Facecook posts through different groups.

What does a Hard Tech Launch look like?

It looked like a ledger, but fell into the trap of the trusting wrong people who didnt have the same passion... Thank you, for inspiring me to start again.

It was basically a google page, with a contact phone number.

Please do a post on “going 100 miles an hour” and “startup fast vs company fast”!

Same !! Such motivating advice

Literally was just doing this lol.

You'd love /r/MealtimeWatch

I’m eating too lol

@@maneeshapte6883 ojhh

We may have some thoughts on this topic next week :)

Have you launched?

love the camaraderie

what's your website?

Is it live? :-)

@@may4081 Yup, took way longer than I assumed though 😅. Still committing on the live build but this video helped me downsize a tremendous amount

Rooting for you. I hope to launch in one week

@@makingJesusproud Definitely will. Thank you so much!

@@davidw8668 this

Look at the biggest risks your idea faces, and run experiments to validate each one. Instacart can use a crappy landing page to validate (de-risk) the hypothesis that fast/easy online ordering is something people want. Once they validate that, then they work on the ops side (next biggest risk) to help fulfill orders. Once those two are validated, they may work on restaurant variety to increase demand, then driver incentives to speed up deliveries, and so on. Then, once they’ve validated all that, they can move to a mobile app after enough users have either requested it or because they have the other pieces in place. Similarly, Uber used SMS and employees with a spreadsheet calling black cars in the early days.

@@lastemperor12 this is so helpful. Thanks, David. It sounds like Wizard of Oz'ing every component as best you can before building is the lesson here.

I like the analogy! Takes some pressure of you.

This would be great to hear!

You have a great idea, and even though you’re an expert in the domain, you run it past other experts, get encouraged, and your family company decides to build it. Your family puts in all their savings ($156,000). Your friends and extended family purchase stock at what’s either a deep discount (for a company that becomes a success), or is throwing away money (if it’s a failure), this is an additional $195,000. You drop everything else and your whole family works their butts off for 3 years building these hardware prototypes (in our case, they’re boats), just paying themselves enough to cover the bills, food, and gas for the car. The prototypes are a roaring success by all metrics, but they’re not complete; they need a bit of robotics and programming work to make them into an MVP. Being a spreadsheet aficionado and experienced in doing bid-based construction work for the last 40 years, you put all the cost items and time estimates in excruciating detail into a spreadsheet. At last you have a number! Finding yourself short of the measly $450,000 you need for final development and going to manufacturing, you apply to YC and the National Science Foundation Small Business Research Grant opportunity, cross your fingers, hope you wrote killer applications and they like you. But you won’t get an answer from one of them for 2 months, and the other for 6 months. So you poot along with the $2,000 to $3,000/month surplus cash flow that comes from your other family company, and keep working on your prototypes, making very slow incremental progress on your vision. You talk robot boats at the breakfast table, with your wife, your 21-year-old, you 20-year-old, and your 17-year-old; they are all founders too, having given a huge chunk of their last 3 years building and testing these boats for no paycheck. The family goes sailing in the prototypes on the weekend, to help keep the vision alive. You don’t get discouraged, you don’t give up. You listen to all the YC videos one more time, to see if you can turn up any nuances or details you missed before. Any hardware startups out there reading this: did I miss anything? Any wisdom you can help us out with? We’re all ears. With Warm Aloha, Tim

@@TJMcCarty I hear u loud and clear. Just that I plan on getting paid from day one. It's hardware+software. Hardware is off the shelf, the software has to work with it. Users in my market are not so understanding when you've taken their money. And I want to avoid refunds

@@stinger4712 I recommend to abstract the hardware through generic interfaces and then use test-driven-development on your business logic. This should help keep most bugs at bay. Then as T.J. stated, any remaining (likely trivial) bugs can be weeded out with the help of your users. In the book, “The Clean Coder, ” Robert Martin reflects on how TDD and clean code impacted his startup ventures.

@@sonictailsandsally I'll let y'all know how it goes

It's true. Users will find insane ways to crash software. It NEVER ends. Never.