Hardware is hard. Consumer hardware is even worse.
As an ex ecommerce seller with years of experience manufacturing overseas, I can tell you dealing with suppliers, MOQs (minimum order quantities), quality control, cash flow and even LTV are tough.
Unlike SaaS where you build it once and sell again and again with almost no added costs, hardware requires cash. Manufacturing 10s or 100s of thousands of products requires massive upfront investments that most startups cannot afford.
And while every sale helps make up those margins, it is still nowhere near SaaS. Worst still is LTV (lifetime value of a customer). And like a one night stand, one and done isn’t efficient in the long run.
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Avidan is the Founding Partner of Root Ventures. Before Root, he designed industrial robotics for Food Network’s kitchens. Prior to that, Avidan was CTO of CIM Group, where he focused on industrial internet investing, and worked as an embedded application developer at Excite@Home.
Nathan is a product guy and leads the Flight VC SaaS syndicate where he focuses on B2B and enterprise SaaS. While running one of the oldest, largest and most successful syndicates on Angellist, he is also Product Manager at a late stage, pre-IPO company, a dad of two and an advisor and consultant to numerous startup companies.