Whilst reading Joi Ito’s (of MIT’s Media Lab fame) new book “Whiplash”, I stumbled across a note in the book:
“(…) there’s a big difference between an Apple Store and an App Store. It takes roughly $5 million to get a product, even a wristband, into enough retail outlets to turn a profit.”
It’s a curious figure which I validated with a couple of my friends (and experts) in the hardware business — and everyone seemed to agree that the number is in the right ballpark.
Which is one of the many reasons why hardware is so much harder (no pun) than software. Or so one might think…
You can get an app into the app store for a few hundred or thousand bucks… But then — there were 2.2 million (!) apps on the iOS app store in January of this year. Good luck standing out.
The moral of the story is: Regardless what you do, it will be hard. The hurdles you need to overcome are different ones, the challenges you face will be different, the skills you will need are different — the constant is that it will be a struggle.
But that doesn’t discourage you. JFK immortalized the eternal entrepreneurial struggle (and attraction) on September 12th, 1962:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.“
What is your moonshot?