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Comment by hugs | Hacker News Reader

I love the easter egg at 3:13. ("ALL PROPRIETARY AND NO OPEN SOURCE MAKES INNOVATION A SLOW PROCESS") The text is upside down in the video, so it's easy to miss.

But on that note of open source vs proprietary, I'm building a business on open source hardware, yet I have a hard time proving to others (especially other startup founders) that open hardware is the way to go. They fear that their designs will get cloned and they'll get blown out of the water (implicitly at a lower cost by someone in Shenzhen). They want to ensure they can recoup their R&D costs. My point is that if you make a successful product, you're going to get cloned anyway. The counter-point is usually "But why make it any easier for them to clone you?"

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> My point is that if you make a successful product, you're going to get cloned anyway.

If you're going to get cloned either way, how will you make selling your hardware a sustainable business?

I love hardware (robotics, incidentally) but I'm so hesitant to release a hardware product because of the inevitability and futility of competing against cheaper clones. I've seen it happen again and again in the nascent world of drone racing - somebody comes up with an innovative new design and there's a clone on Banggood three weeks later. Then most people just buy the clone. I don't see how it can be sustainable.

In the short to medium-term, it's a hybrid product+consulting business model with consulting gigs to add features, custom sizes, or integrated with specific testing frameworks. Long term, competition is based on brand, build quality, distribution, ISV partnerships, and the ability to keep innovating. Also, it's a B2B product, so success or failure is predominantly driven by the quality of the sales team and their process as much as anything else.

I guess it comes down to that age old reputation thing. Get the brand out, get it known for quality and service, and stick with it.

What are you making? We went through the same process with the now-defunct-and-sued-by-patent-troll Comingle, trying to make open source sex toys. We'd get all those same questions over and over...

I'm a making a robot for physical testing of devices (phones, tablets, touchscreens, wearables, etc.). I learned tons of lessons and had success in the open source software world over the years (I started the Selenium project), and am now seeing how well those lessons transfer to the hardware world. For now, we make all our custom parts in-house with a bunch of 3D printers and CNC mills.

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