 So many people have been going to Shenzhen in recent years to do stuff like buying into this place and having to do most of the work for the rest of the world. I travel all over the world constantly. I have an apartment in San Francisco still, but San Francisco is so expensive it's cheaper to travel than to stay in my apartment for free. I also have an apartment with a friend in Berlin and I'm feeling more at home there, but I hang out in Shenzhen a lot. Shenzhen is a really interesting place. There are a lot of people from all over the world doing hardware there and there's a pretty nice community of people there who collect and eat food and brainstorm and hang out. So Shenzhen's amazing. China's pretty magical. You can go to the markets and buy anything at a moment's notice and they have pretty much everything there. You can order stuff on Taobao and it will come maybe the same day or the next day and it's outrageously inexpensive. And there's resources there to make prototypes with an idea or to manufacture a small quantity or millions and it's all there. It's an amazing resource. So yeah, I think it's great if you're into hardware to check it out and there's some WeChat groups. China, everything's on WeChat. I noticed that people use WeChat here too. I have a WeChat but it won't allow me to buy things with WeChat out of China because I don't have a Chinese ID card. But if you're in China, you have to have WeChat. That's how everyone connects. So if anyone wants to go to Shenzhen and hang out with cool people, connect with me. WeChat ID is just my name without spaces. Mitch, ultimately. And I think connect with us. Have you ever had a commercial company take one of your open hardware designs and try to sell it before? You know, the weird thing is open source is open source. You just put it out there and people can do whatever they want with it. So it wouldn't seem like it would be possible for a commercial company to take it and do something bad with it. But, indeed, this happened once. The way I've made a living for the last 15 years is with TVB Gone, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places in cases you don't know about it. And this is actually how I've made a living for 15 years, making this tool to help people turn TVs off in public places. And, yeah, it wasn't a business plan but it turned me into one. And it's open source. It's been open source since about a year or two years into it. I made it open source. I'll talk about that when I give my talk, supposedly at 10. And one of my customers was a bully. And one of the things I learned over and over again, unfortunately, is business is part of life. If you run a small business, it's part of your life. It's a huge part of your life. Why would you have different ethics for running a business than what you want to do and not do in your life? That's absurd. It's not like, oh, that's business. It's okay. So anyways, this guy was a bully and I knew one of the things from running a small business for a while is, as in life, don't do business with people you don't like. Don't do it. It's your life. You will end up needing to hire a lawyer and even if you like the lawyer, you won't like it at all. Going to court sucks. So anyways, I knew not to deal with this guy, but it was so easy. He would give me money and I would send him stuff. But he would always try to bully his way into me giving him stuff that we didn't agree to and lowering the price and stuff. And I was just like, no, we agreed to this, but he was really mean. Anyways, after a while of doing this, he took my product, TBB Gone. He hired some really awful Chinese contract manufacturer to reverse engineer it. It's an open source project. All he had to do was download the plans. It would have been a fantastic product and he used my name. He didn't even come up with his own name. He said it was me and the package said it was me and it was a piece of crap. It was total garbage. I ordered a bunch just to see it. It might have been on market for maybe a few hours before a whole bunch of TBB Gone fans alerted me to it. So I ordered a bunch to check it out and I talked to him and said, hey, what's up? And he said, oh, you weren't giving me a good enough price so I made my own. It's fine to make your own, but you're using my name and that's not okay. So maybe we're going to work on a licensing agreement and you've never heard from him. So I had to hire a lawyer because the third of the ones that I ordered didn't work and the ones that did work didn't work well. And it was ruining my reputation and I was getting all of these angry emails. You know, getting one angry email sucks. Getting a thousand of them in a few days really sucks. Even if you don't know the people, you kind of take it personally. So I had to sue him to make them stop because he's from the UK. It cost me 65,000 pounds because in the UK you can't get your legal fees back even if you're 100% right and the court goes with you. So that lost a year of income, but I was able to continue. And that guy is no longer in business as it turns out. It wasn't fun. So yeah, even if it's open source people can take it and steal it. Speaking of business, so many people are crowdfunding the other projects. But a lot of them fail and people who made deposit use the money and they're also angry and they write angry emails. What do you think is the most common mistake that projects make? Yeah, well there's a lot of failure modes for crowdsourcing. I think perhaps, at least among the ones that I'm aware of, the biggest mistake is that people have a prototype and it's way cool. And then they think they'll get crowdfunding and they'll have a pile of money and all they have to do is manufacture it and everyone will be happy. You know, a prototype, even if it works