Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product | Hacker News Reader

Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

simonberens.com

832 pointssberens405 comments

This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC construction) -Anything you don't specify will be done least cost, and there is no amount of "least" which cannot be chased in manufacture.

The other one noted if you don't specify the density of plastic for bags, or paper for bags and packing, you get clingfilm thinner than you thought existed, and paper which is almost tissue in its weakness. You don't even get boxes to put the boxes in, if you don't specify boxes to be delivered in boxes. So now wrapping a pallet becomes a nightmare if they don't stack. And if you don't specify how many to stack, and how to pad the stack, they won't do unit height stacking if it costs labour time. Your risk.

Some of this like the casting mistake, or the knob thing, could happen anywhere and you have to be close to final manufacture spec to find out e.g. the metal coating impinges on the knob at the free space you specified, because your test rig didn't have powder coating. Or, that a design feature you need like the light entry holes, is used by the casting engineer as pour points because it looked like you'd specified mould pour points not functional holes.

But other things like "yea, you didn't spec how long to make the tails so we cut the tails as close as we could" is just the cheapening above: if you don't SAY its a 10cm tail for the connector, it will be 2cm, if saving 8cm of cable saves money for them.

I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.

That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China.

They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful motor and inside the remote.

They could have used actual wire-sized wire and had the most amazing product ever, for roughly zero more cost. (Possibly less, since surely it must cost _more_ to manufacture and solder micron-diameter wiring). It just makes no sense.

It makes a lot of sense if you agreed on a price per unit before everything was locked in. If their profit is a flat price minus expenses, lower expenses is more profit.

I ordered cups and did specify the thickness (based on a reference) of the plastic but didn’t specify how thick the boxes they shipped in should be. Guess what happened!

There's an extra point here about how quickly home grown stuff can go from drawing board to manufacture. Because it takes us months or years, we go through multiple iterations of prototyping and discover a lot of design issues. They seem to go through much less iteration because they can get stuff manufactured quickly and so don't always discover longevity issues like a too-thin wire.

You're not wrong, but there are 1000 of those rc cars, and maybe 20% have that feature you want, but everyone buys the cheapest because they don't know which has slightly better quality.

Now go with Kyosho or Tamiya and you DO know it will be best in class, but at 10x the cost.

I felt the same thing with GE home appliances. They would last forever if someone didn’t choose to make some little plastic thing so cheap.

China is a 1.4 billion people country, more than US + Europe, so it is expected that there is a wild gap between high end product and low cost there.

This stuff is inevitable as per the article, it's just whether there's a will to fix it for the next batch

Working with a Chinese vendors is an adversarial first relationship, where 差不多 is deeeeep in the culture (and, from my experience, tends to survive trips across the ocean).

There are professional communication/training courses for working with Chinese vendors/colleagues that spell all of this out, because it's not some secret. It's just a very different culture, with high context communication (I'll let you read what the practical implications of that are elsewhere). Want to have your mind blown? Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.

Being a low context person, I have significant and severe communication problems when working with Chinese colleagues/vendors.

I did not find this to be the case, except with a few low quality vendors we ended up dropping.

It was mostly the same as anywhere else, you go talk to them in person, tour their facilities/processes, and see what else they've built.

I was warned strongly about IP theft and cost cutting, but didn't find that expectation quite met reality. It may have been that our products were mostly un-copyable, and we specified everything precisely, or were just lucky.

chabuduo is basically fail fast, fail early with Chinese characteristics. Maybe because I was in a frat, but talking to Chinese salespeople seems very similar to talking to my frat brothers.

Personally, I never really had too many issues sourcing from China because I made sure I was always introduced to a reliable partner first.

And secondly, I told them when deciding on two options, choose the better quality option, regardless of price.

Basically, I didn't tell them to save us much money as possible if that made all the difference.

Given that Mandarin has many forms of "yes", isn't the problem that all those forms map on to our singular "yes". For a native speaker "yeeeessss" means something very different to "yes", but they would use a different word.

Knowing which is being spoken or heard is going to be hard.

Googled that ‘yes’ thing. Not different from my experience in other parts of the world. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. What is your environment?

>Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.

Is there a term for this? Because I see it in my personal life as well dealing with some low price manual labor that doesn't speak english.

Instructions often get lost in translation, the reply will be "yes" and it doesn't get done. I know they want to sound professional and confident, so saying no or asking questions is a "bad thing".

Can you share some resources/books/courses to learn more? I'm interested in exploring working with Chinese vendors and it would be nice to learn from someone else before jumping into it.

It might be a little worse in China, but you get a lot of the same behaviour from contract manufacturers everywhere else. I've been working on a high volume consumer product (you've almost certainly heard of it) and the manufacturer has used any slight delay by any other party to shift the schedule back by weeks or months. Late in the process we realised that they'd switched a capacitor for a lower cost one - same capacitance but lacking in some other spec points that were important. There isn't a lot of room for them to build things to a lower spec because the specs are pretty thorough and nailed down, but anywhere there is room they have gone lower cost.

This is generally true, volume and low cost situations exacerbate it, but it’s not limited to Chinese manufacturing. You see it everywhere. As a completely unrelated example: home remodeling. The guy I contracted did wonderful work and charged a completely fair price, but there were many parts that I hand waved at “he knows best” “he’ll pick the most sensible approach that matches the quality of the rest of project”. Wrong. Cheapest, fastest thing, using materials on hand if possible every time. The economics are obvious and it doesn’t matter to him insofar as I acquiesce or don’t notice. Why should it be any different for low cost mass manufacturing?

"It's not cheap, it's Builder Grade."

A lot of it comes down to differences between “ask” cultures and “guess” cultures, where if something is unknown we in the west may expect the person to ask for clarification, where as other cultures prefer to just guess, because doing _something_, even if it’s incorrect, is seen as better than not doing.

A lot of success in working with suppliers in China (and really anywhere in Asia) is in building a relationship with them where they know exactly what your expectations are and holding them to it until they understand that it is just easiest for them to do it right to start.

I've got suppliers who I can send a difficult part to and know that I'm going to get exactly what I expect, faster and cheaper than just about anyone else. It took a few years to get to that point, but these few vendors make it really hard to go with anyone else, much to the chagrin of the sourcing team who rightly recognize it a risk to rely on just a few suppliers.

Once you get to a certain type of supplier you end up running into the problem where their processes are such that they won't do anything without you clearly documenting it. They simply refuse to make any assumptions on your behalf. They can be so frustrating when you are used to the other way of doing it. I simply cannot answer some questions because I'm so used to my other suppliers just doing it correctly and haven't ever asked about it.

There is an amazing book called Poorly Made in China, by Paul Midler. The title doesn’t do the book justice imho, but it offers some insights into what can go wrong and why. It was a very recognisable and enjoyable read.

> the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works

I've had a 90% failure rate on what was supposed to be the final prototype before production. Turns out they hand-soldered the batch because the proto run was (obviously) only a dozen units - and some parts were just too tricky to reliably hand-solder.

I understand the logic as fully-automated assembly has a nontrivial startup cost, but a big reason of doing later prototypes is evaluating the manufacturing process as well. If the assembly method used doesn't match what I can expect in production runs, what's the point?

Weirdly enough the batch before this was totally fine. In the end we did get a massive discount on the hand-assembled run and managed to do all the testing with the one prototype we got working with some small rework, but it still cost us quite a lot of time and money. We would've happily paid a significantly higher fee to have them just do it properly - per-prototype cost is pretty much irrelevant during development.

That's not my experience at all. I manufactured simple objects in China some years ago (2017-2020) at scale (around 50k units) and everything went extremely well.

