[tonyarkles]

> The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.

I agree with you, but also somewhat disagree on the overall takeaway. Yes, of course you have to put more effort into it than just spending $200 NRE and $2.10 unit cost. The quiet part that really needs to be said out loud (way more than marketing costs and effort) is: find a niche with really great unit economics. When you've got a product with 10% margin, you have to manage all of those marketing costs very very carefully. When you've got a product with a raw 5000% margin, it matters way way less whether your CAC is even triple the raw manufacturing cost of the product.