
Ask HN: Have you ever sold a physical product? - vanilla-almond
I assume many readers here are creating digital products. But what about physical products?<p>Have you ever designed a physical product that was then manufactured for distribution and sale?<p>What made you choose something physical over something digital? How did you find a manufacturer?<p>Be great to hear some thoughts, stories and experiences. Thanks
======
Gibbon1
Two bits of advice.

1\. Often takes 3-4 years to develop a functioning sales channel. In B2B
companies will order samples and literature and then place no orders at all
for a year or two. And then only place small sporadic orders for the next two
years after that.

2\. Going to scale is frightfully expensive. Developing the production process
is 5-100 times more expensive than developing the product. This is where most
small groups trying to develop hardware get stuck.

3\. You can't fix hardware issues by pushing changes to a server. Consider
Takata Corporation, shipped bad airbag inflators from one plant, went bankrupt
as a result.

