andrewmb

The thing to understand about China is that domestic alternatives to international products, especially in 'sensitive' industries (basically anything technologically significant) is ALREADY a core government goal and a major cornerstone of their tech, IP, and political policy. The CCP has stated on many occasions--going back years--that their goal is to eliminate any reliance on non-Chinese firms. This has more urgency in some industries (eg semiconductors) than others, but the ultimate goal is the same.

To provide more of a direct answer, I think that Shenzhen has really great long-term prospects as a tech/innovation hub. Very large number of investors, existing and large tech/innovation/industry cluster (consumer electronics), and long-term government incentives. You can already start to see the momentum building. I've seen major changes since first doing business there (Feb 2012) and even over the past ~2years that I've lived there.

However, the prospects of moving there are not significantly better than the US. China is opening up new classes of visas and making certain business licenses more accessible, but my general impression from being in the ecosystem and talking with locals and foreigners is that it's difficult to get a sustainable business off the ground. The immigration situation (if that is a goal) is bleak.

As another user mentioned, this idea (stationless bike share/rental) has been white-hot in China since the past summer, with a lot of extreme incidents occurring in the past couple months. The article doesn't exaggerate about 10ft tall piles of bicycles. Vandalism is a major part of the competition between companies as well--it is a regular sight (in Shenzhen) to see bikes with spray paint over QR codes, falsely reported damage, missing seats, etc.

Overall, the system works extremely well and is super convenient, but Shenzhen has very good public transportation to begin with and most of the sidewalks in the city are very wide compared to those in San Francisco. Those are two of the key things that have enabled this type of service to emerge and take off in China--it's really just solving a "last-mile" problem of getting to a point that's too far from a metro station to comfortably walk but not far enough to take a cab.

Can you back out $12?? I would put the BOM closer to $6 if I'm going with the high estimate, and more than half of that cost will be driven by the ATMEL and OLED.

Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineer

=========================

Location: Shenzhen, China -or- Chapel Hill, NC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: location-dependent (Bay Area or East Coat)

Technologies: Solidworks, DFMA, GD&T, QC, laser cutting (CO2, Fiber, 405nm, 365nm), 3D printing (SLA), factory management and sourcing.

Résumé/CV: https://cn.linkedin.com/in/andrewboggeri

Email: andrew (at) mecchania (dot) com

Currently prefer contract or part-time consulting work, but open to other options. Planning to repatriate to the USA October 2017.

I'm currently working on a company that could just as easily start in China as the US: anything you can share regarding where and how to find investors? No "Chinese AngelList"?

As others have mentioned, nothing is even close. For certain types of industries there are cities in the US and Europe that are competitive (eg mil/aero in Los Angeles and DC metros), but for general product development and especially consumer electronics nothing is close.

What do you hope to gain out of living in these places? There are plenty of foreigners who have been in Shenzhen for over a decade and are only marginally more interesting or successful now than when they arrived. The location rarely changes what's inside. If you find Shenzhen interesting, just come! It (and the rest of the HK+PRD megalopolis) is not even close to peaking in terms of creative or engineering output. Just bear in mind that there will always be a barrier. If you're thinking of turning into a local you need to be either (A) a skilled Chinese (B) an extremely well capitalized foreign company (C) an extremely skilled foreigner willing to spend years in the city and learn the language to fluency.

All that being said, you want to look for cities with strong population growth trends, very low wages, and huge levels of government investment. India is probably your best bet, though I know nothing about it other than what's in the news that they want to be the next China. That will be tough since India is missing some absolutely fundamental pre-requisites to the kind of growth China has had.

Is this true? I know that as a US Citizen I'm required to pay taxes on worldwide income; but any lawful resident of the USA has the same burden? I'm a little skeptical that someone not on a permanent immigration path would be subject to this, but I'm neither an attorney nor an accountant so...

You should download and explore WeChat (微信）. It seems like facebook at this point is now chasing functionality that's been present in Chinese apps for several years. WeChat lets you order food, buy train tickets, etc in addition to the messaging. The comparison I've heard is that in software B2C China is ahead by 5 years, B2B USA leads by 5 years. And China is defining new C2C and O2O. Hardware is a toss-up.

