Building hardware as an indie hacker
Hello Indie hackers! My name is Dominic and I am working on a project I’m calling monocle ai. It’s a hardware product that will bring camera based safety features to older cars. Think tesla self driving tech without the self driving part. It will do things like lane departure warning, early collision warning, driver monitoring dashboard, etc. I’ve talked to a lot of folks that are not as excited about self driving cars as the media and Silicon Valley want us to believe so this product is meant to fill that need. The first version of the product is not going to control the car but give real time audible warning sounds. I’m pretty excited to be working on a project that scratches a personal itch on my own terms.
A bit about me: I’m a solo founder and building the prototype as a indie hacker. I thought of trying to raise money but I:
a) don’t want to work for someone (a VC)
b) don’t want to give up a significant portion of equity
c) don’t want to have to grow wicked fast since it’s a safety product
So, if you have a second please check out my site (drivewithmonocle.ai). I have a majority of the prototype complete along with a simple iOS interface app. Would love to hear some feedback from the community. I also started to build in public on bitclout if you want to check out some of my progress.
Would love some feedback on how crazy I am to try this as an indie hacker, if anyone has tips on crowd funding for the initial prototyping, or any other nuggets!
Cheers,
Dominic
I echo the same concerns as Artur, and view them as constraints in identifying your go-to-market (GTM) customer. This may be an invaluable tool for driving instructors or giving new/old drivers a greater awareness of their environment. Build features for your GTM customer that would never be standard in stock or aftermarket ADAS systems to clearly differentiate the value.
As someone who has crowdfunded and shipped two consumer hardware products (with considerable venture funding), I would really ask yourself if you need to build your own hardware or if can deliver a valuable product or service with software alone. That is to say, start with an app based product with special dock and then move to a hardware based solution with targeted customer feedback if it’s needed.
When launching a software business, you need to execute on a dozen different business areas and adding hardware to the mix (ME, EE, firmware, DFM, supply chain, logistics, etc) can overwhelm even the best of teams, let alone an indie hacker. If you’re able to reduce execution risk by removing or outsourcing less critical areas of your business/product to partners, you will free up your time to focus on what matters.
Happy to provide more direct feedback with additional context.
As someone who has worked on ADAS products for the past few years now, I wholeheartedly agree with your core philosophy. But to develop your idea as a business you might want to consider the following:
With that said, I don't want to be discouraging. There very well may be undeserved market segments you can tap into. Happy to discuss more.
Hi Artur, thanks for the detailed comments! My target customer is parents of new drivers or children of elderly drivers.
For point 1, I definitely agree which is why I don't think at this stage it would be attractive to vc dollars. It would work well as an add on to an older car that doesn't already have these types of features ie. like something a parent would buy/give to their new driver
2. Agreed, I imagine that most commercial fleets would be standard with these types of features.
3. Also agreed, adding control is several features away in the road map. I think even having a warning system will be a liability so I'm planning to get a lawyer involved before any testing gets started with beta customers.
4. I'm still evaluating how well it will perform for my limited prototype. So far it seems good. Need to find a balance of something powerful enough to work but not make it very expensive. I don't think my target customers will pay anything around $1k.
5. I'm hoping that I'll be able to get good performance out of my segmentation model and at least be able to add in corner cases that the algorithms don't perform well with during training. Hopefully that will be robust enough but that's one of the key things I'm going to look at during the alpha and beta testing.
34% of drivers in the US are between the ages of 16-19. So even a small percentage of the parents buying something like this for their kids could be a nice customer base. Thats the hope at least :) I'm planning to do a really small targeted ad campaign on FB to see if the plan has any legs. I'll post my learnings here as well.
Yeah, there could be a market there. Please share your progress.