• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    25 days ago

    Entry to the market is a bigger obstacle than risk. You can’t just make a phone at home from scraps. You need an army of workers and machines and supply chains and business relationships and licenses.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      You don’t actually have to have any of those things because you can have other companies make those parts for you and then even hire a company to assemble it for you. Apple doesn’t make screens or tiny screws or batteries. At least they don’t have to I’m not sure how their supply chain works. You could do presales on a site like Kickstarter and make the phone. The issue is getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable as all of those companies are going to charge you a set up fee, so the more parts you buy, the lower the cost per part. You’d also have to design a phone that gives people a compelling reason to buy it. Selling stuff is hard probably harder than making the product itself. You’d also need the usual business overhead like an accountant and an attorney.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        25 days ago

        That’s still market entry as the biggest obstacle, rather than risk. Getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable is, itself, a factor of how much can be invested in marketing the phone. Designing a phone still requires at least a team of workers, if not an army, because that requires designing both the phone and software in addition to making it all work together in a usable product.

        You also can’t just start up a phone company from a lemonade stand. You need starting capital. Hence, market entry.

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          I would start by making a dev board in an SBC form factor like the raspberry pi and use an os like graphene and make it compatible with Linux. You could sell that and have your backers do testing for you while you build the rest of the phone. Then once the phone was built you could try to build an os of your own.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            25 days ago

            I’m pretty sure your cobbled together hackathon project wouldn’t be functional as a phone, cell towers wouldn’t communicate with it and it wouldn’t make calls. Also, where did you even get backers? How did you attract them and scam them out of their money? And now you’re using them to outsource your labor team??

            Market barriers are real.