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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

US demand and overseas markets can't cancel out Supply and Demand and market forces.

- Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide.

- He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price point. They'll end up selling the same chalk at double the price.

- And expansion into the USA is laughable. Try expanding into an existing market with well established players (crayola) that is shrinking and on its way out.

- And this is the USA we're talking about, we prefer cheap products to quality ones. The only time it seems we invest in premium products is when they are an American brand, made in America.

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> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market.

I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk.

Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting some other university and think "Wow, what is this? I must have some!" This led me to buy several boxes of it at $35 a pop. My out-of-town guests, who give lectures in the research seminar I help to run, get treated to the good stuff.

As a student, I preferred chalkboards to whiteboards because they were easier to read. It seems that most of the time, unless the professor had an exceptionally well working dry-erase marker, the lines were too thin and light for me to read them, no matter the color.

I remember thinking that the whiteboards were an improvement at first, but that quickly changed when I realized I couldn't read what was written on them anymore.

And the dry-erase boards are never cleaned properly, leaving them coated with a weirdly-colored scrunge.

Unfortunately there simply aren't very many math professors. An average American school district has 200 teachers, all of whom would have used chalk until recently, that's a lot more than there are professors in a university math department and there are many more school districts than universities.

I agree that there is a durable market for chalk, but not at this kind of volume.

It'd qualify as a lifestyle business if you were just looking to make $50-60k USD/year.

You're treating it like a commodity product focused on economies of scale (comparison to Crayola). As an outsider reading about it the last couple of weeks they did have good quantities but it feels like a repositioning as a quality leader makes sense. So switch the focus from cost leadership to differentiation (quality) in Porter terms.

I'm pretty sure the customers mentioned qualify as typical customers that are willing to pay a hefty premium for a product they love. tl;dr: scale down, focus on quality, charge more > shutdown

Oh yeah? try drawing 3D painting on the street with marker.

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