Easy Ways To Sink A Hardware Startup

September 26, 2026 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

[Ryan Walker] may have written up his observations a few years ago, but the lessons are just as relevant today as they were back then. He shares five easy ways to sink your hardware startup.

It’s a reminder that while hardware startups are unique, there are basic business realities that still apply because the hardware itself is going to be only one part of a whole. These business fundamentals can be a drag, but it’s worth giving them some attention. But if that’s not your jam, no worries. As [Ryan] experienced, they will explain themselves one way or another.

A good one is skipping market research. Do customers actually exist for this thing? Or forgoing market testing — do the customers actually want it enough to pay for it? One of the worst things to be stuck with is a product that everyone likes, but nobody wants to buy.

Premature optimization is another good one that a number of our readers can probably relate to in one way or another. It’s one thing to buy a tool or a part that one doesn’t end up needing, but when that gets scaled up it can put a real dent in a fledgling business’s development.

We’ve also shared insights on what it takes to develop a product and get it out there, whether as a solo entrepreneur or as part of a larger team, to help nudge the process toward success.

RAM And EMMC Prices Are So High, Pine64 Has Stopped Linux Device Production

August 28, 2026 by Jenny List 37 Comments

We all know that the price of RAM and storage has shot up due to demand from the AI industry and other factors. In most cases that means we grumble about the price, but if we really need the part we can fork out for it. [CNX Software] are reporting that rather than continue to push up their prices, Pine64 are responding to the crisis by halting production of their Linux boards for the time being.

We’ve seen online comment over the now-exorbitant cost of other boards such as a fully-loaded Raspberry Pi, and this follows in that vein. If we had to guess we’d speculate that the high prices have resulted in too little in the way of sales, which considering the knock-on impact on our community if other vendors follow suit, could be concerning.

If there’s one bright spot in the current situation, it’s that for many applications where a single-board computer might be used, a microcontroller might now be a better choice for the job than something running Linux. We’re in a very different situation from that we were in when cheap Linux boards appeared, the current generation of high-power microcontrollers have significantly closed the gap between the two. Given that microcontrollers have onboard memory and storage, their immunity from the price hikes makes them even more attractive. As to Pine64, we hope that sales of their other products make up for it.

Header image: BasilicumTree, CC0.

How Packaging Can Kill An Electronics Microbusiness

August 26, 2026 by Jenny List 51 Comments

Quite a few in our community make a bit of cash on the side by selling our creations, and it’s not uncommon to find that a project which catches your eye can be picked up as a kit for a few of your preferred currency units. But there’s a problem facing such tiny producers in the form of regulations intended for large businesses which are beyond their ability to comply with. [Alain Pannetrat] writes for the Lectronz marketplace about one of them, the new European Union packaging waste regulations.

At face value it sounds like a good idea, that suppliers should be responsible in some way for the disposal of their packaging. It discourages excessive packaging and encourages recycling, indeed the EU even describe the scheme as boosting business. The problem is that its administration is left to individual member states, and someone selling across the whole bloc would have to join multiple schemes. The hefty price is nothing to a large enterprise, but impossible for a tiny one. He makes a very good point, that it’s difficult to claim to champion innovation, while also imposing something like this on grass-roots innovators. Going by the experiences of our acquaintances in this space an extra burden on top of that presented by the current unstable tariff and customs situation involved in selling to the USA would likely be the straw which broke the camel’s back.

In practice we suspect that many are simply doing the same as they have with compliance marking and waste electronic equipment regulations, simply not bothering and hoping they fly under the radar and never get caught. We hope we won’t end up reporting on any future crackdown, the landscape has definitely changed since we tried our hand in this business.

You Wouldn’t Steal A Font…

April 25, 2025 by Jenny List 67 Comments

In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.

The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.

It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.

If copyright gives you a headache, here’s our take on it.

A picture of a stainless steel ring with a phillips screwdriver bit protruding from it sitting slightly askance atop a matching ring with a phillips head cut out like that of a screw. They are the same size so they can mesh when placed together.