Looking for a software engineering cofounder.

I'm working on a project automating tasks around physical product development, and eventually leading into a SaaS/platform with some intelligence to take advantage of new directions in digital manufacturing. I have a feature roadmap and connections to some early users for sales/testing, but my background is not software engineering (MechE, manufacturing, and some EE/embedded systems). Currently I'm evaluating freelancers to get an MVP built since I have a small amount of money to work with.

SEEKING WORK

Location: Remote (primarily Shenzhen, China); Las Vegas, San Francisco Bay Area

We're a boutique product development firm focusing on concept design through manufacturing and delivery of consumer electronics products. We focus heavily on low-volume, flexible manufacturing in China Pearl River Delta region. Another of our particular specialties is precision electromechanical systems, but we've designed, prototyped, and manufactured systems ranging from wearables all the way through interactive kiosks and high volume packaging. We have a lot of experience in helping companies source from China from the prototype stage.

Email: hello@mecchania.com

The easiest way to know is to watch the chinese deal websites. I use those for sourcing anyway so I perform an idle search here and there. In all honesty, if you're getting cloned it's a positive signal that you have a potentially good product (at least on the higher end of the technology scale--for someone like an early-stage fitbit it would be disastrous if the cloners were capable). If you aren't able to watch deal websites, there are other pretty easy ways to track it.

It's also about the strategy of your development--you can take a few very small actions early on that will make it orders of magnitude more difficult to copy your product. But, generally, it's not worth a factory's time to clone your product, especially if it integrates manufacturing processes they don't have access too. I have this benefit because I work mainly with small factories and while they do cooperate with each other, there isn't the infrastructure or margins to allow them to do anything other than focus on building parts as quickly as possible.

My email should be in my profile, drop me a line!

To provide a somewhat-contrasting anecdote, I've been dealing with Chinese factories (mostly in the Pearl River Delta area) for the last 3 years, manufacturing fairly high-tech products. We haven't had any of the problems you describe. We did our first small manufacturing runs sight-unseen with our initial partners and everything went well. I think the story of cratered Kickstarters has more to do with creators who have little experience in manufacturing and no clue what they're doing in China, rather than some intrinsic failing of Chinese factories.

There are plenty of ways to make your BOM work in your home country, but at least in the US it's surprisingly difficult to get low volumes (<5k units) manufactured economically.

Memrise has some decent Chinese decks.

But if you really want to learn the writing, get skritter. Absolutely worth the cost.

This is an excellent analogy.

Agreed. I have a more or less exact idea of what they're doing just from the concept description as I design resin-type 3D printers at my day job. I know this concept has been tried, I think they're just the first ones to have gotten it to work.

The other thing to note is that this only works with a certain subset of polymerization reactions--not all polymerizations are oxygen inhibited so if they want to move into truly water-clear and UV stable materials this design won't work.

The website is pretty and the copy is tight, but it's nothing pathbreaking in terms of fundamental principles.

This is just bottom-up UV-DLP SLA with a new twist: taking fuller advantage of oxygen permeable materials for the vat to eliminate the recoating step and get to continuous printing. A similar idea was tried, the ill-fated Solidator used a pressurized vat bottom with a permeable membrane. Though from what I know Solidator was not counting on the oxygen inhibition in the same manner as Carbon3d. Solidator's problems were not related to the inhibition technology, just the standard hardware issues faced by many on KS. Other companies have similar technologies as Carbon3D in production or soon to reach the market. But a very talented team and quite the splash of a product launch.

FSL3D (Las Vegas, NV) http://www.fsl3d.com/

We manufacture laser 3D printers, laser cutters, and other digital fabrication equipment for customers ranging from hobbyists to industrial manufacturers. We're profitable and growing extremely rapidly. Please send resumes directly to me (email in profile).

Current Openings:

Electrical Engineers

Mechanical Engineers

Full-stack Web Engineers

Engineering Aides Lab Assistants

Marketing Support Engineers

Open to INTERN; VISA support provided for exceptional candidates. Students graduating in Spring include transcripts with your resume.

