Selling 2,500 MIDI recorders taught one founder that hardware isn't the hard part

Chip Weinberger, a longtime software engineer, spent 18 months shipping Jamcorder — an automated piano-recording device that has now sold over 2,500 units and sustains itself as a business. Coming from software, he braced for hardware to be the brutal part: injection molds, component shortages, scrapped production runs, fulfillment. None of it materialized as the nightmare its reputation promised, with tariffs being the only real scare.

The actual bottleneck was software. Roughly 200,000 lines across firmware, the companion app, and manufacturing tooling took more than three years to build, much of it before LLMs existed to help. By contrast, the physical product was smooth — a deliberate outcome, since Weinberger stripped the design down to a single-screw, single-PCB assembly and cut features like USB-C, a power button, and ambient-light sensing to keep it simple.

His takeaway is that ‘hardware is as hard as you make it,’ and that its fearsome reputation is overstated for small-scale, high-margin products — though he concedes that 10x complexity, 100x scale, or a low-margin established market like smartwatches or cars would be a different story. He closes with practical advice: keep the bill of materials simple and multi-sourced, aim for 70%+ gross margins, partner with Chinese assembly houses, hold inventory and do QA locally, request samples before every run, and invest in anti-counterfeiting.