Walk every aisle of your local Best Buy or MicroCenter. Do a mental calculation of how would this hardware product be 10x better with (present day’s) latest software trend.

Eg can I make this blender 10x better by bolting it to an LLM? Can I make this coffee machine 10x better by adding on a coffee+distilled water+third wave salt subscription? Can I make this network router 10x better shipping it with an invisible-to-normies tailscale + Speedify + 5G SIM card for ultra low latency, highly reliable zoom calls from the middle of nowhere using fast open and MPTCP?

Why 10x? Because if it’s not a 10x better experience the switching costs (aka “activation energy”) will be too high to gain market traction before you run out of funding and die.

Stack rank your items by categories such as “will this increase usage from once every 9 months to 9 times a day (ie smoke detector to co2 environmental sensor)”. “Does this have have a viral k factor that the original didn’t (access control for package delivery in door locks)”. “Does this unlock a recurring revenue stream that previously wasn’t there?” (smart decoding of video feed events). Etc.

Narrow your list down from 220 to 5. Build some prototypes. Test your market amongst fellow founders. Find the one niche vertical that has surprising utility and becomes a runaway success which exceeds your ability to fabricate in your living room using arduinos and off the shelf parts until you’ve exhausted Best Buy, Amazon, Spark Fun, and Adafruit’s supply of said item and you need to make your own version.

Get partnered up with a second rate design firm in one of the flyover states that has weird connections for manufacturing in this space from a random guy you met a JS conference three years earlier that cold calls you. Launch a successful crowd funding campaign. Raise funding. Fly to China to meet some contract manufacturers.

Pick the wrong contract manufacturer based on your own inexperience and your design firm’s prior relationship. Have things go terribly wrong because one didn’t use glass reinforced abs instead of regular abs because injection molded tools are expensive and a lot of tooling adjustments boil down to “guess and check”.

Move to China. But like not the cool part like Shenzhen or Shanghai - like a semi-obscure part - like Yiwu. Have way too many hot pots over Mao Tai trying to find a T2 vendor that knows how to injection mold helical gears. Learn some gutter slang from an obscure dialect of Chinese like Gan. Fire half a dozen T2’s. Hire five more. Fire three more. Refine it down to one final T2 that’s giving you problems. Eg try to find a paint vendor that can match the white on your injection molded part to the white on your metal part.

Nope out of the first paint vendor who can actually do this because of sketchy work conditions like a half naked infant running around the factory floor wearing 开裆裤.

Almost rage quit.

Question why you’re pirating grad school text books on material science from Turkish warez sites instead of taking that aqui-hire to AirBnB when they were like 12 people. Make a futile effort to give out safety equipment to T2’s regarding hearing and eye protection because you begin to question how everything is done in this country.

Nearly burn out again.

Begin to see the light. Parts fit. Production is scaling. Find a critical flaw. Fail.

Then do it all again until you succeed or run out of money.