[soundlab]

This is so refreshing to see on HN. People looked at me like I was out of my mind in the ancient days of 2011 when I told people I was working on a hardware startup. I would only take issue with the author's advice to reconsider what you're doing if your volumes are under 1000. You can bend the cost and risk of your product launch substantially by focusing on a narrower niche and growing out from there. VCs don't like this of course, but scaling a low volume product to a high volume product is orders of magnitude easier than going from zero to a million units in a year. Following good design for manufacture principles and keeping excellent documentation is also key regardless of production size.

[jpindar]

I've been employed most of my life by companies that never made 1000 of any one product. A lot of specialized industrial or aerospace electronics are profitable despite not being mass produced.

[bsder]

Yeah, that's the wrong 1,000.

Reconsider if your unit price is under $1,000.

A $1,000 per unit device that you can sell can cover up a multitude of sins because it's likely profitable from the first sale.

A $10 per unit device won't be profitable until 10,000+ units.