To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, the process is now almost fully commodified with all those OEM and production services. The only thing that now stands between your idea and financial success is your ability to reach the target market, i.e. marketing.

Also, such a slick KickStarter campaign typically costs $10k plus ad spend if you buy it from an agency. Roughly 25% of the final price will be marketing and ads. I know because I've seen first hand that you need a 3400% mark-up on the production costs to profitably sell bikinis in the US.

These hangers will also likely cost <$0.1 to make at scale. It's the initial investments into CNCed molds and the upfront marketing that determine the price.

True. As a developer I could make any thing but don't know how to sell. People lik e peter levios can earn millions with a single index.php and SQLite by reading tutorials. And now gpt would make non programmer more free from devs.

Making a product, certifying it and making sure it’s safe is also hard.

But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.

I make these epaper calendar displays.

https://shop.invisible-computers.com

I have invested thousands of hours into making them as good as possible. You couldn’t tell from my website :D

I would probably profit much more if I just stopped improving them and focused on marketing. But I just feel much more drawn to improving the product.

That's great! Some small things about your website:

- "Contact" page says "Kontact" in en-GB locale

- Do you need a shopping cart for one product? Just have the "buy it now" and leave the cart out?

- Do you need a search? There are only a couple of pages.

- The Contact page might want to highlight to the user that there is a chat feature in the bottom right, if they prefer that to email.

Other than those little bits, the site looks pretty good to me! Payments seem slick. Have you done things like ProductHunt?

Oh, wow, thanks for the feedback!

No I haven't done ProductHunt.

I am not sure if I can disable the cart on shopify?

I think I need better pictures, and I need a better shopify theme.

I think the pictures are pretty good already, but yes, perhaps.

If you wanted to dive into more feature work, possibly the next thing is thinking about CEOs who might want a) Outlook integration, and b) a way to shade off their calendar for privacy somehow. Another thing could be to stick more with consumers and have a way to display recipes on it? Maybe if there's a recipe service you could partner with that has a decent API?

But in general I reckon you should market the Google Calendar stuff, which already exists and looks awesome!

A nice application for this might be places that have reservations that would be helpful if displayed. For example, tennis courts, squash courts, etc. People make the reservation online and, when they get to the facility, often don't remember which court they've reserved. Having it on a display would avoid having to look it up on the phone.

Those sorts of places also might have a budget for something like this.

That's a good point - outdoor places would appreciate screens like this that you can see in the sun.

I'm a software engineer, and the most concerned about marketing in my circle... and I still suck at it and promoting my stuff. How do I get better? I would love to work on actual marketing projects with experienced marketers as a side project.

> But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.

I once watched my father sell a single christmas lightbulb to another guy on a garage sale in the middle of july. "I convinced him he needed it" After that day I paid attention to sales. Some people just have that knack for it. They naturally know all the techniques and when to use them and how to properly use them. There used to be a very nice wikipedia article that broke most of them down but it looks like that page is gone (or I can not find it).

Seeing that you're German, too, I would suggest that you try to reach out to some newspapers. I know that's extremely old school, but it worked well for us. newsaktuell.de/ots is a service where you can send in a press release (and pay) and they'll distribute it to newspaper reporters for you. Also, they offer "Native Advertising" which is basically that you write an article about yourself and they'll pretend as if it was objective news written by them.

And lastly, did you know that you can contact your local IHK and they will report about you in their membership magazine? You probably already pay for the IHK and you probably already get their magazine. A calender seems like something that other CEOs would want to hear about, so this might actually be great content for their magazine. And just like you, every other company owner is also a mandatory IHK magazine subscriber ;)

Yes, your website has two user hostile features which immediately make me want to click away

1) Sending cookies to track me, and then a big lie about how you "value my privacy" while trying to track me and sell my data to your "partners"

" ► UpPromote Affiliate Marketing [Application] - Running..."

2) A cookie banner, which you completely ignore as you've already set 7 cookies before your javascript craps out ("TypeError: a.R is undefined"). At this point I haven't done a single thing on your page worthy of even a session cookie.

