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Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem with hardware startups is more subtle. Unless you open up a fundamentally new market segment or find a niche application, your product is asking to be commodified. Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win. There really is no distinguishing feature for Jawbone or Fitbit. Other hardware startups like Anki are doing stuff that's niche and novel in areas unlikely to be ever entered by Apple/Google/etc.

The technology component of Jawbone or Fitbit was, even in 2007, very very basic and hardly novel. There is literally nothing in Jawbone or Fitbit that is super novel: their sensors aren't ground breaking, their algorithms are (presumably) meh, etc.

VC's hope that these companies will mature to become superstars and achieve the level of tech quality of Qualcomm, FB, GE, Intel, Google, etc. in their respective markets. This didn't happen with Jawbone or Fitbit.

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What about hardware that doesn't so directly rely on an information network, such as sous vide (Anova was recently acquired [0]) and appliances like the Roomba? e.g. I'm sure Google engineers could eventually design a great sous vide, but not much about a sous vide does is amplified by the Google ecosystem. I suppose those kinds of things, as useful and coveted as they are by their fans, could reach elite status in their niche markets, but the highest potential valuation would be too small beans for some VC.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/anova-electrolux/

Roomba came out in 2002 so it predates the current round of VC hardware companies by quite a number of years. I feel like Roomba has been around long enough that they have strong brand recognition, even if their product is cloned and commodified.

The Instant Pot also comes to mind, though I have no idea how they are funded...

See https://www.fitbit.com/technology for a partial and outdated list of novel Fitbit technology.

There are 3 items on that list, and all 3 have been present in all of Fitbit's competitors for years. Even if Fitbit was first mover on these technologies, they've long since lost any unique ownership of any of these 3.

Read the details. Yes, Apple Watch has some form of heart-rate monitoring. But what's described on that page is continuous all-day monitoring. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer.

Yes, you can tell Apple Watch what kind of workout you're about to do and it will record it. But what's described on that page is automatically detecting and recording a type of workout based on motion. Fitbit has better technology to better serve the consumer.

Yes, you can track sleep with a third-party Apple Watch app if you're careful about when you recharge the device. But that page says "your Fitbit tracker can record your time spent in light, deep & REM sleep, as well as your time awake, then distills that information in easy-to-reach graphs in the Fitbit app."

There have been niche products that supposedly tracked sleep stages but they've been reviewed as inaccurate. Fitbit has unique ownership of this technology and major players haven't even claimed to compete with it.

What about Apple watch heart-rate monitoring is not continuous and all-day?

Continuous monitoring is only claimed during a recorded workout https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666

That page doesn't say specifically, but my recollection is that it's otherwise every 10 minutes if you're still. In non-workout mode they don't measure heart rate if you're moving; presumably not accurate enough.

All-day heart-rate monitoring can only be claimed by devices with a battery life of at least a day.

Neither page offered any sort of metric on what constitutes 'accurate'. so how do you know FitBit doesn't just have a lower standard than Apple does?

right... I mean "continuous" on a digital device is still going to have some sample rate... Apple Watch has a 10 minute sample rate most of the time and some higher sample rate when they are doing "continuous" monitoring during a workout. Fitbit must have a great way to store that data if they really are doing "continuous" monitoring all day.

> Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win.

They swooped in but wouldn't say that they won. At least in the UK I seem to see more people with a Fitbit than with an Apple Watch.

Fitbit sells at 1/4 the price of the Apple watch. Apple is getting all the revenues.

I'd argue that the incumbents wouldn't have thought it possible to build a smartwatch or fitness tracker if it wasn't for these start-ups, though. They're just really good at acquiring and copying.

When the iPhone first came out, the way you measured your heart rate was by putting your finger over the camera on the back of the phone.

> They're just really good at acquiring and copying.

Right, but that's why the products become commoditized. The inventors get an early burst of success and easy money, but everyone else figures out how to make similar products very quickly.

Even smartphones are commoditized. The iPhone and the Samsung phones are the rare examples of commodity hardware that can beat the competition on the strength of their software experiences. The other companies are fighting tooth and nail in a textbook example of a commoditized market where the profits are difficult to eke out.

There is competition among fitness trackers. Fitness trackers are not commoditized. There's a difference.

https://ycharts.com/companies/FIT/gross_profit_margin

> When the iPhone first came out, the way you measured your heart rate was by putting your finger over the camera on the back of the phone.

Actually, no. Pulse-oximeters were always quite cheap. Also, Casio had heart rate (although not continuous) monitors on some of their watches for many years.

iPhone 2G did not have any heart rate monitoring...

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