Next is either an educational product or a SaaS business I can build either fully solo or with 1-2 teammates in customer support roles.
>Would you do it all over?
No, not knowing what I know now about how difficult it is to succeed in hardware.
I'm grateful that TinyPilot worked, but there's definitely a reason why there are so few bootstrapped hardware companies.
In the first few years, there were so many things that could have clobbered the business, like supply shortages, manufacturing errors, lost shipments, design mistakes. I did a lot of things to mitigate these risks, but a lot of it just came down to being lucky enough to avoid random disasters.
For example, there were definitely times in the business where a critical part could have been lost in shipping, and we would have been dead in the water for months if it went missing or got delayed.
As the business matured, we were able to mitigate those risks better, but I wouldn't want to go through those first two years again unless I had a huge amount of investment or co-founders with more specialized hardware/manufacturing expertise.
Thanks for all of the content!