3) Once you "decline" your banner (which doesn't stop those cookies - including cookies you have set for 12 months in the future), you get a "chat" window with a red notification icon

I think your complaints are valid. For starters, I turned off that affiliate marketing thing, I wasn't using that anyways.

Simone Giertz (the video's creator) is what you could call a professional DIYer. She has an 8 year old Youtube channel dedicated entirely to making weird or beautiful stuff. She happens to also be good at a specific flavor of marketing, but just because the maker part appears easy when she demonstrates it I wouldn't conclude that anyone with the right idea could have reached the same end result. There is a lot of skill and experience still involved.

Marketing is only important if your product is equal to existing or worse.

For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.

That is not true, at least not for all types of products.

I make an e-paper calendar. There is nothing like it on the market. Regularly, I have customers who say "wow, I have been looking for this for years!".

Some of these customers have googled for such a product before mine existed, and found that none exists.

Without marketing, how would these people learn that the product they've been looking for does now exist?

How do you expect to face competition from general-purpose, high-resolution E-Ink displays appearing on the market now? They are getting to the point where it would be within the ability of an average computer hobbyist to mount one on their wall along with one of the many 'HDMI stick' computers.

Your product looks very polished already, and is considerably cheaper than such general purpose displays right now. However, the E-Ink display market is (finally) becoming mainstream, which makes me wonder where you'll go from here.

No problem if your response would be too sensitive to share in public; good luck with your business in any case!

Uber's initial rates were way below a sustainable rate. Pure marketing combined with lots of media work to make them known.

Low prices don't help, if nobody knows the product exists.

> To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products,

Um, did you see how many prototypes she went through? And also, 3 years - it's in the title.

Designing products that kinda-sorta work might be easy and affordable.

Designing products that work well and don't have annoying edge cases is still hard.

Unless you think that Simone Giertz is unusually bad at this sort of thing?

The sweat equity of 3 years and dozens of prototypes only contributes to 5% of the product's success. Marketing will drive 95% of the return.

Damn, with that kind of math, it almost doesn't seem worth investing the time and effort to ensure that the product works well!

I hope people who think like that are happy with their buggy-as-shit computer games on release day. Because they deserve to be.

EA, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, etc all release broken shit and rake in millions and millions. I don't know what you think your point is. The vast majority of the market responds by whining on social media and then giving you 80$, plus whatever you ask for for literally new textures.

Just look at No man's Sky and Cyberpunk! They basically advertised games that didn't even exist, released something basically unrelated, and now the market rates their products highly positive and earnest people will tell you to give them more money!

America hasn't rewarded sincerity in a hundred years

This is something I’ve come to appreciate much more recently - how hard (or at least unnatural) marketing / sales is. A social media following (upon the right audience) is turning into a new metric for economic power, and it’s a skill in it of itself to self-promote tactfully.

What’s the best way to learn marketing skills? Books, courses? I feel like there’s a lot of trash to sort through here.

I have a product I’ve been working on that is nearly ready, but I’ve told only a few people. Would it be better to learn by getting someone who is great at marketing involved, and learn from them?

You will need to dive in, hit road blocks, fail and regroup to learn sales. Books/ courses can give you motivation, but you will learn most of the art through "the school of hard knocks."

> Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it.

Or, you could just, you know, buy them.

My beef with people who say, like you do that 3D printers are cheap or you can buy an arduino/pi/whatever, is simple.

People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost.

The startup cost because your thinking works on the assumption that people know how to use, e.g. a 3D printer out of the box. The reality is that most people don't. And as such, they will expend a great deal of time with Mr Google and various internet forums trying to figure it out. They will then proceed to flush money down the pan on materials during their learning.

Second people seem to value their time at zero. If you value your time at zero, then sure, its cheaper to make it yourself. But if you value your time realistically, its cheaper to either (a) buy it or (b) pay a domain-expert to make it for you.

Sadly, 3D printers are still cheaper.

