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This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC construction) -Anything you don't specify will be done least cost, and there is no amount of "least" which cannot be chased in manufacture.

The other one noted if you don't specify the density of plastic for bags, or paper for bags and packing, you get clingfilm thinner than you thought existed, and paper which is almost tissue in its weakness. You don't even get boxes to put the boxes in, if you don't specify boxes to be delivered in boxes. So now wrapping a pallet becomes a nightmare if they don't stack. And if you don't specify how many to stack, and how to pad the stack, they won't do unit height stacking if it costs labour time. Your risk.

Some of this like the casting mistake, or the knob thing, could happen anywhere and you have to be close to final manufacture spec to find out e.g. the metal coating impinges on the knob at the free space you specified, because your test rig didn't have powder coating. Or, that a design feature you need like the light entry holes, is used by the casting engineer as pour points because it looked like you'd specified mould pour points not functional holes.

But other things like "yea, you didn't spec how long to make the tails so we cut the tails as close as we could" is just the cheapening above: if you don't SAY its a 10cm tail for the connector, it will be 2cm, if saving 8cm of cable saves money for them.

I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.

I worked for a manufacturing firm years ago and a director once told me 30 was the magic number. Order 30 units and the error rate will scale from there if for example you get 3 in 30 broken you'll have about 10% broken no matter how many you order.

How many of the failures weren't engineering problems, but interface problems between humans: missing labels on drawings, ambiguous cable lengths, assumptions about powder coating thickness, etc

"As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes."

Except those with ears and/or eyes.

This is super interesting, and I'd actually be quite interested in buying a 60K-Lumen lamp... but not at $1200.

Years ago, there was an HN article "You Need More Lumens"[1], which in turn led me down a rabbit hole.

I ended up purchasing:

   4 standard table lamps from Target,
  28 2000-lumen Cree LEDs bulbs[2] and,
   4 7-way splitters[3].

The end result is somewhere around 56,000 lumens. And I LOVE it. Makes me much happier in my home office, especially in the winter months.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957614

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08H4RJQTT

[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FKIE6M4

As a MechE turned SWE, always a fun read when SWE try hardware.

> Blink and you’ll get a different measurement.

This means your environment is not controlled enough. Also quality control is usually done in terms of statistics. You might want to read something called gauge R&R. That being said, you should be proud of being able to ship a physical product!

As for quality checks, software quality teams pales in comparison to hardware quality teams. Mainly as you said, there’s a lot checks you can do in software. For hardware, bigger companies have to have their vendors qualified. The vendors have to follow their customer guidelines and do outgoing inspection. Then the company has a division to do incoming inspection. There’s a traveler that follows the kit (of parts) and there’s usually subassembly quality checks. Then final full build checks before it leaves the door.

Congrats on launching your first 500 units!

I had a similar experience. I quit my job as a SWE at Google and built a hardware product on top of the Raspberry Pi.[0]

I don't really have anything helpful to add, but I relate a lot to all of the gotchas you encountered. Shipping a hardware product made me appreciate software so much more, especially SaaS products where you can ship a fix immediately.

With hardware, it's painfully easy to make a mistake and not realize it for 3-6 months. And by that point, you have this whole manufacturing pipeline you have to halt and unwind. And with overseas manufacturing, tariffs, and shipping costs, you can't even unwind some of this stuff, and you just end up with useless material that you paid 5-6 figures for.

We're definitely spoiled in the software world with the relative ease of fixing bugs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927380

> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below.

What happened after this? the factory have to replace the casting mold at their own expense or you have to pay for it?

I would not advise jumping to mass production for your first deliveries, i think your story would have had less stress and more lower risk of failure of the first n (maybe 10?) units was bespoke, made lovingly by hand in a machine shop somewhere. I don’t think this is unusual advice, it matches the ethos of the lean startup, and pg’s “do things that don’t scale”.

We made our first hardware by hand, i believe we did 15 units. I remember my cofounder broke down because he couldn’t take the pressure of receiving fifteen orders and now we had to make FIFTEEN by hand, lol. But we were able to figure out SO MANY issues before mass production. And of course even then many slipped through

I have one of these - it's awesome, I love it and I think it's an incredible success for a first hardware product. My takeaway from reading this is that caring about building a great product made a huge difference in how your first 500 units landed. Now the next batch gets to come with all those learnings.

