kartikkumar

It's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses.

We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.

Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.

The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.

Enjoy the read!

This is quite a popular idea but there's a lot of challenging economics that haven't been figured out yet.

CisLunar Industries [1] for example wants to harvest and process metal from debris on orbit.

Their initial application is to create metal fuel rods for thruster technology being developed by Neumann Space [2].

[1] https://www.cislunarindustries.com

[2] https://neumannspace.com

Congrats on your launch!

Back in 2015, I was part of an EU Marie Curie ITN network called Stardust [1] working on something similar.

We utilized robotic arms and a novel non-contact, detumbling technology (using eddy currents) to approach and remove Ariane rocket bodies [2].

It was a fascinating project and I subsequently worked on investigating mission analysis approaches to compute multi-target rendezvous sequences, specifically assessing the impact of orbital perturbations on the use of semi-analytical transfer leg design algorithms [3].

You might be interested in the follow-up to the Stardust network, dubbed Stardust-R [4]. Happy to connect you with any of the organizations involved if it's helpful.

It was the frustration of trying to manually deal with collecting information for component, subsystem, and system trade studies that led to me wondering if an 'amazon for space' [5] wouldn't help engineers focus on the really hard engineering instead of Googling :) [shameless plug]

Would love to learn more about your Droid platform if you're interested in chatting!

[1] https://www.stardust2013.eu

[2] https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/projekte-publikationen/pub...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...

[4] http://www.stardust-network.eu

[5] https://satsearch.com

Sounds good!

Congrats! Great to see YC supporting more software companies that are working towards finally bringing the "boring" parts of the sector into the 21st century.

If you're interested in exploring the idea of supply chain integration, I'd love to chat. We're an ESA-backed, online marketplace for the space sector [1], and we've built a few integrations already to bring tools and data together for engineers.

[1] https://satsearch.com