I once needed to make a few customized gears out of food safe plastic. I asked several online services for quotes and I called several on-location shops in northern Germany. The quotes I got were all around $1800 per unique gear shape. Since I needed 4 different shapes (i.e. $7k for outsourcing), it was much cheaper to buy a 3D printer, watch some tutorials and spend two working days just to make them myself.

Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time. What do they do in those 2 weeks after the print finished but before they send the parcel?

Would you consider the parts you made foodsafe? Or would you have to use the parts to make a mold, then produce foodsafe parts? The nooks and crannies in 3d printed plastic, plus the less controlled melting/cooling has concerned me for making something which is food safe. Mostly the concern about places for bacteria to hide on the parts.

It also depends on what you are doing. If they are single-use, they can be made food-safe pretty easily, even with the nooks and crannies. With 3d printing, it can be pretty cheap to do single-use stuff. You can also electro-plate them with silver and have a pretty sanitary part.

> You can also electro-plate them

You can electro-plate thermoplastic?

Yes. It generally involves applying a mildly conductive layer first, for which there are a variety of techniques.

Probably the only way to make it reliably foodsafe without a lot of postprocessing would be replacing the parts frequently. It's possible to perfectly merge the layers by printing with 100% infill, burying the part in fine grained salt and then remelting it in an oven, but that takes time.

No, the stuff that directly comes out of the 3D printer is not foodsafe. Some of it is biocompatible, though, which means you can safely lick it for a while. But you can use 3D printing to create foodsafe molds and then use them to cast foodsafe plastic copies of your 3D-printed master.

you probably get scheduled in the down time between actually important clients.

> Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time

Because they can get you to pay more to skip the wait, probably.

I have multiple small plastic components that have broken for my appliances and use some quick fixes to get the appliance working again, but they eventually break again. These cheap pieces of plastic can never be purchased alone and require buying a much more expensive part which includes the cheaper plastic piece.

Saying that, 3D printing really seems like something I'd like to start doing and build my own parts to fix things myself. Any recommendations on a printer to use?

I wouldn't call it a recommendation, but I suffer through using my Formlabs SLA printer because the results are of amazing quality. But their resin is expensive, you need 2 additional machines if you want to do the washing and curing halfway conveniently and since the beginning (and still ongoing) there have been firmware issues which cause the machine to sometimes lock you out of a DRM-ed resin cartridge before it is actually empty ... but in exchange you get a pretty reliable 0.1mm precision on stable waterproof parts that look like they were injection molded. With the right settings, nobody will recognize the parts as 3D printed because there are no visible layer lines at all and after a bit of varnish you can get the clear resin to be see-through like acrylic glass.

That's a high end looking printer, with a high end price. How much 3D printing do you do? Which model specifically do you own? Really nice looking stuff.

>People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost.

For many people, most of it is spent doing such BS, doom-scrolling, binge-watching, games, and so on, that taking time making DIY stuff would be quite an improvement with regards to value their time, outcome, and even their mental health.

exactly - I would call this the "forgetting the entertainment value" fallacy :)

Also you can't turn your time into money as fungible as spending money is. So Tme is more "liquid" than cash.

That said I got a 3d printer in mid-2016 and basically printed daily getting to know it until the start of 2019 - I had sooo much fan turning the wooden printer i started out with into something reliable. Nowadays i mainly print stuff as I design and need it a couple times a month.

Time is not money. When you spend money - you lose money. When you don't spend time - you lose time!

If you sell your time for a living, then time (during certain parts of the day), does have a value. If you aren't selling your time and are doing something else, you are losing money.

For the vast majority of people who sell their time for a living, their time doesn't actually have value because they are either on salary, and cannot exchange more time for more money, or their manager controls their schedule and they do not get to choose how much time they get to sell for how much money.

With inflation when you don't spend money you lose money too.

Eh, at some point you end up with a backlog of things to do where you never have unspent time.

I've got about 3-500 hours left on a home renovation project, 10-20 on a playhouse for my daughter, 50 or so on a desk for myself, 1000 on a personal programming project, I really need to spend about 500 hours getting back into shape, and all of that is competing for the time I have left after the weekly commitments I have to my day job, my family, and basic self-care.