really well, getting from that to a manufacturable product is a huge, huge, huge, huge ordeal. It's a lot of work to get from a prototype to a manufacturable product. But people without experience don't necessarily know that. I had to go through this myself earlier in my life and it's stressful. So the thing I learned when I had my Kickstarter, I've had a couple of successful Kickstarters. One was for this weird thing called NeuroDreamer and it's still a product. It's a sleep mask and it has blinking lights and sound, music synthesizer actually. And it has a 20-minute sequence of brain waves playing at sound with sound and light. Playing a sequence of someone going from awake to asleep. And if it works for you, you follow along just automatically and fall asleep. So, yeah, I was nine months late in delivering and I was getting some angry emails. I had some experience by then. As long as I gave updates and told openly what was going wrong, even if it was really bad news, people were fine. But there's this deep inner, like, urge to not put out an email to all your backers saying something like, well, just phoned out it's maybe going to be six weeks longer than I thought. And of course, it was longer and then it was a delay after that and there's all these things that can go wrong. If I delayed sending an email for too long, that's when I got the angry emails and it sucked. But when I was open, I just gave an update, even if it was bad news every three weeks, they're your backers. They're backing you not because they're buying a product and they demand service. They're backing you and your project. So, if you're open with them, they're happy, even if you have an urge to not give bad news. Give bad news. Apologize if necessary. But be open and honest and then people are, that's my experience. But the best thing to do if you have a Kickstarter is to develop the whole thing, get it ready for manufacturing and then all you need is some small pile of money to press the spend button at the manufacturer and then you're ready to go and then you can actually deliver more or less on time and everyone's happier. Isn't that a lot of money? You're not necessarily set up a QA cycle. So, when you do the manufacturing, you've got a heavy contract with the manufacturer. So, for example, you don't pay for bad parts but you're the one that has to do the QA. Which means you have to ship QA equipment to the manufacturer. So that they're, for example, and that's expensive to set that up. Or go there. Or do multiple cycles and prototypes to figure out what is actually in the manufacturer or not. This works. You've been through this. No, I've worked at companies that did small work. I've been in the business a long time. Yeah, it's not necessarily expensive but it's time consuming. Yes. So you have to have enough money to eat and pay for your shelter and whatever. Even the prototypes are going to be expensive. You can use them tens of thousands, even hundred thousands, several hundred thousand on prototypes. If you're doing cases, molds, blah, blah, blah, that's even for the manufacturer. That's true. It depends on your product, your project. You want to turn it into a product like this. The total amount of R&D, it was a year and a half of my life. And other than living expenses, the total amount of getting this to a manufacturer product was four thousand dollars. On the opposite side, try to build a relatively vaguely modern cell phone. And then you're talking hundreds of miles in the middle of it. So what you build might be somewhere in that spectrum. Your costs will be somewhere in that spectrum. Right, well actually even cell phones, like this is perhaps a point off the curve, you can manufacture a cell phone for six dollars each in Shenzhen. You can manufacture it, but it's to get to that point easily. Oh, you can get to that point easily because Bunny has a bunch of blogs. Bunny Huang who's here, who's supposed to be here. He has blogs about the ecosystem in Shenzhen, especially the phone. Shenzhen became magical starting with copying poorly iPhones. And it basically became an open source ecosystem without licensing. It just made sense for people to get together and make agreements and share with each other, each specializing, some overlap. And so now many, many years later, you can buy all these modules and people are very open because they want to sell you all this stuff and you can bring it together and it's amazingly cheap. You know, that's just cell phones though because it's huge. If you want to do something that's unique that you have to develop your own modules or your own chips, that can be super expensive. But the problem is if you just want to take the off-shelf design someone's already made, it's often better than buying a pre-made product already. When you want to do the hardware, then you are going to do something unique and then you start hitting the problem. Then there's the extra fun problems of you go it, you make it, you design it. Then you spend a while building a software stack making sure it works. It's not simple stuff. I mean, you're running with full OS, you have to do all the driver layers and then you get it working. And lo and behold, you discover, oh, that IO chip or the extra chip you had on there, Rev A is no longer available, you have to get revision B. But revision B is completely hardware incompatible with revision A. And so the cycle starts again. Oh wait, the screen we had to order in the supplier no longer has it anymore. Now we have it completely screened. Oh wait, that screen isn't available in these dimensions anymore. We have to read it on the text. Or make sure it's screened. Yeah, there's all these things that can happen. And if you have single source things, then that company can order a business and