Developing crowdfunded hardware is no easy feat

Author: Mia Image source: Dazhi

In our daily lives, we always see all kinds of small desktop gadgets, and the developers of these gadgets are trying to get Indiegogo and Kickstarter to invest in them. Many desktop gadgets are the first attempts of small teams to develop hardware. It is really amazing that such a small team can not only establish itself in the manufacturing industry, but also create desktop gadgets without the help of any large companies. We don’t know how much confidence we should have in such companies, because we have gradually learned from long-term experience that even famous companies like Kickstarter can encounter troughs.

But sometimes small companies have big and successful ideas. For example, Flic is a small Bluetooth button designed with programming, which can meet almost all your needs. It is inexpensive and can be connected to automatic network pipelines like IFTTT, bringing great convenience to people. Flic has received nearly $1 million in investment, including investments in shipping equipment, update announcements, etc. This seems to be a beautiful and successful case.

However, the company talks about some details in the blog. It may be easy for you to find a factory in China to work with. However, it is very difficult to do it perfectly the first time. Juacim Westlund explained in the article that the software of the first generation Flic button cannot be updated. What is the reason? When Juacim Westlund's company Shortcut Labs first looked for the accessories needed for the button, it made some predictions about the engineering costs. The company looked up the cost of updating the memory bank on Google and believed that if the memory bank was updated, it would cause too high a cost and double the price of Flic, so it chose to refuse to update.

The company made a wrong prediction by thinking that updating the memory meant doubling the price, which not only inconvenienced us but also caused confusion for our most important customers, and we were foolish not to believe that brand new technology required a full software update.

But then the company actually contacted the people who sold the memory banks to companies like Shortcut Labs at a high price and interviewed them. Updating the memory bank does not necessarily result in doubling the price, so the Flic button will be able to be software updated in the future. However, the first patch for the Flic button is not software updateable. For early users, Flic did not replace other buttons, which are still useful, but the emergence of the Flic button shows that it is not easy to develop real hardware at a considerable scale, even if it is just developing a simple-looking small Bluetooth button hardware.

JPM compiled from,

The Verge, Crowdfunding hardware is harder than you think.