> Make good hardware and sell it at a profit.
It really isn't that simple, and I wish people would stop acting like making ANY profit is enough to keep a business around.
First, making a profit isn't enough... you have to make more profit than the people investing money in the company could make elsewhere. If you make $1 for every $100 invested, and some other company can make $2 for every $100, why would anyone invest in the $1 maker? It isn't just about profit, it is about the opportunity cost of using capital on something that isn't as profitable as other capital uses.
Second, let's say the profit margins are actually pretty good, and you make a nice return on this quality hardware you make. However, if the quality actually is really good, what do you do after everyone who needs your product buys it? You either have to build in obsolescence, which everyone rightly hates, or you have to switch to making another product. That switch is expensive, and cuts into your profit margin... assuming your new product is even successful. This is a lot of risk.
What that risk means is that investors don't want to be left holding the bag when your product reaches market saturation and your pivot fails... which is going to make it harder to get investment.
Really, Sonos is a great example of what happens when you follow your instructions to "make a good product and sell it at a profit"... they did that for many years, and made money.... but now most people who want a speaker like Sonos makes already have them, and their growth has stopped. They can still make money on each speaker sold, but they are selling fewer of them. So they are trying to pivot to make money some other way, and it sounds like it might not be going great.
The only sustainable hardware business is to make and sell a huge amount of commodity hardware at small margins, and simply switch to the next thing once some OTHER company does the expensive research and experimentation to create the next thing people want to buy.