Practically speaking I'm working with about 10-20 hours a week here of discretionary spending, maybe 30 or so if I'm really tight and can use all the disjoint minutes effectively, and will get through my current backlog in 2-3 years. If nothing else comes up that's higher priority.

I don't value my time at zero, I just think making something is more valuable than my time.

You are correct about the utility calculation, of course.

It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.

But what's the fun in just buying stuff? Imagine every problem is solved with money, there is no taste to anything amymore.. if she could just buy a foldable hanger this video was much shorter, not fun, not interesting..

I think you're missing the point, which is that for some people making things is immensely rewarding

I think the best ideas come when you make something that you really want for yourself.

In 2020, I really wanted an eink calendar to hang on my wall.

Still, many people built one for themselves and never turned it into a commercial product.

It’s a lot of work and some of it is boring. And you have to pay for certification and worry about all that paperwork that comes with a business.

It took me 3 years:

https://shop.invisible-computers.com

> And you have to pay for certification

This is the thing that got me down and it seems to be the biggest barrier to entry for commercializing hardware products. The CE/FCC certification is killer.

CE is much worse than FCC. Maybe the US Market would work as a start?

I can recommend Sunfire Testing for certification. They are used to working with hackers.

If you want you can email me and I can maybe help with you with some advice.

thats a great reference, thanks!

We just had a great experience working with US TECH (https://ustech-lab.com).

The price was reasonable (for what it is), the main contact was great, they were very fast and super flexible with our delays.

I know they offer CE, but we just went for FCC on unintentional emitters. It wasn't nearly as challenging as we thought it would be.

Expect to pay something around $2,500 to $5,000 depending on how labor intensive your tests are, or become.

> Expect to pay something around $2,500 to $5,000

Yeah, that's what's discouraging. For something that is effectively a hobby project, spending many thousands of dollars is too much of a risk, when you're not even sure people will buy the thing you created.

Agreed. It's really frustrating.

FWIW, I've done some digging and at least it's not just a mafia shakedown (like the USB-IF charging thousands for an artificially scarce numeral).

The equipment and expertise are both expensive and time consuming. DIY is possible, but would cost considerably more.

I'm a little surprised I haven't heard about a single start-up accelerator that has cert gear available...

Sadly I am in the UK. I guess I could certify it with the FCC anyway, but my aim was to sell locally initially.

Would you mind elaborating on what felt problematic, please? I looked into the CE requirements a few years ago and it didn't seem like a large barrier for small electronic devices - nothing that wouldn't be expected in a safe design already, such as ensuring proper earthing or using lead-free components.

I'm curious to know what you found so that I don't have any unpleasant surprises should I go ahead with a hardware product! Maybe konschubert also has experiences they could share here.

The issue is that verification costs 10K, no matter if you use a pre-certified radio or not.

link is broken for me

Fixed

I am so happy to have discovered this here. I've wanted this product for years.

I just placed an order for the coworking space I run in Brighton, UK.

Super excited about all the potential applications of this. The simplicity of the developer experience[1] is exactly what I want.

Seems like it will also work wonderfully with the screenshot api[2] I'm currently working at.

[1]: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

[2]: https://urlbox.io

Holy crap, now I am impressed!

If I am seeing this right, I could use your screenshot API to implement a website rendering feature for the display, super easily!

I was toying with running headless chromium, but if I can get that as a service, it's an absolute winner! But I would need to see if I can afford the pricing.

Providing this service to my users for an average device lifetime of 10 years free of charge is a lot of screenshots... I won't be able to fold that into the price of the smart screen. I might need to look into a subscription.

Thank you!

I have a few ideas about some tweaks we could make to support you and your customers with this.

We're up to 11 years and profitable with a small full-time team... so I'm very confident that we'll still be around in another 10 :)

I'll drop you an email to discuss.

Urlbox has a beautiful website. And the invisible calendar is beautiful too. Would it happen to render multiple calendars concurrently? (I share an office, seems like the perfect xmas gift)

Thank you!