I'm sure there will be more challenges as well but as long as you keep focusing on the experience you're delivering, I'm sure you'll continue to get past them

Oh hey, I have one of these! I really like it. It's quite a unique design. People (especially where it snows and gets gloomy) should have more lumens, and I'd recommend this lamp for others.

One downside is that the active fan cooling design is questionable - the air goes over the top of the LEDs, and there aren't any dedicated exit holes so the air is just squeezing through the very small gap between the glass and the heatsink. There are also blotches of paint that worsen the TIM contact between the PCB and the heatsink. I used a rotary tool to remove those blotches.

This reminded of the YouTube guy of "Smarter Every Day" who tried to manufacture a a grill brush completely in USA and still be competitive in the marketplace (i.e. China) [0].

It turned out that USA / "the west" lost the engineering knowledge to manufacture "stuff" (in this case injection molding and other procedures): Nowadays, we simply create the plans and schematics (e.g. CAD files) and let the Chinese do the building.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

Well-written and valuable for insight whether you have similar personal experience or not. As someone who does hardware and software as well, I relate to the challenges of making something you can hold; it's very easy to underestimate the challenge difference between the two. Your Murphy's law references are spot on; I feel comforted reading I'm not the only one this happens to! Misery does love company, and it's important to hang on that I think, so that you don't lose hope :)

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why SaaS investors don’t understand how to invest in deeptech/hardtech, despite current trends. Like this guy, they have no clue about the differences in business model, except they’re not founders so they don’t go through the pain and they mostly don’t learn.

Hats off to the author for making it through! What a start to the journey!

I'm late to this thread but I've manufactured about a dozen SKUs and I think you could have saved an enormous amount of grief with one simple step:

If you are American, and you are manufacturing 500 units, do it in America. Yes, it's more expensive per-unit, but at 500 units you don't need a tiny per-unit cost.

American manufacturing is more flexible, higher agency, and people tend to adapt to underspecified instructions better. The communication loops are stronger.

That said, America has enormous tradeoffs. If you need 10,000 of a part in 4 hours because something weird happened, China can make it happen. America... might take months. But if your batch size is 500, it's better for an American living in America to cut their teeth on American manufacturing and go to China when you need 10,000+ units per run.

Author here, happy to answer any questions about the journey!

I'm curious that this story seems to be missing a big part of hardware design - certification.

It seems like the design was being changed up to the minute these were shipped to customers, so it doesn't seem possible that any testing was carried out on the final design?

How did you find factories, and trustworthy ones at that, at all? I know you mentioned just being happy that the factory existed at all, but I'm doubting you just found someones email and then wired them cash?

Previous experience? Or you know someone? To me that always seems like 90% of the battle with manufacturing.

> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.

I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.

I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.

Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.

580 watts is more than my entire server rack. By a good amount too. I run a UPS, firewall appliance, two switches, two APs (over POe), and a NAS with a 36 HHD disk shelf. All of that clocks in at 380 watts steady. Just some food for thought.

I'd like other war stories like this on HN. Considering this is a YC website I'd expect more.

This reminds me of the Keyboard.io blog, where they documented their experience with the same kind of issues: https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/day-743

Notably:

> When we got back, we watched as the laser engraving technician printed out a copy of our alignment template, deleted all of the guide lines from the file, imported the legends into the laser engraving software, and proceeded to try to eyeball the correct label placement.

> Going in, we were annoyed at how far off the legends were. In retrospect, it’s astonishing how good his manual placement was.

I don't know enough about lighting, but if I bought five of these, would I reach 50,000 lumens? Is it just additive? This would cost $250.

https://www.harborfreight.com/10000-lumen-4-ft-linkable-diam...

Also, if you've ever been in a Walmart or Forever 21 at night, you'll know that constant LED white light is probably not the best thing for your eyes.

Great read, thanks for sharing this. I'm also coming from software and have recently started making some hardware for personal use in my free time. The idea of selling it as an actual product has occurred to me, but the thought of dealing with all the logistics quickly makes me reconsider. Congrats on your launch!

Selling a product you haven’t tested or built yet to members of the public, classic.

Miss posts like this on HN, thanks for the great write-up! I tried to launch a hardware thing like 10 years ago[1], but couldn't raise enough money. Fun experience nonetheless.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...

