Holy shit. Did you end up going with China after all? Can you share anything else from your experience? I'm in disbelief about what's going on, having emailed at least a dozen labs around Europe and receiving only one reply.
746 karma · joined February 12, 2010
https://flyingcarcomputer.com/posts/a-new-personal-computer/
> Q: Why do you want to work for us?
> A: Because I need the money.
Generalization is dangerous and people want to join groups of other people for many different reasons. Some of them are bored and have nothing better to do with their time. Others are charmed by that particular group of people because of who those people are or the kind of work that they do. A few are interested in moving to a different city or country and expanding their horizons. Making it sound like this is all about money everywhere all the time seems nihilistic and pretty depressing to me. I would not want to work with a person who is doing it just for the money or refuses to give a reason why they wish to join my group. I suppose therein lies the merit of asking "why".
So, for example, if a business sends SiFive $100K and a copy of OpenRISC, they would receive ~300 chips that could then be used in a commercial product?
If a business then wants to order another 300 chips (or more), would they only need to pay SiFive the $30K? Does the $30K price fluctuate? Does E31 core have an end of life? In the event that EOL is reached, or SiFive ceases to exist, can the business make these chips somewhere else or are they screwed?
* Your first customer will not be representative of your future customers. The adoption curve dictates that you have to start with mavericks and early adopters of whom there are few in the world. In the beginning, I tried everything and persevered despite the rate of closing a sale was very low. Physically going door to door, reaching out to people one by one on Twitter and Instagram. People would typically laugh and try to get me out of their business as quickly as possible but at least I got to see how their business operated from the inside and adapted the pitch based on what I learned. Eventually, I honed in on a few things that I should say and minded many things that I had to avoid saying in order to keep the conversation going.
* Word of mouth starts to spread little by little. When you get to this stage, you passed the first stage. At this point, it's time to figure out what exactly people are saying to other people about your product that they like. Then, incorporate this in to your sales pitch and marketing.
* Know your strengths and weaknesses. If you are not strong in one area (e.g. sales) it is not an excuse to wait until someone closes the sale for you. You just have to work harder on it and figure out what you can do better each time. Conversely, if you are great at something, do not be tempted to use that skill to fix every challenge. The old "when you have a hammer everything is a nail". No matter how difficult things get, it's always helpful to go on a walk and figure out if you are assessing each challenge objectively or letting your passion or emotion drive the decision making.
* Fire customers. Raise prices. Customers associate low price with low quality. Ask yourself if that is your business. It may be useful to set a low price early on just to get someone on board but do not linger in that chasm of misery. In the valley of bargain bin hunters you will get some pathologically bad customers who will drag you down with with them. I think that as soon as you reach "word of mouth" you should start to raise prices.
I think these are universally applicable to any market because it's standard "landing on the beach" procedure for a startup. The stage after will depend on how far up the beach you make it.
I am working on a project (https://flyingcarcomputer.com) and struggling with C at the moment. If you want to chat, email me at hackernews.vudcc@passmail.net.
[1] https://community.nxp.com/t5/LPC-Microcontrollers/Where-may-...
[2] https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-i-mx8-cannot-be-deblobbed-nxp-s...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ECE/comments/9oarto/arm_socs_with_o...
We experimented with several approaches to this over the years and this one sucked the least. Our constraints are:
1) Keep things simple and easy to test and maintain.
2) Follow search engine recommendations (below) as much as we can.
3) Only 30% of our visitors select the English language. We have a very multilingual user base.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/internat...
> Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site. For example, don't redirect based on what you think the user's language may be. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
We also observed a few interesting things:
* The language selector page has an extremely low bounce rate. I think the <1% bounce rate is almost entirely low-end bots, or clients that immediately lose connection.
* Web search results link directly to the localized pages (e.g. /en/) so majority of our traffic never lands on the language selector page.
All in all, it doesn't suck enough to take resources from other more pressing issues. However, would love to hear how you would build it differently!
To me, reducing your intake doesn't make as much sense as paying for traceability and certification.
I remember learning that the introduction of the automatic paintball guns dramatically decreased the price of paint. This benefited all players but not equally. The price of paint for players who did not switch to automatic and kept using manually reloaded paintball guns was reduced to virtually zero. New players sprung for the shiny new automatic paintball gun and usually only played a few games before moving on. The regulars improved their skills with manual reload. When they upgraded to automatic they would have excellent paint conservation discipline and arguably would have a lot more fun for much less cost.