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Comment by fl0wenol | Hacker News Reader

Should have focused on a specific sub-market at first, used it to proof-out internal tools and design->front door delivery processes, show the potential.

Something boutique-ish but simple, maybe a few internal configurables, that could use customization. Like headphone amplifiers (since headphones are becoming like fashion accessories).

Or e-ink pens.

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It's really easy to say this is why someone failed and this is what they should have done instead but take a moment to walk in their shoes. Do you really think it never occurred to them? Every decision has incredible amount of weight to it and only they had to the bear the consequences of the those decisions.

You sound defensive. He's just voicing his opinion.

I spoke about that in the post - we had narrowed our efforts to just be hardware focused, but soon realized that wasn't enough. We then narrowed even further and were going to simply offer a podcast radio with a number of customizations. But that decision was made too late.

Something to think about WRT focus is consider a world, magically without retail car part stores. Actually I'm old enough to remember the world before autozone and pep boys and whatever other competitors I'm forgetting, and we got by pretty easily. But anyway...

It would be tough to startup the first ever disruptive retail car parts store if you focused deeply on parts for a '98 Saturn, however convenient it would be for a couple people. You'd have to make sure you focused deeply on ... How bout sparkplugs? Every spark plug commercially available today. It probably sounds insane, but there's a successful chain that theoretically sells nothing but batteries. This was actually pretty easy to focus. I think their project was immensely harder to focus. I think it would be extremely challenging to narrow their market yet still have more than a handful of customers.

I agree. My personal choice: they should have focused on "build your own personal digital alarm clock - make it snooze however you want: shouting at it, moving it or just placing the snooze button on a particular hard to reach place".

I had a speculative-design project in the back of my head, where objects physically evolve over successive versions, using only existing use data fed into a generative design. The alarm clock was the specific object I chose (what method of waking you up works the best for you?), and this would've been the perfect platform to realize it. Just a silly concept, but you need to come up with a reason to do millions of one-offs, rather than letting a designer doing her job well for a single universal model.

That seemed to be what they did. Only a pod cast radio instead of a headphone amp.

But that's not how they marketed themselves from the get go. It was more about enabling the end user to come up with stuff (I remember reading they were basically targeting other software developers who had a hardware itch they wanted scratched). I think that was _specifically_ the leap too many.

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