How difficult is it to succeed in domestic smart hardware startups?
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If last year everyone was still discussing whether "smart hardware" was a popular trend in the future, this year is the "first year" of smart hardware. Countless domestic and foreign giants have begun to plan their own smart hardware layout and release products. Smart hardware has become the most popular keyword among investors, industry insiders and the media. Domestic smart hardware entrepreneurial teams have sprung up in every corner. If these teams want to succeed, they will face many insurmountable difficulties. Allen Kay, a great man, once said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." This means that people who really care about software should make their own hardware. This sentence was later used by Steve Jobs to express Apple's product development concept. The combination of software and hardware can better provide services to users, improve user stickiness, and win more users through better experience. However, the threshold for hardware products is very high, which is the biggest difficulty for domestic entrepreneurial teams on the road to success. The author has participated in many hardware exchange and display conferences this year. The hardware of some start-ups only stays at the level of having certain functions, while some companies directly "copy" the designs accumulated by other companies over the years to make their own hardware. This may be a good way to "get rich quickly", but it also reflects that these start-ups do not pay attention to industrial design and product experience in hardware, but only emphasize the "forcing growth" mentality of saving time and effort. For this reason, I interviewed the creator of AirScale a few months ago. Product manager Dan said that many domestic startup teams only emphasize the functional part of smart hardware, but ignore the fact that industrial design is a very important part of hardware that is closely related to the lives of users. Therefore, AirScale is focusing on both development and product design, and would rather slow down the pace than bring immature and shoddy products to the market. I think this move is too risky, and it is very easy to turn the product into a product that is still in the development process, and the concept has been copied and mass-produced somewhere. In this regard, Dan said that some products that only play the concept card to seek financing will inevitably face the flaw of imperfect user experience due to the race against time to get the product to the market. The entire AirScale team is very confident in their products. From concept to realization, they still insist on slow and steady work, without any fear of being copied. As expected, before the author finished writing, a brand that had been launched on the market for half a year and developed at the same time was reported to have implied that AirScale, which was crowdfunded at the time of the roll call, was suspected of plagiarism. This also proves that the water of copycat plagiarism is too deep. 2. Is the software easy to use? User experience is the basis Many entrepreneurial teams of smart hardware come from the Internet industry. They have Internet thinking and software development experience, which is their most important advantage in the field of smart hardware. However, it still takes some effort to make a mobile phone application that users will like. Recently, Luo Yonghao's "Hammer Phone" has started to be pre-ordered. In today's low-priced mobile phone market, pricing the "Hammer Phone" at 3,000 is indeed a gorgeous adventure. The author has tried the Hammer Phone, and the user experience in many aspects is great. No wonder Luo Yonghao is full of confidence in his product. Whether the software is good or not, it still needs a good user experience. To develop a good application, the difficulty is no less than making your own hardware. Staffing must be in place To make a good mobile app, you have to consider developing the same app for both iOS and Android platforms. A good development team is essential, otherwise the app you make will basically have many problems. In terms of staffing, you need project managers, UI designers, IOS development engineers, Android development engineers, backend engineers, and test engineers. It is conceivable that the time and manpower costs required for many links in design, development, and testing are huge pressure for general startup teams. How deep is your love for interaction and experience? What we have mentioned before is the cost of making an application with complete functions and few bugs. The applications developed at this stage are only at the stage of having basic functions. If you want to make an easy-to-use application that can "stand out" from similar products, the entire team needs to pay enough attention to user experience from top to bottom. User experience should be centered on user needs, and user needs will change due to subjective or objective factors. How to match the changes in user needs and keep up is a difficult problem that all entrepreneurial teams need to think about and solve. Fast and agile iteration Agile development is an iterative, step-by-step development method that focuses on the evolution of user needs. Simply put, when a simple idea comes to your mind, you should present it to your users as quickly as possible. If the user doesn't like it, throw it away immediately and start thinking about the next idea. If the user likes it, give the programmer enough time to improve and perfect it. This method allows us to conduct functional tests faster. Why do we need iteration? Because there are many "constraints" in many projects, such as budget, schedule and function. The budget is often not very abundant in startups, and in the best case it is just enough. If your schedule cannot be changed, such as launching a certain function before a certain marketing campaign, then you need to use the idea of agile development to flexibly handle such situations. Many startup teams, although they have some software development experience, still lack project management experience. If they still use the old "waterfall development" method, it is very likely that they will not be able to complete the project at the planned time point, because "plans cannot keep pace with changes". If you want to make a good APP, you still need to optimize your development method. 3. How far can the project go? Even if the hardware and software problems are well solved and the product is launched on the market, how far the project can go is still unknown. The author summarizes the following points worth thinking about: 1. Many mobile Internet application companies make hardware mainly for following the trend or commercial realization; they do not focus on creating products with the ultimate user experience. Most of these companies will not make up their minds to continuously optimize their products. Teams and products that lose their innovative spirit will only be short-lived; 2. The combination of "software + hardware" does not necessarily improve profitability. The quality and experience of the hardware are the most critical; 3. For mobile Internet companies to make hardware, production capacity and channels are key. If you can’t control costs, you naturally can’t control pricing. If you want to gain market share with low prices, you can only rely on the method of “losing money to gain publicity”. How long can this method last? I’ll put a big question mark here and see how the market will answer it. As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity. |
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