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Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

97: How to Survive the Chipocalypse

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Nice Segue, LLC

Tech, Smartphone, Phone, Videogame, Microsoft, Games, Apple, Space, Science, Techpod, Society & Culture, Tesla, Technology, Android, Electric Car, Amazon, Smart Phone, Tech Pod, Google, Video Game, Ios

4.8555 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ever wonder what it's like to try your hand at small-batch manufacturing overseas? Keyboardio's Jesse Vincent joins us this week to address that very subject in a broad discussion of his company's history, with a focus on the trials and tribulations of getting a hardware startup off the ground, setting up production-line tooling in China, being on the outs with your factory reps, solving IC shortages with FPGAs, finding loose iPhone processors in Shenzhen electronics stalls, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Jesse, tell Brad about the electronics markets in China, please.

0:03.1

I need to hear about the Shenzhen markets.

0:04.8

So sadly, they appear to be like, well, they may or may not be dying out, but they've

0:09.7

been moving around.

0:10.9

They've been getting every time I've been there, more and more of the buildings have

0:14.6

been getting renovated.

0:15.8

The place you used to be able to get the fake iPhones became a perfume market.

0:21.2

It's nuts.

0:22.3

But they're like multi-story essentially like aisles and aisles and aisles of booths, right?

0:28.5

It is a district of Shenzhen.

0:30.6

It's the Wajon Bay and Wajan Nan, so Wajon Road, north and south.

0:37.6

There is literally a shopping mall full of iPhone cases.

0:43.3

And each time you go, each time I've gone, there have been different trendy things.

0:48.6

Okay.

0:49.3

So we had, I would usually have a day or two to kill in Shenzhen, and I was usually kind of bummed out with the old factory.

0:56.7

And so at some point I tweeted, hey, would anyone want to give me 50 bucks and I'll send you some random crap from Shenzhen?

1:03.9

And got enough takers that we, I put a random box of crap from Shenzhen for $50 on our Shopify storefront.

1:13.4

I limited it to 20 and I said it was only going to be shipped to the States because I didn't want to deal.

1:20.3

And it sold out in a couple of hours.

1:21.9

The second time around, I think we limited it to 100 and it sold out in minutes.

1:26.8

But that first box, everybody got a tiny little

1:31.7

drone. Everybody got a crazy cable that was both a USB, a micro USB and a lightning cable

...

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