I would be quite scared to have such a monster lamp near me indoors. I mean, 60k lumens can cause temporary blindness, disorientation, and potentially retinal damage. It's near the welding arc territory at this point.

> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below.

Never done casting let alone worked with Chinese factory to ship hundreds of units but: this sounds potentially intentional at factory's end. It's plausible that these fins didn't pass factory guy's manufacturability gut DRC who would made changes thinking the customer would just give in. IIUC molding people in general don't like corners and narrow channels with no sprues and/or gas escapes. Especially the outer ring of pins appear to be exactly where they like to place sprues.

I wonder how this problem was eventually solved. The final product seem to retain the number, height, draft angles of the fins, but fillet radii appear to have increased(2mm -> 5mm?) and the entire body shows more material shrinkage at the outer edge of the body as well. Was it just no pins and higher defect rate, or something else entirely?

> It was at this point I truly began to appreciate Murphy’s law. In my case, anything not precisely specified and tested would without fail go wrong

After 20 years of system engineering, I just expected this to always be the case. Until my most recent job with a bunch of startups, where people fly by the seat of their pants, there's no communication, documentation, protection or testing, for anything. I am pissed off daily that things don't go wrong, because people now think this is normal, and it goes against everything I've learned from experience. It seems I stumbled onto the corollary of Murphy's Law: when you expect everything to go wrong, nothing does.

Fascinating read. I didn't know $1,200 for a lamp was a thing but clearly there's a market for it and you priced it better than Coolest Cooler or I would have.

How did you get people to visit that 1st landing page where they could pay a $10 deposit?

For someone who has no idea about light engineering or electronics if I stack two 25k Lm lamps next to each other does it make 50k Lm light?

I recently changed my car's headlamps to Chinese LED which claims to be about 37kLm and I don't know how much it is probably less than that.

Two of those lamps costee me around $24 on Amazon US (pretty sure under $10 in China).

What makes this $800+ ?

Congratulations, you did very well! And I mean it, as someone who has experience building hardware (also in China), you came out pretty much unscathed and did extremely well for a first timer. Good job!

Hardware startups are such a pain in the ass

One recent run fun issue I had was a pneumatic timer that worked fine in testing in the shop and outside my house

But once in the field the sun heated up the tube enough to trigger the sensor and get stuck in an on state requiring a plug on one end with a hole big enough to let the pressure out but small enough to let pressure trigger the sensor

50k lm is quite high. What electric power consumption does it have ? I estimate around 500 Watt, am I right ?

After watching the dubai lamp videos on YouTube, I wonder how many hours this lamp will last

I applaud his initiative for getting this through to production but as soon the market reaches sufficient size he will find multiple Chinese competitors selling an identical product at a fraction of the price. And could well be manufactured in the same factory.

I'm curious, what would be the engineering challenges (either hardware or software) in making it dimmable substantially below 2500 lumens, so that it could continue to work as a primary light source when winding down after the sun goes down, rather than switching to other light sources capable of getting dimmer?

Oh boy, I want one of these. This would absolutely perfect for winter depression (I suspect much better than the "SAD lamps" marketed for this purpose which are bright not even close to this bright). But £889 is a lot of money for a lamp!

This article reminds me of some of the stories in the "The Hardware Hacker" book by Andrew Huang [0], which went a bit about the author's experience in Shenzhen manufacturing some hardware.

There are a bit over similarities with the article, like miscommunications occurring or needing to specify in exact terms what is required. But I think it is slightly different now, the stories in the book was from a while ago and in shenzhen instead of zhongsan, so I am sure things have changed, and this article is more up to date.

[0] Despite the title, it is not entirely solely about hacking in the security sense. But also the traditional use of the word "hacker".

I’m also a software engineer running a hardware e-commerce business on the side. The hardest lesson for me was unlearning 'logic' in favor of psychology.

I recently ran an experiment where I increased prices by 50%, and sales volume actually went up. It’s wild how much copy and creative assets can alter perceived value, allowing you to justify a higher price point for the exact same physical product

Fun read, especially for someone who used to lead engineering for an industrial luminaire manufacturer.

PPAP were developed to help tackle this sort of thing in a somewhat uniform way, but vendor diligence can take many other forms, too.

There are hundreds of articles in this genre from years of failed Kickstarters and Maker-types selling DIY hardware kits.

