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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

“contact sales” literally means expensive shitty product.

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