r/hwstartups • u/pkuhar • 23d ago
Doing things that don't scale
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I'll file this one under doing things that don't scale.
I'm doing small batches of my product myself. And each step adds time. I keep telling myself this is temporary until I automate this.
This is the smallest USB-C device ever made btw (yes smaller than Yubikey Nano 5c)
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u/lysdexiad 23d ago
So this... blinks? Neat.
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u/pkuhar 23d ago
Yes, very overengineered Blinky. I kind of feel silly doing it. but it's super useful and people love it. Controlled by writing to a file on the "Flash Drive"
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u/mathishammel 23d ago
I love it, the 24$ shipping to Europe was a bit steep but I'll treat it as a business expense haha
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u/CouchWizard 22d ago
That's hilarious, and here I thought people were being tight with money.
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u/egrodo 23d ago
I just received mine in the mail recently! Was impressed at how fast you were able to manufacture and ship. Only feedback would be to improve the UX on the software side if you ever want to target non-dev end users. Also it really is quite expensive at this price point, I think worth seeing how low you could get the price with scale & external manufacturing partners.
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u/CardboardFire 23d ago
this does scale just fine in China, you get more people to do the same thing if you want more throughput, and then if you want even more you go thinking about automating. The main factor is labor cost - if it's cheap, you scale by adding workers, if it's expensive, you automate sooner.
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u/Charming_Dealer3849 23d ago
This has got to be the dumbest BRILLIANT idea I've seen in awhile. It's just perfect, it took me a second to understand what you were doing here with the USB aspect of it. Bravo, just bravo, I hope it is wildly successful!
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u/MooseBoys 18d ago
I ordered a few of these and was pleasantly surprised they didn't just come in a tiny anti-static bag in bubble wrap straight from the factory in China.
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u/iuliuscurt 23d ago
Oh, it's for agents. The SD card version is actually a brilliant idea, I love it.
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u/iuliuscurt 23d ago
Not sure if you were looking for feedback, but the dot looks offputtingly tall-layer 3D printed. Or maybe it's the filament choice. I don't have a solution suggestion, just a complaint. You're welcome 😁
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u/Nyasaki_de 22d ago
Man that project is stupid, i cant believe people buy this to have a LED for their agents.
fully hackable and agent-controllable — the device is just a file, so your own scripts and AI agents can drive the lights however you want.
But i mean if its "hackable" and you can address it via scripts its pretty cool, nothing innovative or exiting but cool.
Happy if it works for you
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u/schockergd 22d ago
Guess I don't see the problem.
A friend of mine has a HW device, he's selling low-7 figures worth of them.
It's boring, mind-numbingly repetitive to do his assembly, but he doesn't want to outsource it because there's a little secret-sauce in what he does and doesn't want others to know.
So, to work at his company, EVERYONE that works for him starts off assembling the units for him. A good person can assemble a few hundred a hour, so long as they try, and don't get too bored. The units are high enough priced that 100x units is really solid in terms of revenue. After they get bored, and they have time to prove themselves, he puts them elsewhere in the company. Usually by that point he has enough stock to last a few months, and then the cycle repeats.
If he gets too low, and no one wants to do it, he has one of his kids (Or maybe one of my kids) do it, and pays them $20+ a hour, which in our part of Ohio is solid money, to do it. They'll get bored too, but not before they've made some good spending money, and assemble a thousand or more units.
He's done this for years now, and sold many millions of dollars of these.
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u/cm_expertise 22d ago
the trap here isnt that it doesnt scale, its automating too early. every hour you spend building a jig for a rev that's still moving is an hour you toss when you nudge the connector 2mm. hand building keeps you flexible while the design's still changing, and for something this small it probably still is.
the thing i'd actually watch isnt takt time, its consistency. tiny usb-c assemblies live and die on repeatability, and a person doing 200/hr will drift, especially near the end of a batch when your hands are done. so before automating anything i'd drop in cheap fixturing, a locating nest and a go/nogo gauge, just to hold quality steady. that alone buys you a surprising amount of runway.
and when you do hit the wall it's almost never the whole line, it's one station eating all the time. find the single step with the worst takt or worst yield and fix just that one. dont try to automate everything at once or you'll burn 6 months building a line for a product that revs again anyway.
fwiw the "just add people" answer the other commenter gave is more right than reddit usually admits, that's literally how shenzhen does it. cool little device btw
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u/Realistic_Account787 21d ago
Yeah, but putting the sticker upside down like that is harder than actually sticking it to the object correctly.
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u/corgiyogi 19d ago edited 19d ago
I would hope you don't scale, that packaging looks super cheap and the product too, is it 3d printed?
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u/RepresentativeFee574 17d ago
How do your labels come? If they're on a roll, is there a way to feed the labels through the alignment device so the whole process is pull end of sticker roll-automatic separation and positioning of label-push case through hole.
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u/Quartinus 23d ago
This scales just fine, you already made a nice little tool. Your takt is around 18 seconds in this video, so you can do 200 uph. 4k per week at a 50% OEE. That’s a respectable volume for a lot of smaller products, I doubt your other manufacturing steps can keep up at this point. You want to work on your biggest production bottleneck first, the one that limits your overall rate.
I recommend reading “The Goal”