How you get funding for a hardware startup without cursory research into this is staggering.

I am not affiliated with them at all, but https://getencube.com tries to remove a lot of friction for just these cases and reduce costs. I met their founder a couple of months back, great engineer and a really cool product

This is simply amazing. The pricing per lamp (1200 or 1500?) - how did you arrive at that? And which segment of the population are buying this powerful corner lamp?

Super glad you found (and made!) a product that everyone wants. Hopefully you have brighter nights than this ..

> That was the worst period of my life; I would go to bed literally shaking with stress. In my opinion, Not Cool!

What a great article. It's amazing to see how many simple things can go wrong, and I'm sure there could have been more. Great work keeping your tenacity up and sticking through it.

Well done on shipping. Reading this gave me PTSD of shipping our first hardware product at a similar scale. It was a tough experience but you'll have learned a huge amount and be much better equipped for the second time (if you choose to keep going). I found the biggest takeaway is planning for things to go wrong in advance and building enough slack into the process so that you can accommodate some setbacks.

I'm curious about the final financial outcome: after all the rework, mistakes, and learning costs, did the project end up net positive, or was it ultimately a loss?

You designed and sold a lamp for $1500! You’ve won a lottery!!

Have you taken surface temperature measurements of the heat sink? A ~600W hot plate suspended at eye level is no joke, and certainly dangerous if it fell over or someone tripped onto it. For that matter, have you taken any temperature measurements with the unit on its side, to see what would happen if it was knocked over?

What a great idea; good luck! Also, it's nice to read a hardware story on HN (we need more breaks from AI this and AI that).

For all the complaining about tariffs and all the woes of manufacturing in China, much of this could have been avoided by manufacturing in the US. Or even Canada or Mexico. There is literally nothing here that requires Chinese supply chain magic, it's just penny shaving. This isn't Apple where you need 80 million bespoke screws manufactured for your device overnight, which can only be done by slave labor supply chain in any reasonable time and quantity. This is really basic mechanical and electrical engineering and could be built anywhere.

Cost is not an issue because anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500 (and have the satisfaction of keeping your fellow neighbors employed).

Anyone that has ever manufactured anything in China—or India for that matter—knows unless you spec every little detail and dimension and tolerance it WILL be ignored and violated.

Whereas in the US & Canada there is a different level of workmanship and culture where you might get a phone call instead of a box of weldments bent 30° in the wrong direction because the drawing didn't say it couldn't. And you probably could have visited the factories a half dozen times before starting production (did you really not plan on building prototypes?)

Dang 560 watt draw. About the same ratio as other LED options at 90 limens per watt though.

Great post. Thank you.

How/where did you find your suppliers/factories?

Congratulations on the successful launch and excellent write-up. Hardware is fun but also much more challenging.

The $10 deposit validation approach before committing to manufacturing is underrated. So many hardware projects fail because founders fall in love with the build before confirming anyone will pay.

What stood out to me: the factory miscommunications and quality issues compound because you can't iterate as fast as software. Each mistake costs weeks and thousands of dollars.

For anyone considering hardware: if you're not getting deposits or strong signals of purchase intent before tooling up, you're basically gambling. The author's approach of getting commitments first is the right playbook.

580w. So long for the low-power leds then :)

> As someone who generally stays out of politics

Such a wildly privileged take.

Unrelated: why offshore this? Why not end-to-end local development and production?

I am amazed that someone dared to list a lamp for $1200, that it sold that many units, and then proceeded to ship sub 1 dollar shitty screwdrivers with it.

Had I ordered a $1200 lamp and received a $0.1 screwdriver with it, I would be livid.

I guess it goes to show in what kind of an inflationary environment we live in.

i'm curious what are use cases for a lamp this bright?

That's a neat product. You can expect it to be copied within a day or two of this announcement.

How much power does one of these consume?

I have no productive words to share other than positive feelings and kind empathy to you @sberens. I've gone through this manufacturing route in China before about 10 years ago and...it has largely been the same. Even with near native fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese did not spare me from this experience. Good luck and I looking forward to purchasing one on your next run - its been on my radar for a very long time!

580 watts..... :D. Why not work on cheap solutions to bring in natural light into darker parts of the house?

Very interesting. I would like something like this, but not with LEDs.

That lamp is a nightmare to someone with migraines.

