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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

After getting tired of ads on my PAID smart TV, 6 months ago I started building a casting device using raspberry pi for myself. A couple of months later one of my friends who is an AV technician ended up using it at the largest convention venue in Barcelona to play content on loop, here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FF3I9EOs4AA.

Fast forward to last month, now I have started selling these in Barcelona, Spain where I am based out of and branched it into three use cases: digital signage, casting, and a portable computer for presentations at events. Here is the link with features: https://soljacast.com

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Clicked on the link, ready to buy one. “Contact sales”. Ew. No thanks.

We are literally new and only available in Barcelona at the moment which I mentioned in my comment as well. Not sure what's eww about that?

Sorry, knee jerk reaction any time I see “contact sales” instead of a price.

No worries. If you message me via the contact form or chat support on the website, I will try my best to provide you with one. The more feedback I can get, the better.

Thanks for liking my product enough to want to buy it right away :)

Sales friction is how you lose sales. Make your website one click purchase product page. One button - apply pay, customer pays with preset shipping and then you handle everything from there.

Trust me, I really wish it were that easy. We're based out of Spain, so to sell in the US (or other countries) we either need to figure out assembly of the device there, or we need to solve cross-border payments, logistics, customs clearance, tax remittance to individual states, and hardware compliance. That said, we're working hard on all of it and plan to go D2C as soon as possible.

I haven't used them myself, but it seems that services such as paddle.com takes care of the payment and tax compliance. There are probably similar sevices for logistics as well.

The thing is majority platforms like paddle.com don't supoort hardware products. I was looking at fastspring as well but hit the same wall. I will still try reaching out to paddle.com support to see if they will allow it. Thank you for the suggestion.

Your device seems to be an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi running custom software. Have you considered making the platform available in a BYOD form, either for fulltime use or for evaluation?

Yes, we're using an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi for v1. We are working on figuring out a custom board for v2, because we can't scale with Raspberry Pi as a dependency, especially with RPi prices constantly rising due to the RAM shortage.

Also, we want to test our OS extensively before we release it to be used with a BYOD model. We are launching soon and after that we will try to offer BYOD model as well.

If you are interested in trying it out and helping me in evaluation, please reach out to me via email on my HN profile. Thank you

I believe they're referring to the friction point of this company/website not publicly listing a price. That's a huge barrier/red flag to a lot of people. Myself included. Last thing I want to do is waste time bouncing emails back and forth between sales just to figure out if the price range is even remotely in my wheelhouse.

However, if your target is B2B (Business to Business) as opposed to B2C/D2C (Business to Client/Direct to Client) and you're selling the install plus enterprise support, then the sales thing makes way more sense, and is more expected/palatable for B2B type customers than your everyday consumers, so depends on who you're targeting.

We are working on figuring out payments, logistics, hardware compliance (different countries have different requirements), state-level tax handling, customs clearance, etc. for D2C.

Also right now we are focusing on B2B here in Spain like you guessed, and once we have the other things figured out, we will start shipping to the US and Europe. And after that we plan on rolling out to the rest of the countries.

The "eww" part is that normally, anytime you see "talk to us for a price", that means someone is charging an absurdly high amount for the good or service.

I see, the thing is we are very new and plan on launching soon. We are still trying to figure out our B2C/D2C pricing.

I would suggest making the wording something more like "Launching soon, contact us for pre-release information". Same end result but it avoids the association with overpriced enterprise providers.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will add something like that to the website.

Or it's a scam where there's no product and no price and the "seller" is just fishing for contacts (or marks).

“contact sales” literally means expensive shitty product.

your product looks cool, but why do I need to contact sales to buy that device? can't you just open like a shopify shop and redirect end customers to that? Also showing the retail price on the page would be a plus one

Thank you for your kind words. I am pasting one of the comments I made on this thread regarding challenges with online sales at the moment:

> Trust me, I really wish it were that easy. We're based out of Spain, so to sell in the US (or other countries) we either need to figure out assembly of the device there, or we need to solve cross-border payments, logistics, customs clearance, tax remittance to individual states, and hardware compliance. That said, we're working hard on all of it and plan to go D2C as soon as possible.

For the pricing part, I am still trying to figure out the pricing for retail consumers. It was relatively easier to do for B2B but for retail, there are a lot of factors and moving parts such as import duties, taxes, shipping etc.

I guess it would be easier to start selling in EU and then expand. I'm looking for an alternative for my apple tv since I mostly use it for airplay looking forward to buying solijacast once it's available in Germany

If you email me (it's on my HN profile), I can send one to you the moment we are taking D2C orders. We still have to make it self-serve ready for end consumers. Really thanks for your interest :)

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