Why did the start-up that earned 30 million yen from the departure chart type object of the station go bankrupt?
NYCTrainSign, a startup that made models of electronic bulletin boards (departure signs) displayed at railway stations, etc., and sold them with the ability to display the actual departure time and custom text, went bankrupt soon after the product was released. bottom. Blogger Kevin Chan explained why the marketing was successful and disappeared despite achieving sales of $ 250,000 (about 33 million yen) at some point.
Taking over a Dead IoT Company
At the time of 2017, NYCTrainSign was manufacturing and selling replicas of departure signs as a startup. It was marketed to cafes and pizzerias as a 'decoration that displays letters', but in 2018 it went bankrupt, and problems such as the product not being delivered to some buyers occurred.
Mr. Chan, who was investigating why the company went bankrupt, happened to find someone selling NYCTrainSign departure signs on the Internet in 2021 and succeeded in getting the real thing. Mr. Chan decided to investigate the departure sign and find out the reason.
The inside of the departure sign was packed with LED panels, Raspberry Pi, microSD cards, etc., but some parts were loosely screwed and had problems such as coming off if they were moved too much.
The price of the parts used is also quite high, and it seems that it will be 150 dollars (about 20,000 yen) when putting everything together. Considering that the retail price of the product is generally four times the price of the parts, the selling price is reasonable at $ 600 (about 80,000 yen). In fact, it seems that it was sold for $ 599 on the
Even for one part, for example, the part called ' HAT ' was selected for $ 25 (about 3300 yen), but it was possible to substitute it with a $ 2.1 (about 300 yen) part. Also, it seems that there was also a problem that the light flickered for some reason even though it was supposed to use good things.
Looking at the code written to communicate with the server and retrieve information, Mr. Chan noticed various quality issues. The mix of tabs and spaces due to misconfiguration of the code editor frequently occurred, and the entire git history was saved on the microSD card, and the code was almost never reused.
Mr. Chan said about the problem NYCTrainSign had, 'I think it's because of the high cost of parts and the fact that they sold a lot of products at a discount. Even though it's in beta, there's no venture capital backing, and it costs $150. 'I really don't think you can sell your product for $117. $300 is too cheap. This sign probably should have been sold for $600 in the first place.'
Regarding inventory management, he said, ``It seems that the marketing was successful and there was considerable demand for the product, but it was impossible to sell it at a low price because all the products were made by hand. The lead time for procuring parts seems to have had an effect on the company. I guess it's because I tried to get the funds to do it.'
As for what NYCTrainSign should do in the end, Chan said, ``In my opinion, without a better strategy to lower component costs from the start or some sort of recurring revenue, the company quickly became unsustainable. After all, the team at NYCTrainSign didn't have a clear plan of what they were going to do with their product, and they were careful about what they were going to do at every step. It seems like people jumped into building a company without thinking, which doesn't work very well in the hardware world, let alone in a software company.'
In addition, since the domain that communicates with the departure sign was available for purchase, Mr. Chan purchased it and rewrote the system so that he could display any character on his favorite departure sign. ``I plan to open source the rebuilt API server, including the signature code and exploit code that underlies NYCTrainSign,'' said Chang. If you have one, try moving the sign remotely on the site I made.'
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in Hardware, Posted by log1p_kr