anything that can go wrong, Murphy prevails. So basically you have big, deep pockets before you get into it. But there are so many things you can do that are inexpensive as well. It depends on your project. And I might as well rant about this for just a minute or two. Crowd source funding is a great way to go. It's relatively new. The way that people think is the normal way to do things is totally wrong. You don't get VC funding to start. Absolutely don't do that. If you're thinking about doing that, quit now. Seriously, quit now because these VCs are the scum of the earth. There's like five exceptions on the entire planet. Okay, so they only care about money no matter what they say because they believe their lies as they're saying it. And they'll say things like, I'm not like other VCs. I only care about you and your project. I'm not like other VCs. That's a five. Yeah, well, they're kind of overloaded. And so they will do whatever it takes to manipulate you into them having over 50% of your company. And then they'll make amazingly stupid power. So they will manipulate you into having 50% or more of your company and they believe that they're a hot shit because they make all this money. But you know, you throw enough money around, one or two of these are going to be a hit and they make money and they think it's because they're a genius, but they're not. They make all these stupid decisions about your company that don't care about it and then you complain and they fire you. And then they run your company in the ground and all of your years of life and effort and dreams go down twice. So this is not just a personal experience. It is a personal experience. It's several personal experiences. But this is the norm. This is absolutely the norm. And if you find someone who didn't have that experience, that is hugely exceptional. So find other ways of becoming profitable first. Then a VC might be worthwhile because, you know, it's a risk. If you can get a bank loan that's even better, you just pay back the money. And the bank loans only happen if there's no risk. But if you're in a place and you want to give whatever you're doing available, make it available to more people, there might be a risk involved because there's no guarantee that you'll get that money back and that's when VCs can be useful. And they can't take too much of your company because you're already profitable. Okay, let me start here. I think there's a lot of knowledge in the community about what consequences you gave a bunch of examples right now. Is there a central place online that, you know, like a Wiki or whatever where all of this can be put down into, you know, a single... Like at least some repositories like this. These are the things you don't do. These are the things that, you know, you might want to look at or if you're stuck here looking at this area because I hear a lot of people with really good success groups started especially in hardware area. And all of them know these small little things. I look at business before or they have, you know, run through these things. A lot of newcomers come in and they are completely blindsided to a lot of these issues, especially in manufacturing and having some kind of community support, you know, especially in the open hardware world will be perfect for, you know, getting, you know, into this whole system. That would be great. You want to start one? Yeah, I'm just wondering if there's any around that otherwise it would be a good one to start. I'm not aware of any. You know, I've given talks about how to run your own small business and bring your idea into a project and a product and I talk about what I've done horribly wrong so other people can learn from my mistakes and other people have done that in their own way. Bunnies had some blog posts about this and, you know, maybe you've done that too, I don't know. But yeah, there's no central place for any of this. Some hardware accelerators used to have things like that but, like, I'm a mentor at HACS but HACS seems to be focusing more and more on unicorns. And you know what? Unicorns are a mythological creature. So, yeah. So they don't talk so much about this anymore. So, yeah. So people who go through this give talks but not so much have a central repository where they invite everyone else to... You know, you've been having these jobs I mean, bunny and dogs talk about the next one about doing detection moving. And that was a great talk about, you know, how did it get moving for their small little USB port. Things like these, I think, are super valuable and they're out there. It's just, you know, you need to go look them up and find them and if you don't know where to look it's going to struggle. So what you can do is you can do, like, one of these three-type catches. It's awesome. Awesome manufacturing. Awesome hardware to start with. Well, so... We can fill it with lots of wrong information and then wait for people to know, you know, no, you're wrong! But that's, like, the red flags, the books. Don't have my answer. But I'll start it awesome. Yeah, do it. Put the word out there and then I'll add to it. So, yeah, another people will add to it. We can put the word out and more people can add to it. Maybe you can do the other thing. Let me know. Great. But realistically, the way you find out this information is mostly by meeting people, sitting down, sharing beers, having, you know, whatever, or getting into the industry. If you want to do this, go and get a job at a company that you've seen before. Oh, yeah, yeah, like, for 15 years of consulting, helping small companies with their hardware problems, I learned so, so much of what not to do. Yeah, because these people who run the company, they're clueless. Like I was when I started my company. And we learned along the way.