The objects were order of magnitude simpler than in the post (no electronics and no plastic, only metal) so maybe that doesn't compare, but I never had any bad surprise from any supplier, including packaging (which can be quite complex and involve several providers), etc.

Everyone will gladly send you samples (for free!) and prototypes of what you imagine (usually at cost) and if you're explicit about what you want and validate each step before the next, everything goes well.

Eventually I moved on to other things for mostly bureaucratic reasons; selling objects in Europe is an administrative nightmare that's simply not worth the hassle.

But the manufacturing part was not just smooth -- it was the best part of the experience.

(And I never left my town and never even talked to anyone over the phone: the primary means of communication was email.)

Edit: why would anyone downvote this, and so fast? If anyone thinks I'm being insincere, I have proof! ;-)

I would reckon the simplicity of the objects and the single material helped. If you specify 304 and you get 304, they can really only cheap out on tooling, and that'll cause them pain rather than you.

HN loves downvoting. It's Nerd Reddit. Don't sweat it.

Feels like the real skill in hardware isn't just engineering, but learning how to be absurdly literal with reality

> I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.

That is very rational. Each 9 in uptime or quality represents expense. The expense of moving to the next level up can't always be "shift left", but instead done at the point in the process where money can be applied.

Lets say you have a process that goes right at a minimum of 20% of the time for cost of 100. The manufacturer can add QA that makes the cost 120. Is it better to trust the manufacturer at the cost of +20? Or is it better to do your own QA for 20 and gain any correct pieces above the 20%?

Do you happen to remember where you read that article about SBC construction? I’d be interested in reading it

It was a HN post several years ago. I will try and find it.

I think it was one of the many threads off "Bunnie Huang's Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen" because the specific incident I can't find.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=guide+shenzhen

So I'm curious, if you give them a really detailed specification, will they actually follow it all? If they don't, do you have any recourse? Are these small shops/fronts that are constantly coming/going like Amazon sellers, or do they have reputations?

> Are these small shops/fronts that are constantly coming/going like Amazon sellers, or do they have reputations?

Depends on the shop. The one I use for prototyping has been around for at least 15 years with a good reputation.

Do you still have a link or some search pointers to the article about SBC please? Would love to read it

This is super interesting, and I'd actually be quite interested in buying a 60K-Lumen lamp... but not at $1200.

Years ago, there was an HN article "You Need More Lumens"[1], which in turn led me down a rabbit hole.

I ended up purchasing:

   4 standard table lamps from Target,
  28 2000-lumen Cree LEDs bulbs[2] and,
   4 7-way splitters[3].

The end result is somewhere around 56,000 lumens. And I LOVE it. Makes me much happier in my home office, especially in the winter months.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957614

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08H4RJQTT

[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FKIE6M4

Just a fun random fact from me: We do need more lumens. Not for normal (non-production) indoor lighting in most situations, however, I always want a bright light for my outside lights, and I find that most 100w-equivalent (1500 lumens) are just not quite enough. 2,000 lumens is almost there, however, 2,500 lumens would be beneficial. Both 2,000 and 2,500 lumen bulbs either don't last in temperature extremes, or are super expensive. The power on time (think hours per day of use) and color of the light matters as well. In my use case, I need a bulb that can withstand long periods of time being run from dusk till dawn. I am willing to pay a decent amount for a guaranteed warranty for X years, however most bulbs of ANY amount of lumens only guarantee 1-3 hours a day for 1-5 years. When you need 7-10 hours a day, well...

You can derate/"underclock" a regular LED and it will run significantly cooler, heat being one of the big drivers of LED lifespan. Downsides are less output per lamp (so need more lamps, probably why long-life lamps are expensive on a per-lumen basis) and you need to do a bit of DIY.

bigclivedotcom video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY

Have you seen the Philips TrueForce Core 40W LED bulbs? Not sure if they're sold in the US, but they're 4000 lumens, "last up to 15,000 hours" (whatever you make of that phrasing). They're quite huge but fit into a normal light socket. Not very expensive either.

It's a literal streetlight. It has the bigger E40 screw, not the standard E27 screw. It has an awful spectrum, it's basically blue + yellow, with a massive gap inbetween.

Interesting. 25000 hours actually.

Try looking into videography COBs. I would recommend something like the Zhiyun Molus G300, SmallRig RC 220B or similar.

The absolute cheapest lumens per dollar COB would be the GVM SD300D, although I highly question the reliability and light quality.

I have a pair of PAR38 LED bulbs from Cree Lighting (2100 lumens) that are rated for 25,000 hours. They're in a flood-light mounted under the eaves of my house.

I never got around to putting them on a dusk-to-dawn timer, so they've been burning 24/7 since I purchased them at the end of 2020 (except for the occasional power outage, of course). I paid $20/each for them.

Sample size of 1 (technically 2), but there are definitely products on the market that meet your criteria.

Don't know enough about your neighborhood, and I might have misread your comment (the "under the eaves" makes me think these are outdoor)

but as someone who appreciates darkness I'd be really upset to live near someone who did this.

Unless you can keep your light on your property (as in, you are extremely rural).

why are you lighting up outside unless you are outside in the light?

Relinking what I've already linked in a sibling comment, but I've just started having these die after 4 years of continuous use ~12hrs/day: amazon.com/dp/B07BRKT56T

Interestingly, 4 of the 6 that I had running all died in the same ~3mo period, but still I was pretty happy for 4 years of use for $25/ea.

Why do you need bright lights on outside all night?

In my case, I park a car in my driveway overnight. My lights also help deter anyone who might wander near my neighbor's open carport. I run GE daylight 100w equivalent bulbs purchased from Lowe's from dusk to dawn. They last for years and are cheap. Two bulbs at my driveway and two 60w equivalents on my porch.

I throw 200w led onto my garden. Enough to see where you are but a long way from daylight.

Costco sells a ceiling light that does 24k lumens for just over $100.

https://www.costco.com/p/-/enbrighten-ultrabrite-hex-lights/...

The problem with lights like that is the CRI[1].

Getting just lumens is cheap. Getting a full spectrum of light is where costs increase.

This is the reason I chose to go with the specific Cree bulbs (linked in original post) that get a 90+ CRI rating

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

The Costco lights list a CRI of 90 in the user manual.

https://enbrightenme.com/cdn/shop/files/85837_QSG_v4.pdf?v=3...

I hate dark/dingy basements, so one of my first purchases with my new house was 100k lumen of Costco shop lights. I do find myself cleaning the basement, doing laundry, and working on projects more when the sun starts to set at 5PM.

I did something similar, but a slightly different approach. I installed grow lights in my ceiling conches: amazon.com/dp/B07BRKT56T?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1

In my office I have 6 of these, for a total of around 13,000 lumens. It effectively 6x'd my light output for around $150. Worked wonders, especially in the PNW winter.

> the PNW winter

It rains only once ... but for six months :)

$1200 is a lot, and it would be a straight dealbreaker to me as well. But I also noticed it draws 580W, which is a lot too.

Besides not wanting to waste the money, I doubt the lamp will last 5 years (not 5 years of projected use of XX minutes per day…). 580W converted to heat on a small disk will take its toll.

~100 lumens per watt is rather poor, especially given the cost. It's the same as a standard LED lightbulb, and that includes the miniature AC voltage converter.

150lm/w would make it at least a cut above domestic lightbulbs.

200lm/w would make it a premium product.

fwiw, LEDs with higher CRI will generally be less power efficient, so the premium category has a 3-way tradeoff between brightness, power, and color quality. It's common for high efficiency LED lightbulbs to be much worse at illuminating red objects.

