For point 4, that could be a pretty smart move on their part and the reason they're able to keep going. Selling directly to consumers/setting up the distribution and marketing for that etc would be really difficult and a lot of D2C hardware companies have not done too well recently. It's unfortunate that it results in it being difficult to access for hobby markets, but relying on large, stable contracts from a lot of big manufacturers that already built up marketing and distribution over decades of operations is probably one of the better ways to commercialize a hardware innovation today.
I feel eInk’s marketing strategy has really held the technology back. They seem to want to force the technology into a few well-defined verticals that they came up with themselves instead of letting an army of smaller companies innovate rapidly.
They were founded in 1997, so their earliest patents have probably expired. I wonder when the clones will arrive. Maybe they’ll have a better marketing and sales strategy.
Those don't seem like valid reasons not to offer for sale to consumers. Distribution is a non-issue. Literally ship in a case of them to FBA or one of the countless other fulfillment operations and put up a listing. Amazon handles the customer service.
As for the marketing, just don't do any. Let the hobby market find it on their own and then just set a minimum order for anyone that wants to work directly with the company for their small project.
I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.
I really don't see how their current strategy could be that great considering how rare it is to see products out there that are e-ink.
> I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.
I'm trying to think of a single kickstarter-style project that generated a volume above even 100K units let alone a million. I can't think of any.
BeatBuddy is probably the most successful by unit volume project I can think of, and they're probably under 10,000 units.
So, the evidence is that the hobbyist market is completely useless to manufacturers.
Well yeah, but that's not where the money is in selling to hobbyists.
If you want someone to invent something that uses them, you'll have to have them in the hands of people that invent stuff. Maybe you only break even on your small scale sales to hobbyists, but eventually one of those hobbyists will be the one to invent the next big thing.
My point was that over the last 5-10 years, we have seen ZERO hobbyists create the Next Big Thing(tm) out of a kickstarter-like.
And, I would argue, for two good reasons.
1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.
The combination of the two is death for the Next Big Thing(tm) coming out of a kickstarter.
Oculus and Pebble maybe aren't "Next Big Thing", but both were major hardware Kickstarter projects. Pebble was the first mainstream smartwatch, and the VR landscape would be significantly different if not for Oculus. It's probably fair to say that neither was iPhone level of industry revolutionary, but it's a mistake to discount them entirely.
My comment wasn't about Kickstarters, I think they're irrelevant in this discussion. I'm talking about making your stuff accessible to people outside of large corporations. The world isn't two perfectly non-intersecting groups labeled "hobbyists" and "professionals". There's enormous overlap. Hell, a very large portion of HN falls into both categories.
Let's say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it'd get bought. But since I can't use XYZ in my personal life, I've never even heard of it, and as a result when we're deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn't get bought.
Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I've met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It's hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you're sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you'll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.
So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it's only accessible to large corporations, then it's not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won't have familiarity with your thing and they'll just pick what they know.
Furthermore, it's not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you're done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It's not like you're personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.
Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.
Why would only the initial kickstarter matter? There are several major brands/companies that started on kickstarter and then went on to sell quite a bit. Pebble raised millions. Oculus started out on kickstarter and sold to facebook for a couple billion and are currently selling units faster than they can make.
Pebble raised $10.3M in Kickstarter. I didn't find how many units that was, but with retail price of $99 that should fit your criteria. Also, was using eink.
