Ask HN: Advice on a passion project in a small (but growing) market

[dbla]

tl;dr; I'm building a fitness tracker for rock climbers[1] that will be sold though rock climbing gyms. The climbing gym market is small and we have heavy up front costs to bring to market. I'm looking for advice in getting past this hurdle.

Two years ago I gave a talk at a tech conference called "Lessons learned prototyping a wearable for rock climbers with Node." I'm an avid rock climber and I was looking for a way to connect climbing with my passion for tech as well as find a project that would give me a chance to learn more about hardware and embedded systems programming. I continued working on the project after the talk and have made a good bit of progress but I'm at a critical point where I need to decide if I should continue with this project and if so, how to fund it.

The climbing industry is still relatively small (~600 gyms in the US, thousands more in Europe). The sport will have a debut in the 2020 Olympics and there are a number of new rock gyms that are sprouting up each year so the overall outlook of the industry is positive. I have 20 prototypes that I'm currently testing at one gym and three more gyms that have offered to test.

My buddy and I both have full time jobs and do this for fun on the side. I'd be happy to continue to bootstrap this project, but we have several hefty costs (in the hundreds of thousands) that we're going to get hit with if we want to bring this product to market including injection mold tooling costs, FCC certification, first batch of units, some (expensive) final engineering work, etc.

Does anyone have experience getting over this hurdle in a hardware project? The original intent of the project was to build something cool with no real dreams of turning it into a business, but in order to actually make the idea a reality I don't see another path. We need gyms to be on board and in order to do that we have to be able to provide them with a polished (not 3D printed) product.

[1] https://www.climbalytics.com

[tlb]

Can you not build this as an app for an Apple Watch using NFC tags? Or any other commercial wearable. That'll save you a boatload of money, and probably be more appealing to climbers who usually do other sports as well and would rather have a single device.

When it comes to raising money, investors will want to know how big your moat is. For instance, if in the future Garmin or Apple added a climbing feature to their product, can you keep growing?

[dbla → tlb]

I wish we could use NFC on an Apple watch. It would have saved a lot of trouble. Unfortunately the read range of NFC is too short to work on a climbing wall. The climbers wrist will sometimes be up 12+ inches away from the closest point on the wall. This was the challenge that I ran into with our first prototype.

As for moat, I think we have some patentable IP (another potential large cost to file for that patent) and because our model hinges on a relationship with the climbing gym, the big guys would have to establish a salesforce to sell into these gyms, which I think for the size of the market would not be worth it for them. If we can solidify a decent market share it would probably be more likely that they'd try to buy us out rather than fighting for those relationships, but I'm not certain about that.

[matt_the_bass → dbla]

You might want to consider alternate technological approaches. Have you considered using an IMU to deadreckon the route and detect rests and falls? I think this would be an perfect application. Then you wouldn’t need the rfid tape. You could also probably use an existing 3rd party hardware. I think developing the hardware and managing its production will kill you in the end. Plus, who wants yet another doodad to buy and wear.

Another possible method is to use computer vision and video to capture the climbers motion.