How inevitable are most accessible hard-tech startups?
(For context, I’m an undergraduate considering entering the hard-tech startup space. One concern I have is whether some of these startups are highly inevitable, and therefore whether my marginal impact as a founder would be essentially negligible.)
Question: For many hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if the first inventor had not existed, how much later would someone else likely have done something similar?
By “hard tech that does not require extremely sophisticated technology,” I mean physical products that could be created in a typical local makerspace (i.e. without specialized nanotechnology, advanced fabrication methods, etc.). For example, smart thermostats and basic robotics would fall into this category.
I would like to believe the answer is often “years later,” but I can also imagine the delay being only a few days to a month, because i) many hard-tech founders are actively looking for startup ideas; ii) many of the underlying problems are already well known; and iii) if the technology is relatively accessible, it seems especially likely that multiple people would try to solve the same problem around the same time.
Is this intuition correct? I’m looking specifically for rigorous quantitative analyses that try to estimate the “delay” for accessible hard-tech startups, not one-and-off anecdotes. If anybody knows of any rigorous analyses, it would be deeply appreciated.
Interesting question, and I suspect it’ll vary greatly by the specific idea/product/domain.
I’ve been building systems and innovating for decades now (mostly at large companies, but currently at a 10-person startup), have a number of patents and was instrumental in some quite large products. I can say that all of them seem obvious from some angles, but in retrospect some of them might have taken years if I/we weren’t successful, and others would have existed fairly quickly (or sometimes quicker than we did, if it weren’t known that we were doing it), but in a different (and IMO worse) form.
The thing is, there’s no way to know in advance which it is. And generally, no better way to influence how things turn out—even if the general idea would happen anyway, your specific take on it and your caring about that particular set of details will be different than it would be without you.
(note: I also explored with Claude to get some crunchbase numbers and some research on idea simultaneity WRT patent claims in the iot space, but it turns out I don’t care that much on those dimensions. If you do, it’s worth exploring that way).
Interesting ponder.
I think if you realistically try to do what you are claiming other founders are doing, you might realize your own answers. Having gone through similar experiences and thought processes, here are some related thoughts I have had in the past:
Startups are often not (dare I say almost never) about who does it first, but who can continue to survive. Tech advancement is not automatic nor natural. So your initial question might not even be the right first question to ask. For instance, my first questions relate more to #2 below.
There are many PRACTICAL reasons the tech you are describing might not currently seem as trendy as you expect. To name a few, assembling a high performance team is hard (networking). The problems solved by ‘hard tech’ might not be as profitable/easy/big enough/accessible as it seems. You might not actually want to startup if you find out what it takes. Working for someone else can actually be great. You might not have the ability to start a startup (money, resilience, IQ).
A crowded market doesn’t mean it is bad or saturated. It might mean it is a good market in which to do business. Imagine doing business in an empty market. There are often good reasons why a market is empty (or crowded, or saturated).