Making Products For Fun And (Probably No) Profit

February 5, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 25 Comments

If you’re like most makers, you have a few product ideas kicking about, but you may not have made it all the way to production of those things. If you’re thinking about making the leap, [Simone Giertz] recently discussed all the perils and pitfalls of the process from idea to reality.

The TLDR is that there’s a big difference between making one item and making hundreds or thousands of them, which you probably already knew, but it is nice to see what sort of issues can crop up in this seemingly simple example of the Yetch Screwdriver Ring. It turns out that the metalworking skills of tool making and jewelry making rarely overlap in the contract manufacturing world.

[Giertz] also shares some of the more mundane, yet terrifying, parts of business like finally committing to bulk orders and whether it’s wise to go with intermediaries when working with suppliers overseas. She also keys us into parts of the process where things can go wrong, like how product samples typically use a different manufacturing process than bulk for practical reasons and how you need to have very specific quality control requirements not just decide if a product is good enough based on vibes.

If you’d like some more advice on making your own products, check out [Carrie Sundra]’s Supercon talk about Manufacturing on a Shoestring Budget.

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Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ Shopping Is Out, Moves To Dash Carts At Its Grocery Stores

April 4, 2024 by Maya Posch 60 Comments

After a few years of Amazon promoting a grocery shopping experience without checkout lines and frustrating self-checkout experiences, it is now ditching its Just Walk Out technology. Conceptualized as a store where you can walk in, grab the items you need and walk out with said items automatically charged to your registered payment method, it never really caught much traction. More recently it was revealed that the technology wasn’t even as automated as portrayed, with human workers handling much of the tedium behind the scenes. This despite claims made by Amazon that it was all powered by deep machine learning and generative AI.

An Amazon Dash Cart's user interface, with scanner and display. (Credit: Amazon) — An Amazon Dash Cart’s user interface, with scanner and display. (Credit: Amazon)

Instead of plastering the ceilings of stores full with cameras, it seems that Amazon instead wishes to focus on smart shopping carts that can keep track of what has been put inside them. These so-called Dash Carts are equipped with cameras and other sensors to scan barcodes on items, as well as weigh unlabeled items (like fruit), making them into somewhat of a merging of scales at the vegetable and fruit section of stores today, and the scanning tools offered at some grocery stores to help with self-checkout.

As the main problem with the Just Walk Out technology was that it required constant (700 out of 1,000 sales in 2022) human interaction, it will be interesting to see whether the return to a more traditional self-service and self-checkout model (albeit with special Dash Lanes) may speed things along. Even so, as Gizmodo notes, Amazon will still keep the Just Walk Out technology running across locations in the UK and elsewhere. Either this means the tech isn’t fully dead yet, or we will see a revival at some point in time.

NFTs And Tulipmania: A Little Bit Of History Repeating

October 20, 2023 by Al Williams 123 Comments

We were not surprised to read that a company that tracks NFTs declared that most NFTs are now worthless. But the NFT — non-fungible token — market was huge, so around 23 million people invested in NFTs that are now worth nothing. Worse still, the company notes that because of oddities in how NFTs are priced, the real number of worthless assets is probably even greater than they think.

It is easy to look back and think that it was obvious. After all, an NFT of the Mona Lisa isn’t really the Mona Lisa. Nor does owning it confer any real benefit other than “bragging rights” of owning an NFT of the Mona Lisa. But that’s like saying Luke should have known Darth Vader was his father — it’s only evident after the fact. History is replete with bad ideas at the time that paid out down the road. Of course, history is also full of bad ideas that were simply bad ideas. For every Apple or Google stock you didn’t buy at $4 a share, there are a hundred $4 stocks that you shouldn’t have bought.

The Virus

The NFT craze was sort of a viral event. We usually think of these as part of the Internet culture, but that’s not really true. There is actually very little new on the Internet. The Internet just lets things reach further and faster than before.

Don’t believe me? Kilroy was a viral meme in the 1940s. Fads such as hula hoops, phone booth stuffing, and flagpole sitting were the ice bucket challenges of their day. But, of course, these things weren’t economic. Just fun fads. But economic fads that turn out to be a bad idea are nothing new, either.

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