My fifth year as a bootstrapped founder
Please do not take the following as criticism, just observations based on my own experience and hopefully guidance for others wishing to venture in this direction.<p>First, to state the obvious:  Hardware is hard.  I have been doing hardware for forty years.  I know.  The cash requirements to build and sustain a hardware business can be brutally painful if you are bootstrapping.<p>One of the problems I see when reading about solo founders in the hardware domain is that they launch into the business without having 100% of the skills necessary to deliver the product.<p>When I built my first hardware startup I was able to complete all of the electrical engineering, firmware&#x2F;software engineering, mechanical and had a pretty solid grounding in manufacturing.  In looking at the profit statement for the OP&#x27;s startup, I see $360K in costs that could have been avoided.  That is, payroll, electrical engineering and web design.  That&#x27;s a ton of money.<p>My guess is the raw materials costs ($330K) likely is high as well.  Hard to say without having greater visibility into the design.  I&#x27;ll say this, I would not be surprised if the cost could be cut in half by going to a reputable contract manufacturer in China.  That&#x27;s just reality, sorry.<p>The first quarter my product went on the market we (I) sold $650K of that product.  The website didn&#x27;t look particularly great, but it worked.  I got better at web design over the years and improved it, eventually handing it off to someone else.  At that point we were nicely profitable and I had several employees.  The point is, if the product solves a problem the website almost doesn&#x27;t matter.  I always think of Craigs List as and example of that.<p>It looks like the OP devices sell for, rounding it, about $400.  Which means 2022&#x27;s sales amount to about 2,000 units.  That&#x27;s great, but the profits got eaten-up by having to pay people for skills.  A device like this can be assembled and delivered 100% without having to hire a single person.<p>I recently had a case where I had to redesign a board three times due to component availability issues.  It cost me nothing to do that work (in terms of cash), just a few nights and weekends of my time.  That&#x27;s the power of being able to do the work yourself.<p>My take is that solo founders, particularly if bootstrapped, must restrict their venture to whatever their competencies might be.  If they don&#x27;t, they will have to use cash to buy that expertise, which can make the difference between a nice grow path and extended pain and agony.<p>That said. Good job!  Hardware startups can be horribly painful.  I am currently helping a hardware startup that has to spend a million or two building prototypes before they can even hope to sell their product.  Very different from being able to code-up a web product on a laptop in the dorm where pizza might be your greatest expense. It takes a special kind of personality to endure entrepreneurship in general, hardware entrepreneurs are on a different class altogether (which could mean we are amazing or we are absolutely demented...I think I am demented).