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A comment on YC for Hardware. Parent comment

Re:YC for Hardware by bravo22 on Thursday February 05, 2015 @09:00PM (#9007373)
I think there is a large difference. It requires a different skillset to manufacture 1000 of something that consumers will buy vs manufacturing customer touch points that are owned, and serviced by the company.

Your manufacturing pipeline, volumes, service issues are all very different. So as great as BufferBox was I don't think they were a hardware company and certainly not for the purposes of this thread. I am not discounting their abilities or what they made but based on my experience they are apples and oranges.

Most of the problems kickstarter companies run into are unique supply chain, and manufacturing issues that BufferBox wouldn't have had to deal with.

Additionally, a big part of what BufferBox offered would have been in their app, and website. A locker that you can remotely lock and unlock is not difficult from an electronics point of view and had been around before.

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Re:YC for Hardware by tjculbertson on Friday February 06, 2015 @12:19PM (#9010063)
So would you consider SpaceX to be a service company and not hardware? They build rockets to deliver stuff for customers. I think defining whether a company is a HW company is too narrow. If you need to build HW to build a business of serving customers, or need to build HW to sell to customers, you need to build hardware in either case.
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