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Cost of customer acqusition. States have to be bagged one-by-one, each with an insanely long sales cycle, your profits have to cover those nice salespeople's salaries, while leaving you with sufficient profit to cashflow expansion. This is not a dev problem; the sort of orgs which are prepared, and can cashflow these sort of sales simply don't have (nor are they incentivized to have) any dev culture whatsoever.

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first, that margins are pretty standard on accounting for sales and overhead

but even if they aren't enough here then you sell the machines to those people to flip them to the states at a higher cost. Don't be in THAT sales game. Otherwise, sure, you can add 30% to the cost ... it's not going to be another 600% just to sell the thing.

And even if it was, I'm sure I can personally, in my spare time, produce a far better product than the one outlined in the article.

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