> ~100 lumens per watt is rather poor

Is it, though? Most of the LEDs I've seen are very similar, and lower temp LEDs are slightly less efficient. If it were 60lm/watt I'd be a bit surprised, but 100lm seems pretty typical. Maybe not "well engineered", but average. (Which, with all due respect to the founder, seems the quality of the product.)

The 'wasted' electricity is turned into heat, which should be welcome by their target customer base.

It is way too expensive for me as well. Yeh, world's brightest lamp is costliest to buy & maintain.

You can also buy photographic lights and umbrellas; it's dirt cheap and works well.

Related thread I wrote a bit ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lighting/comments/1po7sxb/are_there...

I do think it's actually quite hard to beat the Brighter lamp on all of: Lumens, $, QoL (ie: Google Home integration + temp control), Form Factor (ie: not looking ugly), CRI.

I personally noticed issues w/ CRI & Form Factor quite a lot with my previous options.

Curious if LEDs can really match the black-body that is our sun (and therefore incandescents).

I would get/build such a thing for my mental health, but I worry the LED illumination will be counter-productive.

I've found that a 250w incandescent bulb (can be had for ~$10) paired with a 4000 lumen LED produced decent results on a budget. Search for "reptile" or "chicken" lamps, they are usually red. You can feel the HEAT from a 250w light bulb.

The only thing to watch out for is that the lamp base you're using can support the high wattage.

Look for the CRI rating of bulbs that you buy. It's a measurement of how close to a blackbody spectrum the bulb is putting out, the highest fidelity being 100. Note that this is not the temperature measurement, and you can have e.g. 2700K or 5000K bulbs with high CRI.

Newer LED phosphors are typically 90+ CRI, and I commonly find 93 CRI bulbs available off the shelf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

Sunlight diverges significantly from a black-body spectrum because the atmosphere absorbs so many wavelengths.

Even high cri lights have a huge blue spike that doesn't match the sun. I don't know what chip OP uses, but you need a full spectrum light if you actually want very sun-like light. This page has some details:

https://optimizeyourbiology.com/best-natural-full-spectrum-l...

No idea if there's any evidence or not of the blue spike actually mattering for human biology.

Interesting. The Wikipedia entry mentions SPD and I think that is where I think LEDs fall down—having a skewed and/or incomplete spectrum. Even though it may make certain target colors look correct.

I have seen a couple studies that show having/adding deep red is an important part of LED lighting because deep red penetrates your skin the deepest and is used as a signal to your body that it is receiving light/sun.

Personally if I wanted "daylight" replicated by LEDs I would go for a higher quality white grow light that included deep red LEDs. Just be sure you don't get one that is also outputting in the UV range, although most don't.

Any spectrum you want with the right phosphor mix, but are they commercially produced, or must you make your own?

don't worry, there soon will be knock-offs way cheaper

As a MechE turned SWE, always a fun read when SWE try hardware.

> Blink and you’ll get a different measurement.

This means your environment is not controlled enough. Also quality control is usually done in terms of statistics. You might want to read something called gauge R&R. That being said, you should be proud of being able to ship a physical product!

As for quality checks, software quality teams pales in comparison to hardware quality teams. Mainly as you said, there’s a lot checks you can do in software. For hardware, bigger companies have to have their vendors qualified. The vendors have to follow their customer guidelines and do outgoing inspection. Then the company has a division to do incoming inspection. There’s a traveler that follows the kit (of parts) and there’s usually subassembly quality checks. Then final full build checks before it leaves the door.

> terms of statistics. You might want to read something called gauge R&R

I think the first thing to focus on is the stats portion - do you have appropriate FAI/SPC/OQC with Cpk requirements defined? Gauge R&R plays a much smaller role, especially in something that is relative

"As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes."

Except those with ears and/or eyes.

This reminded of the YouTube guy of "Smarter Every Day" who tried to manufacture a a grill brush completely in USA and still be competitive in the marketplace (i.e. China) [0].

It turned out that USA / "the west" lost the engineering knowledge to manufacture "stuff" (in this case injection molding and other procedures): Nowadays, we simply create the plans and schematics (e.g. CAD files) and let the Chinese do the building.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

Slightly more nuanced, I think we no longer have domestic industries making the components for the machines that make stuff. Many machine shops have Haas mills, but lots of Haas's suppliers are overseas. Regarding injection molding, we actually have better suppliers for the prototyping phases such as https://www.protolabs.com/ .

What China really has is not just cheap labor but dense, living industrial ecosystems

I would not advise jumping to mass production for your first deliveries, i think your story would have had less stress and more lower risk of failure of the first n (maybe 10?) units was bespoke, made lovingly by hand in a machine shop somewhere. I don’t think this is unusual advice, it matches the ethos of the lean startup, and pg’s “do things that don’t scale”.

We made our first hardware by hand, i believe we did 15 units. I remember my cofounder broke down because he couldn’t take the pressure of receiving fifteen orders and now we had to make FIFTEEN by hand, lol. But we were able to figure out SO MANY issues before mass production. And of course even then many slipped through

The product in question has a cast part. How do you do that in low quantity by yourself? Sand casting?

There are a number of pressureless casting techniques available. Investment casting is widely used, for instance. https://www.harmonycastings.com/ is a fancier example.

For this specific application, the manufacturing method determines the porosity of the material, and therefore the heat transfer.

CNC prototype parts will have better heat transfer than pressure die cast, and the pressure die cast will perform better than pressureless cast parts.

I'd CNC machine that part, which is much more expensive in-quantity than the casting option but for a handful of prototypes gets you there quickly.

I wander what's the cost of (renting) metal 3D printers nowadays

Word of advice, never tool up unless you absolutely have no other options left.

https://jlcpcb.com/3d-printing/?gad=1

But if you must:

https://iro3d.com/#products

Metal printing has been available for awhile. =3

In some sense it seems like hardware has two cliffs: the handmade one, and the factory one. You need to fall off both to really know what you’re doing

DFM is a skill like any other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability

Some are good at designing to factory capabilities, yet others try something slick and get schooled the hard way. =3

Congrats on launching your first 500 units!

I had a similar experience. I quit my job as a SWE at Google and built a hardware product on top of the Raspberry Pi.[0]

I don't really have anything helpful to add, but I relate a lot to all of the gotchas you encountered. Shipping a hardware product made me appreciate software so much more, especially SaaS products where you can ship a fix immediately.

With hardware, it's painfully easy to make a mistake and not realize it for 3-6 months. And by that point, you have this whole manufacturing pipeline you have to halt and unwind. And with overseas manufacturing, tariffs, and shipping costs, you can't even unwind some of this stuff, and you just end up with useless material that you paid 5-6 figures for.

We're definitely spoiled in the software world with the relative ease of fixing bugs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927380

I have one of these - it's awesome, I love it and I think it's an incredible success for a first hardware product. My takeaway from reading this is that caring about building a great product made a huge difference in how your first 500 units landed. Now the next batch gets to come with all those learnings.

I'm sure there will be more challenges as well but as long as you keep focusing on the experience you're delivering, I'm sure you'll continue to get past them

Would you be able to post an image of the labelling/markings on the unit?

Thanks so much for the kind words and being an early supporter <3

Oh hey, I have one of these! I really like it. It's quite a unique design. People (especially where it snows and gets gloomy) should have more lumens, and I'd recommend this lamp for others.

One downside is that the active fan cooling design is questionable - the air goes over the top of the LEDs, and there aren't any dedicated exit holes so the air is just squeezing through the very small gap between the glass and the heatsink. There are also blotches of paint that worsen the TIM contact between the PCB and the heatsink. I used a rotary tool to remove those blotches.

