Molson Hart

A brief thread on how different hardware and software are: My company makes both custom hardware and custom software. The hardware is toys, not rockets like @SpaceX or cars like @Tesla, but stuffed animals and construction toys. 1/n

When people hear that we make toys, they laugh. They assume it's trivial, a business for people who can't do something better. Plastic toys and stuffed animals? How hard could that be? Well it turns out that it is really hard. 2/n

We, as an e-commerce company, also make custom software. We have a whole suite of tools we use to do everything from forecasting, to data gathering, to repricing, to document generation etc. in an attempt to automate our business and make our decisions better. 3/n

Product development for hardware, relative to software, is significantly more difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and unpredictable. It has taken me 2.5 years and about $30,000+ (excluding labor) to redesign (not even design from scratch!) a simple plastic toy. 4/n

Whereas, to build our custom software, it took maybe 2 weeks per project and required no expenses besides a $9/month subscription to some web services. That said, software isn't just cheaper and faster. It's much more predictable. 5/n

It's much easier to have a sense of how long things will take before and during. Whereas for hardware, that 2.5 year project, was 1-2 months from completion...for 30 months, and we haven't even built the production mold. We've only just finished the prototype mold, finally. 6/n

So, if you're asking yourself, should I start a software business or a hardware business? It's not even a question for me. Unless your hardware idea is world-changing, I would stay away. There are enough low-risk potentially highly-profitable software ideas out there. End. 7/7