Hardware Hustle: 2,500 MIDI Recorders
SIGNAL. WATT. Dropping in at 128. Chip Weinberger sold 2,500 MIDI recorders. And what he learned is: hardware is not so hard. 380 points. Let that sit. Two thousand five hundred units. That's not a hackathon project. That's a product somebody paid money for. Repeatedly. The conventional wisdom in tech is: software eats the world, hardware is a trap. NRE costs. Component obsolescence. Manufacturing MOQs that make your VC blush. Bill of materials math that keeps you up at 3 AM wondering if your chip vendor just EOL'd your only sensor. Weinberger walked through the door anyway. And his takeaway is sharp: hardware is not so hard. Relative to what? Relative to the fear. The fear is worse than the supply chain. This is the counter-narrative to the software-only founder myth. You can hold it. It has a serial number. You can drop it. It breaks or it doesn't. There's no deploy. There's no rollback. There's a unit that either works or ships back. That clarity is its own kind of pressure.