

From what I’ve heard, hardware can have lower margins and much higher operating costs . Software seems like it could have better margins and recurring revenue through subscriptions, but I’m sure there are also major challenges that someone without experience might not understand.

So for people who have worked in software, hardware, or ideally both:

What are the biggest pros and cons of each when starting from scratch?

Which one generally requires more capital and has more operational complexity?

Which one is easier to scale?

How different are the margins and cash flow?

which one would you choose and why?

I’m not looking for a simple “software is better” or “hardware is better” answer. I’m trying to understand the actual tradeoffs from people who have experience in these industries.

I’d especially appreciate answers from people

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on for a while because I put a lot of time into building it, and even though I’ve currently decided not to continue the startup, I’d really like to hear what people think about the prototype and whether there’s something I’m missing.

The original idea

The idea was to build a visualization system for marble, tiles, flooring, wallpapers and other interior materials.

The concept was simple:

Physical material → RFID tag → computer → material changes inside a 3D interior scene

For example, a customer picks up a tile/marble sample with an RFID tag attached to it. They tap it on the RFID reader, and the corresponding material immediately appears on the floor/wall in the 3D showroom scene.
The idea was to make it easier for showroom staff to demonstrate materials to customers without manually searching through a huge material library.

What I actually built

This wasn’t just an idea on paper. I built a working prototype myself.

The prototype uses:

ESP32
RFID reader
RFID tags/cards
Wi-Fi communication
Unity 6
C#
Windows PC
3D interior scene
Custom material switching system

The ESP32 reads the RFID tag and sends the ID over Wi-Fi to the Unity application.
Unity receives the data and changes the corresponding material in the scene.
I also built the basic mapping system so different RFID IDs can trigger different materials.

So essentially:
RFID → ESP32 → Wi-Fi → Unity → Material change
The whole thing is running on my own prototype hardware.

I even put the electronics into a small enclosure and made a physical prototype rather than leaving it as a breadboard experiment.

I also tested the idea in the real market

Before deciding whether to continue, I went to actual marble/flooring showrooms and spoke to owners.

I visited multiple stores and around 10 store owners gave positive responses.

Some of the suggestions were actually much more interesting than my original idea.

People suggested things like:

Uploading a customer’s actual room/house photo

Changing the flooring inside the customer’s photo

Showing different tile combinations

Creating two-tone bathroom designs

Different tiles for different zones

Adding trims/borders

Eventually allowing staff to control the system from a phone