Glad you like it - we're working on improving the airflow right now actually! Thanks for the feedback on the paint.

What is your TIM? Do you have a facing secondary on the interface surface?

What finishing process, thickness, overspray, masking requirements does your drawing package specify?

> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below.

What happened after this? the factory have to replace the casting mold at their own expense or you have to pay for it?

We had to remake half the mold, and I split it 50/50 with the factory.

Well-written and valuable for insight whether you have similar personal experience or not. As someone who does hardware and software as well, I relate to the challenges of making something you can hold; it's very easy to underestimate the challenge difference between the two. Your Murphy's law references are spot on; I feel comforted reading I'm not the only one this happens to! Misery does love company, and it's important to hang on that I think, so that you don't lose hope :)

When I read the "I had no prior experience in hardware; I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers" I was ready to curl up into a foetal position... the fact that the author actually got something like this manufactured and shipped is nothing short of miraculous, it's not just a board off JLPCB and a plastic case, this involves custom manufacturing of metal parts and whatnot, and I take my hat off to him for managing it.

This is also why so many crowdfunded projects fail, people go into it with no idea of how hard it is to get something to market and waaaay underestimate the time and cost. Years ago for the first project we did we took an absolute worst-case estimate, then doubled the time and cost on that. We came in on time and under budget, but only just.

Looking back I agree it was miraculous lol, I don't know if I'd do it again...

Thanks :) It turns out "hardware is hard" isn't an exaggeration!

Congrats on the first batch shipment! What an accomplishment. As someone who just crossed 10 years as a first time foray into HW, I'd like to tell you it gets easier. It doesn't but keep going anyway! Good luck.

https://blog.iotdef.com/celebrating-10-years/

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why SaaS investors don’t understand how to invest in deeptech/hardtech, despite current trends. Like this guy, they have no clue about the differences in business model, except they’re not founders so they don’t go through the pain and they mostly don’t learn.

Hats off to the author for making it through! What a start to the journey!

How did you find factories, and trustworthy ones at that, at all? I know you mentioned just being happy that the factory existed at all, but I'm doubting you just found someones email and then wired them cash?

Previous experience? Or you know someone? To me that always seems like 90% of the battle with manufacturing.

I stopped reading when I realized it wasn't a deep dive into the most interesting question I had, which is the technical hardware design process and finding a factory to actually take your design and manufacture it.

I'm late to this thread but I've manufactured about a dozen SKUs and I think you could have saved an enormous amount of grief with one simple step:

If you are American, and you are manufacturing 500 units, do it in America. Yes, it's more expensive per-unit, but at 500 units you don't need a tiny per-unit cost.

American manufacturing is more flexible, higher agency, and people tend to adapt to underspecified instructions better. The communication loops are stronger.

That said, America has enormous tradeoffs. If you need 10,000 of a part in 4 hours because something weird happened, China can make it happen. America... might take months. But if your batch size is 500, it's better for an American living in America to cut their teeth on American manufacturing and go to China when you need 10,000+ units per run.

500 was just their first batch.

I'm curious that this story seems to be missing a big part of hardware design - certification.

It seems like the design was being changed up to the minute these were shipped to customers, so it doesn't seem possible that any testing was carried out on the final design?

Given that these went straight to backers, and would have required the final die cast parts to test in the thermal chamber, they probably had not gone to an NRTL at the point the article had been written.

This product is about at the point of DVT in development flow, and therefore would be sent to testing about now. But, instead, being sent to backers.

PS, not a hypothetical circumstance for me. I've previously certified a number of luminaires under UL and CB Scheme. I was the technical chair of ANSI C136.37 for several years, and on the working groups of several other standards.

Totally agree, I've also done electronic design work in the lighting industry, though not enough to end up on any standards body.

I was trying to ask in as charitable way as possible...

Yeah, I was confused on that front as well. Unclear why a prototype wasn’t initially made by the factory to be vetted and approved before producing hundreds of lamps.

There was a different lamp startup article kind of recently, where they talked about this, and if I remember correctly they needed to run the lamp for like 1000 hours straight for it to receive some kind of certification.

I could search for it if you want to read about that.

Author here, happy to answer any questions about the journey!

Do you have any recommendations for FCC/CE testing providers?

I'm really curious how they handled certification of a design that was changing apaprently up to the minute it was delivered...

FWIW I've had good luck with Intertek https://www.intertek.com/ for most testing and certification processes across a variety of products.

I definitely feel your pain. I own a company that makes custom process controls for industrial and commercial clients, and while we work from a large library of hardware and software designs from past jobs, every job has a lot of the same "start from the beginning" feel as what you went through. Especially, the one thing you didn't check is always the thing that is somehow screwed up, and the sleepless nights wondering halfway into the project if you're in deep trouble.

Got a discount code for the HN family? ;-)

Congrats on shipping. I'm living in the EU working California hours (4pm-1am) and will definitely be buying one.

Just made one - use HN100: https://getbrighter.com/discount/HN100 :)

What was your marketing strategy once you had the $10 deposit landing page setup?

Hello, nice write up. I'm curious about your deal with the factory and downstream suppliers.. did all these iterations and fixes cost more every time? Or it was a fixed contract? How does that all work

So just to confirm, the actual cause for the controls not working is still unknown to the reader but the reason the measurements didn't make sense was swapped labels?

The controls weren't working because we had wired them up according to the labels which were wrong (which is also why the measurements didn't make sense to us).

Being 6'5" myself, I am worried I'd be blinded by the lamp when I stand up: to avoid adding a base under (an already bulky) base, is there a way to separate the lamp itself and have it wall/ceiling mounted (still pointing upwards)?

Because the lamp is 6'3" it's only below eye level for people who are 6'7-8.

We had another 6'5" customer who was worried about the height but they said it was totally fine even with shoes on.

Which NRTL did you end up using for certifications? Can you say more about that process?

Just curious about the frequency of the diodes and do they pulse simultaneously? Quite often I can perceive flicker in moving objects indoors.

We use constant current reduction dimming so there's zero flicker!

How did you figure out how to price your product?

Did you find your CM through your own network? Tradeshows? Cold calling?

I'd like other war stories like this on HN. Considering this is a YC website I'd expect more.

You might like the updates from my current project. It’s got it all—-tariff surprises, flaky suppliers, switching manufacturing processes midstream, and most of all, the slog: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/pickup-...

Pixels dice have also been going on a “fun” journey with the weight of a huge crowdfunding raise. I’ve been following their updates with sympathy: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixels-dice/pixels-the-...

> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.

I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.

I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.

Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.

In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.

This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.

And as a fellow Greek man said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics, it does not mean politics won't take an interest in you".

You could equally say "just because you take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics will take an interest in you".

Well wasnt that a good thing?

After the extermination of Melos they could credibly say they were less responsible for the actions of the polis.

And had a higher chance of deflecting the inevitable revenge on to the non idiotes Athenians.

If one civilization is taking revenge on another I don’t think they would show that much nuance.

For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?

I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.

Funny seeing people pushing for other people becoming more active in politics with the assumption that “being more involved” means with their political fights, then get worried when the other side grows or intensifies.

I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.

It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.

The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.

Trump in 1987 in a full page ad in the New York Times: "It's time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. ... Tax these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America's economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."

Trump in 1989 talking to Diane Sawyer: "he would impose a 15% to 20% tariff on Japanese imports".

Trump in 2011 in his book "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again": "I want foreign countries to finally start forking over cash in order to have access to our markets. So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town — and that especially includes China."

