[aikiai]

I disagree with your assumption that this is an engineering crowd. I would say entrepreneurship is at least as important to the HN culture as engineering.

You ask a huge question, which is discussed every day all around the internet.

But to take a high level stab at it:

Marketing is crucial to an early-stage hardware startup to start to determine if anyone actually wants to buy what you're proposing to build. Good luck getting money from a VC, much less a customer, if you can't talk intelligently about your target market, and demonstrate an ability to connect with it.

Sales becomes paramount after Version 1.0 is released, when you have to demonstrate that your business is actually profitable. Many engineers are under the impression that, if the quality is high enough, the product will sell itself. While this is true for the (tiny) subset of your market that cares enough to really investigate your product, it seems that a great sales team with a mediocre product will outsell a mediocre sales team with a great product more often than not.