Watering a New Brand - mdot's Hardware Startup and E-Commerce Progress Thread

[mdot]

Just had a freelancer send me this as a portfolio example if you are interested, looks like they did ok

Quench - A unique voice for your plant

Quench takes the guesswork out of plant care by telling you when to water

www.kickstarter.com

Thanks for the link! I guess that does validate the market need and even shows a preliminary price point that consumers are willing to pay.

I think it's interesting that they are using resistive sensors, which can be influenced by soil type and presence of minerals. The alternatives are TDR (basically listening to an electrical "echo" caused by the presence of water) or capacitance (pushes energy into the soil and measures how much is retained by the water). The latter two are used in more scientific meters. Perhaps using a combination could help? The gold contacts to prevent corrosion is an interesting idea.

I love that they aren't relying on an app, and I plan to follow the same example. Most of the complaints of the previous meters were because the app sucked or made it a paperweight when it wasn't available.

 

[woken]

Guys, I'm so psyched to show you this. It's been a long weekend of coding, but the hard part is over - writing the e-paper driver and drawing bitmaps to the screen. The rest of the project is straight forward. Once I create bitmaps (fonts, graph axis, icon images etc) I arrange them on screen to form my user interface. Next I'll program the sensor readings and have them display on the screen. Then I'll focus on the power saving mode to put the processor to sleep and allow the device to run for long periods of time on coin cell batteries only.

View attachment 40664

Where are you with this, Michael?

Any updates?

 

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[doster.zach]

You're right. I definitely can't compete on price. The cheapo meters that sell for $20 in stores are like $1 each on Alibaba. Value pricing is the only way to go.

I'm reminded of Alex Hormozi's quote from 100 Million Dollar Offers - "make them an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no". I need to know what customers are actually looking for to do this.

Lol yes, that’s exactly who I was thinking of. Haven’t read his book yet but his content is borderline addicting.