What is the difference between the domestic hardware business environment and foreign countries?

Note: This article comes from knowing "what is the difference between domestic and foreign hardware entrepreneurship environment?" The answer to the question, the author Kang Shaoning, is the founder of Yeelink, the hardware start-up company.

The biggest difference between domestic and foreign hardware business environment is that foreign hardware products are born to the world market (English-speaking world), and the domestic current team is more facing the domestic market (mainly the mainland).

In view of the fact that people like to compare China and the United States, as a purely Chinese team, participated in the American hardware incubator (HAXLR8R) entrepreneurial team,

I'm here to compare us (yeelink/yeelight) to the common US hardware start-up team (Http://Spark.io) in the same period.

There are many other differences, of course:

1. Supply chain Distance (supplychain/manufacturing): This Chinese team has advantages but not full marks. In Shenzhen can find all the large IC Factory Fae and agent/module Company's sales representatives, technical engineers. American early 0 points, the latter can be leveling.

But how to make good use of this advantage, in fact, for the Chinese team is doubtful. Why, because a lot of Chinese students, especially software engineers, the character is generally introverted, to Shenzhen, but there is no American students to open, see the United States team of small partners 0 Chinese level, with the iphone translation software, fart-fart ran to Dongguan and Zhongshan look at the factory, People feel that once the Western development of the American innate spirit of exploration. Therefore, the Chinese team in the early stage of the cost advantage, after all access to financing, will gradually in the late to catch up with the United States team.

2. Incubators and Accelerators (accelerator): United States team full marks. A good American incubator can do a remarkable job of raising the idea of entrepreneurship, in addition to providing some of the early funds, can quickly talk about a large number of resources to butt, whether it is halxr8r,500startup,yc and so on most of the incubator has the following characteristics, founder and program Director itself has been an entrepreneur (similar to PayPal), many technical background with industry experience, and even the founder of well-known companies, can quickly talk about the company's founders of the vision, contacts and patterns to take a step. And the domestic incubator is currently not enough to promote the hardware team (is there an incubator?) )。

3. Financing environment (Fund raising): For the early days of the United States, in addition to the very good Kickstarter public-raising methods (many prepared projects can get more than 100,000 U.S. dollars of start-up funds, haxlr8r hatching projects generally have 30-50w U.S. dollars, To complete the first round of seed user recruitment and trial production, there are also very good early angel financing channels, such as the very popular angellist active in a large number of amateur and professional angels (in addition to the American Angels and many Middle East and Russian bosses), often a few people a hundred thousand of dollars to invest in some early projects, There are a lot of special preferences for hardware, if you tell the story fun, there are one or two small partners board, or easier to get proof of the concept of early funding, the cautious even can fly a trip to China to take out the prototype.

4. Seed User: It should be said that the domestic seed user environment is relatively miserable, consumption is relatively weak relative to the United States, and many U.S. seed users not only more, the ability to consume, but also to the development team to give a very professional opinion. And the domestic current platform, the professional users, especially the technology-oriented middle class unattractive, so more like selling platform.

5. Media Relations and market branding (pr/marketing/branding): This point, for different team combinations have advantages, but for the American students grew up playing DV, this is generally relatively strong, sparkdevices CTO is a music composer Dr , the CEO is the United States Top10 State, and my music classes are basically done physics ... So in the face of the media's natural stay requires a long period of time adjustment, Xiaoping teacher said, every entrepreneurial team should have a music, because he can not do technical work, will definitely go to break and think things, this will activate the technical team to do the stagnant water, so that the company has a complete character, this I think very reasonable.

6. Product Pricing (pricing/position): This is a lot of Chinese team flexibility, can be high and low. The American team is 0 points, for a variety of reasons, they can't sell bargains.

7. Sales channel (Distribution/channel): Domestic Foreign Trade direction (stickers brand) is indeed a quantity, but not to make a lot of money, no brand accumulation, it is easy to surpass, and the United States team almost no one to do OEM, all do their own brand, this is very interesting. Another point, in the Hardware app era, if the simultaneous maintenance of a large number of ODM Third-party brand orders, alone from the app version maintenance point of view, the development team is also a considerable pressure. So intelligent hardware products, should be the future of OEM/ODM will be less, because if you do too many brands, the development team maintenance difficulty will/benefit ratio will become unbearable.

China has some unique advantages, such as cottage culture, intellectual property rights can be cut and so on, but because this is not the main battlefield and has long-term development of hidden dangers, in this answer in the first skip to mention, followed by further.