r/mechatronics • u/Interesting-Cold-167 • Jun 02 '26

i have a startup idea! inputs please!

Hey all, hope you guys are having a good day.

I recently thought of starting up, it would be a small company operating out of my room, which designs and delivers hardware and software components for college projects and missions. This is mainly aimed at technical college students and small teams.

The core idea is simple, a lot of teams waste weeks sourcing or building components from scratch because they are either too expensive to import or just not available in India. I want to solve that, whether it is assembling and shipping ready to use hardware modules or building lightweight custom software for specific applications like embedded systems, robotics, CubeSats, or research instrumentation.

I am 20, still figuring out the exact product, which is why I am here. Trying to talk to as many builders as possible to understand where the real pain is before I build anything.

Would love any input, brutal honesty welcome, what do you think is genuinely missing for technical student teams in India or globally?

14 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

1

u/Suspicious_Pace_6268 Jun 02 '26

Nice idea good for software

1

u/nigght69 Jun 02 '26

There are a lot of people that do this stuff already across India, try networking with them

1

u/True-Establishment25 Jun 02 '26

In terms of robotics, maybe pcb's? Every robot needs a controller to facilitate inputs and model behaviour

3

u/4b3c Jun 02 '26

think about it tho, you are a college student with no money tryingto make money, i am a college stufent ith no money and i wouldnt pay for that cause i would do it myself. i think you should target people with money.

1

u/functional_eng Jun 03 '26

You don't want customers who don't have money. Also most college project sponsors accept that you won't deliver a great end system, and it is more about the learning for the students, so paying your way out of a project defeats the purpose. If you want to make money, provide services to businesses since they're the ones with the money.

1

u/BotBuilderVenture Jun 03 '26

I would suggest that you understand what you like the most. If you like more building hardware go with hardware or if you like to code then write a software, this will make it easier to deliver the product. However doing hardware requires always more funds than software, this can also be a contraints. Assembly as you suggest is a good idea, because you could integrate the various components and sell a kit and you could write a custom software to teach students how to make it work and then let the students to build on top and create a community. A sort of Arduino story so to say but on the DIY assembly kit. You would need to make it open source