[eande]

Michael, thank you for sharing your story and experience for TinyPlot from inception starting to scale. As a hardware engineer myself and having been in your shoes, founded 10 years ago a startup and launched the product I know what it takes and how hard it is to reach the point you got to, kudos.

This blog mentions that you consider manufacturing in China and drop ship the product. In all likelihood by now you might get PCB/PCBA and/or other parts of it from China, not sure. Outsourcing the whole chain flow is another dimension.

Some post here mentioned it already, but the support/expense you will need to provide that is going to be a longer list. Ongoing quality handling remotely, component shortage, part replacements you did not know about, yield, shipping issue, etc it can be real distractions. That is one of the reasons you need some build/ship volume, probably minimum over several hundred units a month to make the whole flow work efficiently.

One more thought. I am not sure how you will avoid an actual office for a hardware company assuming you want to continue to grow with product improvements, debug and next generation development.

My post is just to give you heads up shifting from in-house build with tight control to outsourcing might not solve all your problems. At least that was my experience and I for one definitely did that outsourcing too early.