Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions!
My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
I wouldn't discount your ability to bring this back to market. Would consult a lawyer to see what implications taking over the branding and APIs have. But clearly this has a big market.
People's stuff will work again thanks to you and you should feel great about it!
Once the new server was up, did any signs from the field connect to it?
Do you know how many signs are out there actively looking for the mothership?
> Good question! No signs connected to the server until I reached out to some other sign owners to try out my instructions.
I do not know how many signs are out there. I imagine most people would have just unplugged their sign after the company's API vanished since any data would be stale and useless.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2023/01/09/iot-archaeology-leads-to-api...
Even your calculations are way too optimistic.
Giving it little thought, I can say that NYC would have at best 10k sales of this item. In total... including any knockoffs.
The product may have scaled to be able to sell to London, Paris, Tokyo, Soul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. But this is the total addressable market for this item.
Let's say you have 2 engineers in US working on this full time - that's 500k in salaries(that includes all associated staff).
In NYC you would be able to charge $300, but no other major metro area has that kind of disposable income. In London the max price would be $170, Paris and others - $150... And boom, you can't even make a product to cover development costs.(not to mention any operating costs)
Cool art project and commercial viability clash perfectly here. This item is at best - an art piece, that should cost as such($3000+).
USA, the land of start ups!
That's 2 days of median disposable income.
For comparison:
San Francisco, U.S. - Disposable income after rent: $4,710
Zurich, Switzerland - Disposable income after rent: $4,626
Chicago, U.S. - Disposable income after rent: $3,298
Boston, U.S. - Disposable income after rent: $3,188
New York City, U.S. - Disposable income after rent: $3,157
Sydney, Australia - Disposable income after rent: $2,615
Melbourne, Australia - Disposable income after rent: $2,485
Oslo, Norway - Disposable income after rent: $2,342
Copenhagen, Denmark - Disposable income after rent: $2,285
Wellington, New Zealand - Disposable income after rent: $2,075
Depending on your list and method, New York could be 44th on global purchasing power index:
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings.jsp?title=20...
Or 15th:
https://defence.pk/pdf/attachments/screen-shot-2019-11-27-at...
Anyway, "no other major metro area has that kind of disposable income" seems inaccurate.
I've had a few projects like this where I list out the BOM then go for 'reasonable business success profit' and scratch my head at exactly this line:
> At even just 60k per founder, with the profit per sign sold being maybe $400, you would probably need to sell ~600 signs at full price per year to create enough revenue to run payroll.
Hardware is an exponent to the value of the internal reward, but the root of all business profit. We need a better funding mechanism for this style of development - more like the hardware lifecycle - wasn't Bolt doing something like that?
EDIT: Here is the specific tweet: https://twitter.com/NYCTRAINSIGN/status/926106932573810688
It's a shame because there is a small but sustainable business here.
Why would you think that a company using a $25 Adafruit HAT that could be found for a magnitude less elsewhere would be using cheap LED matrices?
Put another way, what from the article gives you enough confidence to say that they would have used cheaper parts?
There are various "HUB75" panels of different pitch, brightness, LED type, matrix size, etc. Also, there's variations like "HUB75E" with 5 address lines instead of 4. Address lines are typically A/B/C, A/B/C/D, or A/B/C/D/E. And there's also "HUB08", "HUB12" and other standards.