Credit to Lukas Wiesehan: https://lw.works/en

Nice design work on Urlbox

Cheers. That was thanks to Lukas: https://lw.works/en

I made a picture frame that I can send photos to with Telegram. I've been using it for years and have made a couple for family members too.

But, I soon realised that it wasn't cheap enough or reliable enough to be a product. That would require a lot more work and investment.

This looks nice. The website is a bit thin on description/documentation. How much does the display weigh? What's the power usage (Watts)? Presumably the device connects via Wifi? Does it support WPA3? Does this work with private iCloud calenders (e.g. as described in [0])? Is all processing on-device, i.e. doesn't involve any cloud services and would work in a closed home network if the calendars are served on that network? What's the update frequency/interval? Can it combine multiple calendars (i.e. private and work)? Is the frame user-replacable?

[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-find-your-icloud...

Hi, you are right, I need to add a FAQ section to the page!

- It weights about 400g including the wooden stand.

- It draws very little power. I am not sure how much, but you can run it on a battery pack for quite a while. (The power draw is so low that some external battery packs think that nothing is connected and go into standby, which is annoying.)

- Yes it uses WiFI. Not sure about WPA3 to be honest.

- Private iCloud calendars should work if you get the secret iCalendar URL as described in the article you linked.

- There is very little processing on-device, it needs an API backend that runs on the internet. Code that runs on an embedded device and updates only via Over-The-Air updates is always a liability in terms of maintenance and security, which I tried to minimise.

- The device polls for updates a few times a minute. But depending on the calendar integration, there may be caching going on in the backend. (For example, iCalendar data is cached for 10 minutes. The cache is encrypted.)

- Yes, you can combine calendars from multiple sources and accounts.

- You can replace the frame if you are willing to tinker a bit, re-solder a connection, and are you're careful.

Thanks. Would you open-source the server software so one can self-host it? To be honest, I wouldn’t want to disclose my calendars to a third party.

I’m a worried about my IP being stolen, to be honest. I don’t have much of a moat besides the software which is quite solid, I think

That's a pretty great price for an eink based display. Only setup thru iPhone atm? When is Android coming? Is there a webui for setup as an alternative?

> iCalendar setup is only possibly through the iPhone app at the moment.

From what I gather, only iCalendar can be setup just through iPhone.

> It can display calendars from Google Calendar and any iCalendar link* (ical, ics, ...).

> You need your phone (iOS or Android) only for the initial configuration.

You can setup Google Calendar through Android

Almost everything is possible with Android.

The icalendar support is very new and The Android update for it is still in progress.

You should 'Show HN' this in its own right, this is great.

I’ve done this before and I’m afraid I’ll get banned if I do this too much.

Even though I definitely am a normal, annoying HN user. :)

It has been on here a couple of times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=invisible-computers.c...

Yeah I saw those just checking if it had been via Algolia, but they didn't do very well and I thought an actual 'Show HN' that's clearly a 'member project' as it were, with someone around to answer questions and chat about it, might fare better. (The call for feedback a couple of years ago aside.) Plenty of interest in this thread despite no relation (in terms of the product) to OP! And people seem often to be commenting about these things, or difficulty in buying big/good enough epaper displays to do it, etc.

That’s class! Well done.

For that price I can purchase 3 Google home smart displays which do all this and more.

I guess the main advantage would be always-on with little to no power consumption, but all your pictures still have cables.

You're comparing the output of a small business with a multinational behemoth that has the advantages in procurement and manufacturing due to volume. What's the point of making that comparison and effectively negging someone's work?

People buy products based on the value proposition of those products, not because they are hippies that want to support independent technology makers.

I don't understand why factual statement and reality checks get modded down; this is just plain denial.

What an odd reply. Where possible, I will try and support independent technology makers, often even if that means it's a slightly worse/different product.