You’re missing one important point: radiated power scales with the fourth power of temperature. Could it be that xAI has a chip capable of operating at very high temperatures?

A really bright lamp? I want one. I have to get up at 3am for work many mornings. This would be great for helping me to wake up.

Checking store ... 1300 ... um ... no.

I can buy a professional LED lighting rig, the stuff used to film movies, for cheaper.

holy crap, this lamp costs $1200??? i couldn't focus on the article after reading price tag and instead went in a 'why this lamp has to be this expensive' search mode.

I never ever buy any crowdfunded product, because the moron that makes it always offshores production to China. I support local businesses, with a local supply chain. Please do that too, it’s how we get a better future!

I will never understand why when you expect to sell a few hundred units of a product at most, you would decide to go and build something in china. There are instances where building in china might make sense. this is not one of them! you can easily hand assemble everything yourself in America, since this was a 1-year long time-frame. There is phenomenal CNC shops in the east coast (and also some in the mid-west) if you don't mind the lead times. You don't have to deal with tariffs, imports, and more importantly THEY SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE. Yes this sounds dumb. Like, with Google Translate you shouldn't have a problem no? Think again! From my experience with Chinese metallurgic, they are clumsy and often mess up even straight forward designs. Yes, they are fast, but at what cost! They will redo it as many times as you need. But the headache, man the headache of dealing with it is not worth it. On the other hand some of the issues here are expected and fun! well maybe not fun, but part of the process, like the swapped components in the board. it happens to the best of us and that's okay! but it would always be easier to debug when you can drive yourself to the CNC factory, or at least have a video call with the tech in your own language. Also, regulations in china is whole different world and not at all straightforward to navigate for westerners, at all. I really don't like that people turn directly to china cause "that's what everyone does anyway". nu-uh. also, China is not the only option! Eastern Europe, such as Poland, can get you there too for reasonable prices, and have tons of phenomenal electronics and manufacturing engineers. Tons.

Since you’re already done creating your hardware product instead of thinking of a new product to follow up with, I would suggest a new business model: there are probably a non-zero number of people on HN that have a vision about making a hardware product. You can offer your services so the don’t have to learn all these lessons the hard way!

Great post, I really want to see more stuff like this on HN. And congrats on shipping!

I bought one of these for my sister. They are well build and precisely as bright as promised. If you desire a very bright light source, this is it.

Just a few slots down in my YC feed: the benefits of bright light

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00373-9

Leave behind 1 prototype fully assembled and 1 prototype disassembled.

Day 1 of product manufacturing class.

It's a damn fine lamp. Really makes a huge difference for feeling energetic and productive! I experienced exactly what the author mentioned with the white lamp, but the support was top notch. Glad to see the details!

How have the overall reviews been ? I love the idea and the product!

I’m so jealous of you. You can just go and make a product as if it was software, with no “respect” to boundaries and restrictions, even though you’re not even in the lamp business. And then you have a China contact, and China can just manufacture anything as if it was software, but it’s a real life physical object. And the commitment, the fearlessness, the rudeness of just making it work.

I believe people like you will become very rich (because you’re so compatible with money making), but I have a prejudice that you lack depth in your understanding and intentions.

I almost never feel jealous but while reading your blog I could feel this feeling of freedom of creating that I seek and I couldn’t help but. Congratulations.

Appreciate the war stories. Is the product still available? I'd love to get one, though fortunately the first false spring of San Francisco will hopefully be followed soon by a true one.

The store is still online so I assume it must be. Let me run this by my wife haha.

This is really cool, and I saw the claim that it can "replicate the sun's spectrum". Do you have any measurements to share of the spectrum?

Love the intersection of geopolitics and hardware design lead times. Trade wars can be waited out why getting the design right.

The article starts by saying that the person took $400k of orders without knowing how to make the product he had just sold, nor any experience that would help him do so. What?

>In March, after $400k in sales through our crowdfunding campaign, I had to figure out how to manufacture 500 units for our first batch. >I had no prior experience in hardware; >I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers.

And i wish this kind of people to fail miserably. Too many times they tried to make me the scapegoat for their bullshit project, already sold on paper but with nothing more than a render to show, now looking for an hardware guy to point the finger at to blame

What was the tooling cost for the 2 ton mold?

Great write-up! Thanks for sharing your journey

I want a bright lamp like this but not for $1200...any suggestions?