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Comment by popalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Why does this need to be a hardware solution? Seems insanely hard to justify the cost/risk compared to offering a simple SaaS.

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I sort of like the physicality. There’s something satisfying about using a physical device for a communicator. One issue is privacy and security. Does it just broadcast messages after someone hits play? That’s not awesome in an open space. What if someone nicks it? How do you authenticate?

The same features could probably be achieved with a smartphone, without the security issues, and good headphone support.

Philosophy: building on current platforms limits solution sets and only gives you primitives that they thought of. I built 15+ variants of software versions tangential to flowy. It always limits experience. This doesn't mean everything should be it's own hardware. I just believe that human to human commz should be put higher on the hierarchy than, say your calculator.

Practical answer: we want to do cool things like "hover over keypad and say a name" and then you can talk to them. Only possible when we build the whole stack.

Thoughts?

Seems like a huge amount of capital to invest in something most people are already perfectly fine without. If I were in this company's shoes, I would build a SaaS and sell the hardware as an add-on. The venn diagram of people who need this type of VoIP/chat service but don't have an existing SaaS solution is small, even smaller if you also limit it only to people who need hardware and are willing to pay for it.

At least if you did a dual SaaS/hardware offering you'd cast a bigger net.

There's no SaaS opportunity. It would literally be Discord

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