Just because you're cynical and jaded, doesn't mean that everyone else is. You're not giving a factual reality check, you're just being an ass

For me (i built something similar) the main advantages where:

- I control my own data - It is e-ink, not glaring into my face - Screen is way bigger - Screen is hanging on the wall, I do not have to look down - Less energy consumption of course

and most importantly:

- Google home displays are not actually helpful at all in this respect (we have one in the kitchen too) as they do not show calendar info well at all. For a family of 4 you need to be able to look at the entire week or more to plan events quickly

PS: I use a 10000mAh battery in the frame, so no cables A typical use-case is glancing at the calendar during a phone call for example

I agree with everything you're saying, but I do want to note that you can put just about anything you want on Google's displays by casting.

HomeAssistant has built-in support to cast lovelace dashboards onto them, and it works surprisingly well. Even has touchscreen support, which I didn't know was possible with casting.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cast/#home-assist...

Control your own data is certainly a big selling point, but seems this one seems to rely on a closed source saas model.

But those 3 google home smart displays are ugly, use watts of power and are spying on you.

I'd pay more for a version with touchscreen support for reserving a block of time. I've been using Joan's for several years and people generally love them, but their subscription price-to-feature value leaves much to be desired.

Something to consider if you decide to market to businesses.

http://www.getjoan.com/

I've wanted something like this for a while... might have to pick one up. Congrats on making something you wanted AND bringing it to market.

Funny . i built something quite similar and many others I am sure too. World is pretty good today. BTW your price is very good, the screen and battery itself is quite expensive already for me (two color e-paper)

Every great product needs a product expert and a technical expert. The two overlapping is a magical opportunity to create something not only new, but right.

Ha, awesome! I half built one but never finished. Good for you.

That's great, I really wanted something like that when I worked at Google because nobody allowed their machine to make noise and I'd miss the 'meeting indicator' and be late for meetings. Started making one but with much more grandiose and expensive design :-). So impressed you got this done and on the market!

cough there is a common module with an esp32-s2 you can grab for 2EUR. Its cheaper than i can get a pro micro clone. look for "s2-mini" on Ali.

I cannot fathom somebody still using an arduino nano.

I had stocked on 10-20 nanos from some years ago and was cycling through them

but now that you said that I went and bought 10 esp32-s2s from aliexpress, thanks!

I am planning to do 'advent of things' this year, where I will make something small every day until Christmas, hopefully the s2 minis will arrive before december :)

they are especially good for emulating USB-hid stuff - I have made several password and OTP emitting boxes with them.

Ideas are talking to me so ofte , that it is hard to decide with which one to go. Which one people need?

> As David Lynch says, ideas are very quiet, you have to learn how to listen, so far I have not heard one, but maybe some day..

If that's your experience, either you're lucky, or just wait, or both. They're loud, and they keep coming faster and faster, and ideas beget ideas. You need a solid mental wall to protect yourself from them.

Edit: *you're

>3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano.

If all you have is a hammer...

I have an opposing view. The current popularity of those particular crafting items has resulted in a plethora of crumbling and misshapen plastic widgets with barely-functional networking features that required limited creativity or novel ideas to create. This is to the detriment of the many other skills and crafts used to create physical objects.

The state of off the shelf maker tools and parts is insane.

Recently built a custom LED controller based on a WT32 ETH01 (cheap, $8 on Aliexpress, ESP32 with an Ethernet port). I ended up building 3 revision, all in EasyEDA (Web-based EDA tool), which integrates directly into JLPCB (PCB manufacturer).

After submitting to JLPCB, they fabbed the PCBs, assembled them, and shipped them to West Coast USA in less than a week! For like an all-in cost of ~$10 per board, insane.

The esp-idf toolchain is amazing, and pretty well documented, with lots of concrete examples of getting peripherals up and running (SPI, Ethernet, TCP/IP stack).

Then I need custom enclosures, so got a Bambu Labs X1. Learning Fusion 360 was a bit of a lift, but a week later had a snap-fit, fully custom enclosure.

That combo of super easy, supplier integrated EDA, cheap and quick fab and assembly, good tools chains, and easy building of enclosures is night-and-day from doing hobby electronics back in early 2000s.

Choose a base ESP32 board, design and have a shield fabbed in a week, quickly code it up, done.