Commenting so I can come back later (email also in my profile). Would be very interested in talking.

HMO: Feedback from hardware startups.

I run a meetup and organized a conference to help folks who are working on or want to found a hw startup. Would love to connect over email with folks interested in the field and find out what their biggest frustrations are so I can develop my blog content and offer some more educational and fun events. First one is here: http://boot.lvhardware.com

Would also be interested in trading hardware work for coding/design skills or tutoring.

I can help: Hardware design verification, general advice on finding suppliers, kickstarter strategy, etc.

Customization is the immediately obvious one and a central point of their campaign.

Where/what is this from? A book of TR's speeches? Would appreciate the source, this is fantastic.

Wow. This is more than 2x my most optimistic estimates when I first heard the rumors, but I was banking on a larger cash component. I'm in agreement with other posters here who have suggested the purchase is for the brand name and I want to add that control of Thingiverse is no small matter either.

I'm painting with a broad brush :). The extremely negative and short-sighted attitude about Chinese knockoffs is (in my experience) most prevalent in 'western' countries: USA, Canada, UK, Western Europe. I have less contact with Eastern Europe, South America or Africa so I can't comment on their reactions.

Attitudes toward copying are very cultural. In China, it stems from pragmatism and a greater focus on the ends rather than the means (winning trumps winning well) whereas in the US--and West--winning is important, but so is "playing fair".

Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme and miss the bigger picture--China is incredibly focused on technology and there are huge sums of money and a strong cultural impetus for home-grown innovation. As an analogy, China is at the stage where they have learned the major rules for a programming language, and are now copying and pasting advanced code from stackexchange or other places.

Let's not forget historical context either: Japan and S.Korea were once known as knockoff central, and now produce extremely advanced products in their own right.

Pretty much this exactly. Even as an insider, I don't ever see 3D printers being as ubiquitous as PCs or microwaves. However, I think that one day, probably on that 10-year timeline, every printshop and Kinko's will have one. But for home use? It makes more sense for them to be consolidated and shared/rented. The laws of physics are actually the limiting part for most 3D printers--you can only extrude plastic or cure resin so fast without crazy expensive support hardware. People compare this to Moore's law; the analogy is sound, but they don't realize how far along the curve we are with respect to the supporting technologies that go into these machines.

As a suggestion for a next step or advanced functionality, if there was a way to put in my own recipes or ingredients?

>Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products.

I both agree and disagree. For cutting edge products and extremely large volumes, yes you need experience. For a very complicated product, I again agree. But for the majority of what we're seeing with "Kickstarted, low to mid-volume production"? Disagree. If you have a mechanical or manufacturing background you can absolutely get a new product launched without paying Dragon or PCH exorbitant amounts of money. Will there be hiccups? Yes, but nothing catastrophic if you follow good engineering principles.

Design, validation and simulation can all be carried out in advanced CAD packages (or by not-advanced CAD + lots of labor).

Depending on your timeline, you can prototype locally for higher costs but faster iteration (design, build, test), or you can prototype with suppliers more slowly but save on production verification and testing. The speed benefits are variable too: I've had US proto houses come back with ridiculous lead times and Chinese factories turn around a production verification sub-assembly in less than a week. YMMV.

I love the smile curve; I've never seen it before, but that is exactly how things work. But the situation is changing as more and more Chinese factories of all sizes integrate engineering teams and work to become OEM/ODMs for the local market. The other changes are in the labor rate: as China gets more expensive that curve is going to flatten.

For small scale stuff in the 100's to 10's of thousands I think that you can go it alone for the right product class, which happens to be most of what we see here on HN/Kickstarter. Find factories on Alibaba, spend a minimal amount of money testing them out, place small orders to protect yourself and voila! I think the hardest part is dealing with demand prediction/logistics, but that's inherent to any hardware enterprise that doesn't have its own manufacturing capabilities.

Take a look at FSLaser (http://fslaser.com). Minimum cost for an entry-level system is $2350+shipping.

Disclaimer: I'm an employee.