Trump at a rally in Vegas in 2011, referring to China: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!"

Trump in 2018: If the Europeans are "not going to treat us fairly... then we're going to tax all those beautiful Mercedes-Benzes that are coming in."

Anyone who didn't think tariffs were coming is a fucking moron.

Too harsh. Trump was president once before, and didn't impose 150% tariffs on anybody. You don't have to be a fucking moron to assume he'll behave similarly in his second presidency. Trump says a LOT of things that he doesn't end up doing.

Meanwhile, here in Australia I spoke with small business owners (cafes, gyms, etc...) about their preparedness for the COVID lockdowns before the first one we had. All of them just had a wide-eyed look and a mumbled "Lockdowns? Really? Here? You think so?"

More than half of them went bankrupt.

One guys kept dumping money into a new gym buildout mere weeks before the months-long lockdowns commenced.

Did you buy options to trade on it?

My first thought too, there's a big difference between 10-30% tariffs on China on certain goods and a blanket 150% on everything.

I had a university friend who spent hundreds of hours on his YouTube channel whilst the rest of spent hundreds of hours arguing about politics.

He’s now unimaginably successful at YouTube but at least I’m better at predicting the content of tomorrow’s newspapers.

Yeah - you can try to stay out of politics, but no way politics will stay out of your life, simple as that.

Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?

There are two different kind of “prediction” mixed up here.

The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.

That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.

If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.

Just because you believe X is going to happen doesn't mean you can make money in the market off of that information, that requires judging what _everyone else_ thinks will happen and thus how the market is priced. You could just as easily get stuck in the situation where the market as a whole was expecting it to be worse than it was and didn't move far enough for you to make your money back.

It would have been very hard to find a counterparty that didn’t think Donald Trump was going to raise tariffs prior to his inauguration. He was very transparent about this (though the exact amount has fluctuated pretty wildly). Hard to make money when nobody else is taking the other side of the bet.

Isn't the problem that he can do it single-handedly ? Tariffs are usually something a given gover ing body needs to vote on & they are supposed to be implemented with a reasonable timeline.

Being able to set tarrifs and other stuff basically at random in real-time with no oversight is the main issue IMHO.

Plenty of things are predictable in the sense that one can bucket them. Tariffs were very predictable because we know the pedo has that unilateral lever and talks about wielding it. But who would have predicted that out of all the stupid tariff things that might happen, it would be things like tariffing allies, tariffing uninhabited islands, TACO tariffs, or a giant board with “reciprocal tariffs”? It requires not only predicting specific stupidity, but taking an aggressive position.

Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?

All the main retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot/Lowes etc. should band together and pull out the tariff costs as a separate payment line on the bill like sales tax. They shouldn’t include it in the bill and pull it out to be paid at time of sale.

The Trump administration has made it very clear on multiple occasions that any company that does that will find that every law that affects them and has some amount of administrative discretion will suddenly be interpreted maximally against them.

https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/04/30/amazon-wont-b...

They couldn’t realistically take on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and major grocers all at once. They’re just not organized enough. We’ve already seen them give up or flop in court when challenged.

> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not

I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.

National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.

Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.

A few examples:

- The Printing Press

- The Steam Engine

- Factories

- The Internal Combustion Engine

- The Internet

- "Smart" Phones

- Social Networks

- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)

What I find particularly galling is that he failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson: Maybe he wouldn't have these kind of problems if he hadn't outsourced his manufacturing to China but kept in on-shore instead.

I did wonder how many less issues would have popped up if the lamp wasn’t manufactured in China. Was a little surprised it wasn’t addressed.

The product would be perfect and he would lose $10 with every sale.

It’s because building 500 units would be a non starter for many of them

You should check out Michael Lynch's blog series about building TinyPilot.

He tried to source from America companies first, but the products were actually worse and much more expensive than his Chinese vendors.

He has one blog post which details the quality differences, and the Chinese vendors were much better than the American ones. The American ones also took longer and we're less communicative to him than the Chinese vendors.

Last Trump term, a small business making PC cases locally in california went out of business because of steel tariffs. I'm not sure that local manufacturing in small batches is much safer given there's aluminum and other material tariffs this time too?

Nobody saw this coming. Trump's first term might have been crazy inside US, but outside... it's the least interfering US govt we've had in a while for the world. So as far as geopolitics is concerned, he is right.

“Nobody saw it coming” is a blanket people wrap themselves in that socializes their failure to see it coming.

> Nobody saw this coming.

That simply isn't true. Here's a PDF from December 2024 (before Trump was elected) by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee:

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5c392e02-9eb0...

Throughout 2024, Donald Trump has proposed a series of tariffs on all goods coming from outside the U.S. or on goods from specific countries. His recent proposals include:

• An across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.

• An across-the-board 20 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.

• A 60 percent tariff—“or higher”—on all goods imported from China.

• An additional 10% above any additional tariffs on imports from China.

• A 25% tariff on products imported to the United States from Mexico and Canada.

Yes, everbody who was paying any attention at all saw this coming.

First term Trump didn't quite have as many toadies willing to follow him no matter where he takes them. They also weren't quite so willing to blatantly violate the law and dare someone to do anything about it.

Second term plans were all written down for anyone to read but still far too many didn't believe it.

Classic hindsight bias. In fact, you could be paying a lot of attention to politics and still think tariffs were not going to go so high. Here's [1] a betting market that regularly was below 5% chance of tariffs above 40% on Chinese imports in first 100 days of Trump's second term.

https://polymarket.com/event/trump-imposes-40-blanket-tariff...

Polymarket isn’t a source for this, lol. Maybe google trends, since there’s no reason to manipulate it. There were also reasons to anticipate the amount of the tariffs, and the absolute stupidity of the tariffs (still reeling from the Heard and McDonald islands tariffs lmao).

I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?

This isn't about timing the market by being clairvoyant about the timing of a madman's tariffs.

This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.

Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.

It was extremely easy to see them coming, because he talked about the repeatedly.

The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.

He literally said he was gonna:

"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...

(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)

EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...

They were very much priced in, you had retailers purchasing a lot of imports in Q1 to prepare for them. What wasn’t priced in was the scale, which is what resulted in the initial sell off in April until the administration walked back the steepest rates

let me guess... you don't follow politics either...

You could also say politics is downstream of other forces that are less global and more local. Some people choose to stay aware of their more local forces rather than the grand ones.

Selling a product you haven’t tested or built yet to members of the public, classic.

That's a pretty ungenerous take. Pushing timelines back doesn't solve the fundamental issue that you don't know what you're going to get when you submit that first large order. I've seen many situations where the samples and the manufacturing are completely different, even produced in different factories.

They didn't do everything perfectly, but this looks like a normal learning curve for product manufacturing. Textile manufacturing would be even steeper.

It's way more than just pushing timelines back. The person took $400k from people without knowing anything about how to provide what those people had already paid for.

580 watts is more than my entire server rack. By a good amount too. I run a UPS, firewall appliance, two switches, two APs (over POe), and a NAS with a 36 HHD disk shelf. All of that clocks in at 380 watts steady. Just some food for thought.

Yup this is a very inefficient way of reaching a target illuminance.

Multiple sources spread over an area would be more efficient, as each LED could run at lower current and temperature, which increases their efficacy.

The light would also not have to bounce off ceilings/walls multiple times, while some are nice for diffusion, every reflection is lossy.

I suspect you’d also get better reliability.

This reminds me of the Keyboard.io blog, where they documented their experience with the same kind of issues: https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/day-743

Notably:

> When we got back, we watched as the laser engraving technician printed out a copy of our alignment template, deleted all of the guide lines from the file, imported the legends into the laser engraving software, and proceeded to try to eyeball the correct label placement.

