I'm trying to figure out how I can turn hobby products (that me and family and friends are using) into real products for a wider audience. So far, I've found 2 main failure cases:
1. While I can share source code and documentation with trustworthy people, that won't work at scale: the market would get flooded with Chinese clones that re-use my Open Source software but then I have no ongoing revenue to fund support / maintenance.
2. Especially for products with a physical component, shipping, taxes, refunds, CC chargebacks etc. add considerable overhead. Plus I need to add in Amazon fees and marketing spend. And suddenly I need to charge 8x the manufacturing price, which means I either need to massively cheapen out with quality, or it's going to be a very premium product.
1. While I can share source code and documentation with trustworthy people, that won't work at scale: the market would get flooded with Chinese clones that re-use my Open Source software but then I have no ongoing revenue to fund support / maintenance.
2. Especially for products with a physical component, shipping, taxes, refunds, CC chargebacks etc. add considerable overhead. Plus I need to add in Amazon fees and marketing spend. And suddenly I need to charge 8x the manufacturing price, which means I either need to massively cheapen out with quality, or it's going to be a very premium product.