> Going in, we were annoyed at how far off the legends were. In retrospect, it’s astonishing how good his manual placement was.

Great read, thanks for sharing this. I'm also coming from software and have recently started making some hardware for personal use in my free time. The idea of selling it as an actual product has occurred to me, but the thought of dealing with all the logistics quickly makes me reconsider. Congrats on your launch!

Once you get your design polished, than consider partnering with a good Contract Manufacturer to do a trial run. Some will handle the ISO, CE, IC, UL and FCC paperwork for you. Make sure your Patents and Trademarks are locked down in both the manufacturing and marketed countries, or some ambitious folks will try to rip you off later. If your projected volumes attract profit sharing offers, than expect 10% to 14% of wholesale cost as a normal ask.

Tooling up a production line for even a toothbrush is well over $1.5m to get the first unit off the line. Building these factories is a different skill set, and everybody is bad at it at first.

Note hardware has a 1:6 success rate compared with service companies.

Best of luck, =3

The lack of UL approval is a concern. This thing draws over 500 watts and runs hot.

Is it really not UL approved? Hard to call it a premium product in that case.

I don't know enough about lighting, but if I bought five of these, would I reach 50,000 lumens? Is it just additive? This would cost $250.

https://www.harborfreight.com/10000-lumen-4-ft-linkable-diam...

Also, if you've ever been in a Walmart or Forever 21 at night, you'll know that constant LED white light is probably not the best thing for your eyes.

Yes. But it would look ugly, and does not have "smart" features.

whether or not it's worth it depends on user.

generally it's the opposite. people need a lot more light. an overcast window is like 50k+ lumens while a light bulb is like 500 lumens.

https://myopiainstitute.org/imi-whitepaper/imi-the-role-of-l...

lack of light is generally the leading hypothesis for why there is a myopia epidemic actually. from people being indoors most of the time for school or work.

though unfortunately scientists are still researching if it is a specific frequency of light etc... people are missing

Fascinating read. I didn't know $1,200 for a lamp was a thing but clearly there's a market for it and you priced it better than Coolest Cooler or I would have.

I would be quite scared to have such a monster lamp near me indoors. I mean, 60k lumens can cause temporary blindness, disorientation, and potentially retinal damage. It's near the welding arc territory at this point.

It bounces off the ceiling and so is massively diffused.

You definitely don't look at it directly.

But there is a non-zero chance it will not stand straight 100% of the time? Pets, earthquakes, human shoulders, you name it, something can throw this thing off balance. Plus, there are people higher than 6'3", people on the ladders, children on the shoulders, and they all can pretty much look at it directly from above.

> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below.

Never done casting let alone worked with Chinese factory to ship hundreds of units but: this sounds potentially intentional at factory's end. It's plausible that these fins didn't pass factory guy's manufacturability gut DRC who would made changes thinking the customer would just give in. IIUC molding people in general don't like corners and narrow channels with no sprues and/or gas escapes. Especially the outer ring of pins appear to be exactly where they like to place sprues.

I wonder how this problem was eventually solved. The final product seem to retain the number, height, draft angles of the fins, but fillet radii appear to have increased(2mm -> 5mm?) and the entire body shows more material shrinkage at the outer edge of the body as well. Was it just no pins and higher defect rate, or something else entirely?

Miss posts like this on HN, thanks for the great write-up! I tried to launch a hardware thing like 10 years ago[1], but couldn't raise enough money. Fun experience nonetheless.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...

This is a great idea. What was your biggest blocker?

> It was at this point I truly began to appreciate Murphy’s law. In my case, anything not precisely specified and tested would without fail go wrong

After 20 years of system engineering, I just expected this to always be the case. Until my most recent job with a bunch of startups, where people fly by the seat of their pants, there's no communication, documentation, protection or testing, for anything. I am pissed off daily that things don't go wrong, because people now think this is normal, and it goes against everything I've learned from experience. It seems I stumbled onto the corollary of Murphy's Law: when you expect everything to go wrong, nothing does.

Congratulations, you did very well! And I mean it, as someone who has experience building hardware (also in China), you came out pretty much unscathed and did extremely well for a first timer. Good job!

50k lm is quite high. What electric power consumption does it have ? I estimate around 500 Watt, am I right ?

580W

https://getbrighter.com/

It's 60k lumens now, and it draws 580W off the wall

Am I right in thinking you're dissipating that 580W using passive cooling only?

Impressive if so - every time I've designed something approaching that power level I've ended up needing forced air cooling.

Whats the expected life for the leds at that power draw level?

Good estimate, the official website for the lamp says 580W

How did you get people to visit that 1st landing page where they could pay a $10 deposit?

Hardware startups are such a pain in the ass

One recent run fun issue I had was a pneumatic timer that worked fine in testing in the shop and outside my house

But once in the field the sun heated up the tube enough to trigger the sensor and get stuck in an on state requiring a plug on one end with a hole big enough to let the pressure out but small enough to let pressure trigger the sensor

For someone who has no idea about light engineering or electronics if I stack two 25k Lm lamps next to each other does it make 50k Lm light?

I recently changed my car's headlamps to Chinese LED which claims to be about 37kLm and I don't know how much it is probably less than that.

Two of those lamps costee me around $24 on Amazon US (pretty sure under $10 in China).

What makes this $800+ ?

Please don’t put in extra bright headlights on cars. Stock LED headlights being to bright for other drivers is already a massively common complaint — and then we have people installing even brighter ones? Please don’t.

It is also illegal to use non-DOT approved lighting in the US. Was behind a jackass today with a receiver mounted accessory red light that was excessively bright and made it look like the brakes were applied.

For colours to look natural you need your white light to contain lots of different wave lengths. It’s usually measured as Ra. Artificially looking LEDs are easily 10x cheaper than photography grade LEDs. Also, this guy is probably paying taxes and handling stuff the proper legal way. If you order from Alibaba, chances are you’ll not be paying taxes. Plus if they offer a 5 year warranty, they probably need to keep some money around for repairs.

In addition to the all the other stuff, including light spectrum differences, you can't just trust that a "37000 lumen" light (cheap from China ...) is such a thing. Some examples of "100,000 lumen" flashlights that ended providing more like 2000 to 3000 lumens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_0wxzClkg

It's possible, they exist, many such LEDs are probably manufactured in China ... but the legit ones are probably more expensive, and you may need a more recognizable brand to do some QA, and keep pressure on the factory to not slip quality or inputs.

Consider the cheap screwdriver included with the lamp in this story: unexpectedly, many were more faulty than the cheapest $4 screwdriver you'd find in any hardware store. The more stories you read about manufacturing stuff in China, the more you'll see very strange things. It's not about nationality or anything, it's an extreme kind of optimization. If you didn't catch it already, maybe you didn't really need what you thought you asked for ... they're just checking/optimizing

Yep lumens are additive (though your eyes perceive them logarithmically).

I don't know much about car headlights, but chatgpt says high beams are typically 25-45 watts, and assuming a generous 200lm/w that gives you 5000-9000 lm.

Roughly speaking, it's expensive because it's 50 lbs & tons of electrical components (that are much higher quality than $24 headlights).

> claims

That's all there is to it. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CJqAJ2LXw8&t=852.

Just to add context those are just dumb lamps and I acknowledge that the product here has a lot more features including IoT support and the ability to change Hue.

Is it the ability to change Hue that makes this expensive?

The main cost driver is the sheer size/weight/power. Dimmability, adjustable CCT, and smart home controls do add a decent chunk though.

I'm curious, what would be the engineering challenges (either hardware or software) in making it dimmable substantially below 2500 lumens, so that it could continue to work as a primary light source when winding down after the sun goes down, rather than switching to other light sources capable of getting dimmer?

The manual version could be done with a plastic frame and some filters: https://us.rosco.com/en/products/catalog/roscolux

I worked for a manufacturing firm years ago and a director once told me 30 was the magic number. Order 30 units and the error rate will scale from there if for example you get 3 in 30 broken you'll have about 10% broken no matter how many you order.

I applaud his initiative for getting this through to production but as soon the market reaches sufficient size he will find multiple Chinese competitors selling an identical product at a fraction of the price. And could well be manufactured in the same factory.

After watching the dubai lamp videos on YouTube, I wonder how many hours this lamp will last

This article reminds me of some of the stories in the "The Hardware Hacker" book by Andrew Huang [0], which went a bit about the author's experience in Shenzhen manufacturing some hardware.

There are a bit over similarities with the article, like miscommunications occurring or needing to specify in exact terms what is required. But I think it is slightly different now, the stories in the book was from a while ago and in shenzhen instead of zhongsan, so I am sure things have changed, and this article is more up to date.

[0] Despite the title, it is not entirely solely about hacking in the security sense. But also the traditional use of the word "hacker".

Oh boy, I want one of these. This would absolutely perfect for winter depression (I suspect much better than the "SAD lamps" marketed for this purpose which are bright not even close to this bright). But £889 is a lot of money for a lamp!

I have the Amaran 200d S, which is about 250 pounds I think. It's not as stylish, but has not only a CRI of 96+, but more importantly an SSI (D56) of 87+, which is hard to beat imho.

I rather like the way it releases concentrated light towards you, as the sun does through a window, but not everyone wants harsh shadows. At the same time, the reflector makes the 20.000 lumens feel like a lot more, as the light doesn't have to illuminate the whole room, just where you're sitting.

Find a garden shop, a 2' square full-spectrum light from "The Indoor Sun Shop" was very important to my mental health when I lived in Seattle and cost a lot less than this. Especially after I added a mechanical timer so I could never be too depressed to turn it on in the morning.

If you're not afraid of DIY and it looking (much) uglier than these lamps, you can buy extremely bright "cob lights" and make something yourself: https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

Not even DIY, the 600W 92000 lm "UFO lamp" is just 170€: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DD4J7GMC/?tag=meaningness-20&th=...

Basically a hanging version of the "Brighter" lamp.

Recipe for winter depression (works almost anywhere except for Antarctica):

- Go for a daily walk outdoors after lunch

- Get some vitamin D supplements

Fun read, especially for someone who used to lead engineering for an industrial luminaire manufacturer.

PPAP were developed to help tackle this sort of thing in a somewhat uniform way, but vendor diligence can take many other forms, too.

Super glad you found (and made!) a product that everyone wants. Hopefully you have brighter nights than this ..

> That was the worst period of my life; I would go to bed literally shaking with stress. In my opinion, Not Cool!

Thanks! The ups and downs of startups are very real (maybe doubly so for hardware)

There are hundreds of articles in this genre from years of failed Kickstarters and Maker-types selling DIY hardware kits.

How you get funding for a hardware startup without cursory research into this is staggering.

"cursory" implies fairly shallow / quick looking into it - given they have delivered, I'd say they met that benchmark. And the funding is obvious, through Kickstarter.

There's demand for high intensity lamps (and other hardware projects), a lot fail but some succeed, and lessons are learned. And not just by the people starting these projects, a big part of why these projects start in the first place is because the manufacturers make it accessible too.

What a great article. It's amazing to see how many simple things can go wrong, and I'm sure there could have been more. Great work keeping your tenacity up and sticking through it.

This is simply amazing. The pricing per lamp (1200 or 1500?) - how did you arrive at that? And which segment of the population are buying this powerful corner lamp?

I'm curious about the final financial outcome: after all the rework, mistakes, and learning costs, did the project end up net positive, or was it ultimately a loss?

You designed and sold a lamp for $1500! You’ve won a lottery!!

Well done on shipping. Reading this gave me PTSD of shipping our first hardware product at a similar scale. It was a tough experience but you'll have learned a huge amount and be much better equipped for the second time (if you choose to keep going). I found the biggest takeaway is planning for things to go wrong in advance and building enough slack into the process so that you can accommodate some setbacks.

I’m also a software engineer running a hardware e-commerce business on the side. The hardest lesson for me was unlearning 'logic' in favor of psychology.

I recently ran an experiment where I increased prices by 50%, and sales volume actually went up. It’s wild how much copy and creative assets can alter perceived value, allowing you to justify a higher price point for the exact same physical product

What a great idea; good luck! Also, it's nice to read a hardware story on HN (we need more breaks from AI this and AI that).

Have you taken surface temperature measurements of the heat sink? A ~600W hot plate suspended at eye level is no joke, and certainly dangerous if it fell over or someone tripped onto it. For that matter, have you taken any temperature measurements with the unit on its side, to see what would happen if it was knocked over?

Since you’re already done creating your hardware product instead of thinking of a new product to follow up with, I would suggest a new business model: there are probably a non-zero number of people on HN that have a vision about making a hardware product. You can offer your services so the don’t have to learn all these lessons the hard way!

I am not affiliated with them at all, but https://getencube.com tries to remove a lot of friction for just these cases and reduce costs. I met their founder a couple of months back, great engineer and a really cool product

Appreciate the war stories. Is the product still available? I'd love to get one, though fortunately the first false spring of San Francisco will hopefully be followed soon by a true one.

The store is still online so I assume it must be. Let me run this by my wife haha.

Great post, I really want to see more stuff like this on HN. And congrats on shipping!

It's a damn fine lamp. Really makes a huge difference for feeling energetic and productive! I experienced exactly what the author mentioned with the white lamp, but the support was top notch. Glad to see the details!

The article starts by saying that the person took $400k of orders without knowing how to make the product he had just sold, nor any experience that would help him do so. What?

I will never understand why when you expect to sell a few hundred units of a product at most, you would decide to go and build something in china. There are instances where building in china might make sense. this is not one of them! you can easily hand assemble everything yourself in America, since this was a 1-year long time-frame. There is phenomenal CNC shops in the east coast (and also some in the mid-west) if you don't mind the lead times. You don't have to deal with tariffs, imports, and more importantly THEY SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE. Yes this sounds dumb. Like, with Google Translate you shouldn't have a problem no? Think again! From my experience with Chinese metallurgic, they are clumsy and often mess up even straight forward designs. Yes, they are fast, but at what cost! They will redo it as many times as you need. But the headache, man the headache of dealing with it is not worth it. On the other hand some of the issues here are expected and fun! well maybe not fun, but part of the process, like the swapped components in the board. it happens to the best of us and that's okay! but it would always be easier to debug when you can drive yourself to the CNC factory, or at least have a video call with the tech in your own language. Also, regulations in china is whole different world and not at all straightforward to navigate for westerners, at all. I really don't like that people turn directly to china cause "that's what everyone does anyway". nu-uh. also, China is not the only option! Eastern Europe, such as Poland, can get you there too for reasonable prices, and have tons of phenomenal electronics and manufacturing engineers. Tons.

I assume they plan/hope to sell much more than 500 units, and/or the profit margin is much higher with China manufacturing.

Just a few slots down in my YC feed: the benefits of bright light

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00373-9

How many of the failures weren't engineering problems, but interface problems between humans: missing labels on drawings, ambiguous cable lengths, assumptions about powder coating thickness, etc

I want a bright lamp like this but not for $1200...any suggestions?

>In March, after $400k in sales through our crowdfunding campaign, I had to figure out how to manufacture 500 units for our first batch. >I had no prior experience in hardware; >I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers.

And i wish this kind of people to fail miserably. Too many times they tried to make me the scapegoat for their bullshit project, already sold on paper but with nothing more than a render to show, now looking for an hardware guy to point the finger at to blame

This feels a bit harsh! I get the impression that the author considered their project far more carefully than this, especially given the Ben Kuhn blog posts they say that they were inspired by.

This is really cool, and I saw the claim that it can "replicate the sun's spectrum". Do you have any measurements to share of the spectrum?

I bought one of these for my sister. They are well build and precisely as bright as promised. If you desire a very bright light source, this is it.

Love the intersection of geopolitics and hardware design lead times. Trade wars can be waited out why getting the design right.

While true, who knows how long said trade war will last for? And in that time you're paying for storage / other expenses, your investors are waiting (although Kickstarter backers are often pretty patient), etc.

And they got the design right, insofar as they could see at that point, hence having 500 units built. In a lot of cases you can't have a single unit built as a one-off.

Great write-up! Thanks for sharing your journey

What was the tooling cost for the 2 ton mold?

Wow, $1,200 for an LED lamp

Congratulations on the successful launch and excellent write-up. Hardware is fun but also much more challenging.

The $10 deposit validation approach before committing to manufacturing is underrated. So many hardware projects fail because founders fall in love with the build before confirming anyone will pay.

What stood out to me: the factory miscommunications and quality issues compound because you can't iterate as fast as software. Each mistake costs weeks and thousands of dollars.

For anyone considering hardware: if you're not getting deposits or strong signals of purchase intent before tooling up, you're basically gambling. The author's approach of getting commitments first is the right playbook.

Leave behind 1 prototype fully assembled and 1 prototype disassembled.

Day 1 of product manufacturing class.

Dang 560 watt draw. About the same ratio as other LED options at 90 limens per watt though.

For all the complaining about tariffs and all the woes of manufacturing in China, much of this could have been avoided by manufacturing in the US. Or even Canada or Mexico. There is literally nothing here that requires Chinese supply chain magic, it's just penny shaving. This isn't Apple where you need 80 million bespoke screws manufactured for your device overnight, which can only be done by slave labor supply chain in any reasonable time and quantity. This is really basic mechanical and electrical engineering and could be built anywhere.

Cost is not an issue because anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500 (and have the satisfaction of keeping your fellow neighbors employed).

Anyone that has ever manufactured anything in China—or India for that matter—knows unless you spec every little detail and dimension and tolerance it WILL be ignored and violated.

Whereas in the US & Canada there is a different level of workmanship and culture where you might get a phone call instead of a box of weldments bent 30° in the wrong direction because the drawing didn't say it couldn't. And you probably could have visited the factories a half dozen times before starting production (did you really not plan on building prototypes?)

> anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500

Maybe even more would be willing to pay if it had a Made in USA stamp.

>anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500

Not 100% true. With $1200 it has wider market reach than $1500. There are still people spend $1500 for a floor lamp, but 100% it will be fewer if it was priced at $1200.

Also pricing it too high means higher chance a clone will exist, because they can copy literally 1:1 and price it a little lower.

Another thing in China is they move fast. As long as you have enough money, the time to market is insanely short.

Maybe the sarcasm was lost in translation but a $1200 lamp is out of reach (or out of the question) for most people. A Juicero of lamps. I feel sorry for the guy because in a way you're right, clones of this will be going for $60 on AliExpress, probably built in the same factory with the same tooling.

How have the overall reviews been ? I love the idea and the product!

Great post. Thank you.

How/where did you find your suppliers/factories?

I’m so jealous of you. You can just go and make a product as if it was software, with no “respect” to boundaries and restrictions, even though you’re not even in the lamp business. And then you have a China contact, and China can just manufacture anything as if it was software, but it’s a real life physical object. And the commitment, the fearlessness, the rudeness of just making it work.

I believe people like you will become very rich (because you’re so compatible with money making), but I have a prejudice that you lack depth in your understanding and intentions.

I almost never feel jealous but while reading your blog I could feel this feeling of freedom of creating that I seek and I couldn’t help but. Congratulations.

I am amazed that someone dared to list a lamp for $1200, that it sold that many units, and then proceeded to ship sub 1 dollar shitty screwdrivers with it.

Had I ordered a $1200 lamp and received a $0.1 screwdriver with it, I would be livid.

I guess it goes to show in what kind of an inflationary environment we live in.

580w. So long for the low-power leds then :)

> As someone who generally stays out of politics

Such a wildly privileged take.

Unrelated: why offshore this? Why not end-to-end local development and production?

That's a neat product. You can expect it to be copied within a day or two of this announcement.

How much power does one of these consume?

Q: How much power does the lamp use?

A: 580 Watts from the wall

580 watts..... :D. Why not work on cheap solutions to bring in natural light into darker parts of the house?

As someone who recently replaced a few windows in my house, I can say in no uncertain terms that spending $1200 for a lamp and paying to feed it 0.58kW is cheaper than hiring a contractor to add another window. And it works all day.

What is a cheap solution to bring natural light into the house when it's dark outside?

That's a lot of wattage.

I have no productive words to share other than positive feelings and kind empathy to you @sberens. I've gone through this manufacturing route in China before about 10 years ago and...it has largely been the same. Even with near native fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese did not spare me from this experience. Good luck and I looking forward to purchasing one on your next run - its been on my radar for a very long time!

i'm curious what are use cases for a lamp this bright?

Places where the sun doesn't always shine.

Very interesting. I would like something like this, but not with LEDs.

Hydrargyrum medium-src iodide lamps are an alternative (artificial sun lights for movie sets), but you'll want a good AC unit in your office

I thought hydragyrum was a made-up word, but it's the Latin word for mercury, which explains the Hg chemical symbol. (Just in case anyone finds this interesting.)

Very curious why you want to avoid LEDs

No infrared spectrum

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35389-6

A really bright lamp? I want one. I have to get up at 3am for work many mornings. This would be great for helping me to wake up.

Checking store ... 1300 ... um ... no.

I can buy a professional LED lighting rig, the stuff used to film movies, for cheaper.

That lamp is a nightmare to someone with migraines.

You’re missing one important point: radiated power scales with the fourth power of temperature. Could it be that xAI has a chip capable of operating at very high temperatures?

holy crap, this lamp costs $1200??? i couldn't focus on the article after reading price tag and instead went in a 'why this lamp has to be this expensive' search mode.

I never ever buy any crowdfunded product, because the moron that makes it always offshores production to China. I support local businesses, with a local supply chain. Please do that too, it’s how we get a better future!

Insults / name calling aside, can products like this even be manufactured domestically? Is there a US based LED manufacturer, for starters? Cables / connectors? Final assembly? And do the ones that make the bespoke parts and final assembly even take orders for 500 units like this one?

I want to support local manufacturing too, but in many cases the choice isn't there. The Trump dictatorship's tariffs are an attempt to "encourage" this manufacturing back to the US, but redeveloping the factories and supply chains will take years - if there's even people willing to commit to it, because despite high import tariffs, it's still cheaper to import things. And even if it wasn't, it'd still be cheaper and easier to go through a 3rd party and back channels, or to a country not affected as much by the import tariffs. Whole manufacturing lines are / have been moved to e.g. Vietnam or India to avoid the tariffs, and that's still cheaper than moving to the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com