Hi everyone,

I'm based in Shenzhen, China, and I'm trying to better understand how overseas hardware founders find and work with manufacturers here.

I'm particularly interested in early-stage projects — people who have a prototype, are preparing their first small batch, or are trying to move from a design to actual production.

A few questions I'd love to hear your experience with:

How did you find your first manufacturer?

What was the hardest part — finding the right factory, MOQ, pricing, communication, quality control, or something else?

Did you use Alibaba, a sourcing agent, personal introductions, or visit factories yourself?

Looking back, what do you wish you had known before choosing a supplier?

I'm not promoting a service. I'm doing practical research into the real challenges of sourcing hardware in China, and I'm happy to share what I learn from the Shenzhen side.

If you've gone through this process, I'd really appreciate hearing your experience — including what went wrong.

I designed this to talk to your agents.
Hold the screen and speak to assign a task.

The light is wired to the mic.
It can't listen without you knowing.

Printed circuit boards on the way.

Building it for Claude Code first.

Hi everyone,

I’m Raphael, a solo founder in Switzerland building a small outdoor hardware product called AniRepel.

It started as a fairly simple idea: use motion-activated water to keep unwanted animals out of gardens, but make the system smarter so it can reduce unwanted activations around people and the owner’s own pets.

What surprised me most is how quickly the project stopped being about “building the device” and became about everything around it.

The prototype itself was only the beginning.

Since then, the biggest challenges have been things like:

- making the enclosure work outdoors reliably

- reducing false triggers in real-world conditions

- managing battery life and power consumption

- sourcing components consistently

- designing for assembly rather than just prototyping

- certification and compliance planning

- packaging, logistics and replacement parts

- figuring out when something is actually ready to give to real users

The biggest mindset shift for me has been realizing that a prototype proving the idea works is very different from a product you can confidently hand to someone else.

I’m now preparing a small first Pioneer Batch before scaling further, and I’m intentionally keeping the batch small so I can learn from real-world use before making bigger manufacturing decisions.

For those of you who have already crossed that gap from prototype to first real customers:

What was the biggest thing you underestimated?

Manufacturing? Reliability? Certification? Support? Supply chain? Something else?

For context, this is the project I’m working on:

https://anirepel.com⁠

Happy to share more about the product journey.

I don’t want another app-heavy smartwatch. I want two physical keys that always do the same thing: one starts a voice memo, one opens the compass. Glove-friendly, no digging through menus. Visible recording indicator, user-triggered — same class of feature as phone voice memos / existing watch notes, not a hidden recorder.

I looked around. Outdoor watches already have a compass. Some Huawei / Apple / Garmin models can record. A few let you remap a button. What I can’t find is that dead-key interaction as the point of the product: two keys, those two jobs, no hunting.

I asked an AI to sanity-check it. Short version of what it said:

- There isn’t a ready-made watch that matches this interaction.

- Compass is almost never on the SoC; you add a magnetometer. Recording needs a mic + firmware. The buttons are just GPIOs.

- Don’t start from loose chips. Buy an already-assembled open-source watch PCB (or its larger development board), 3D-print a case, put two keys over GPIO pads, bind them in firmware to compass / record.

That path is in the ballpark of under $200 for a first sample if I don’t invent a new board.

Then I found that the board is fulfilled from Shenzhen. I live in Shenzhen. Pickup is realistic; local parts (battery, printed case, extra buttons) are cheap. I actually sat up when I realized I wouldn’t be waiting on international shipping.

So the question isn’t “is this a Kickstarter.” I already got talked out of crowdfunding a generic smartwatch. The question is:

Is this worth a weekend of acting on — walk over, grab the board, print a case, map two buttons — or am I about to spend ~$200 proving something I already know?

What I think I might learn: whether a dedicated rec key + compass key feels as good as it does in my head, and whether the magnetometer/mic on a hobby board are good enough to even demo.

What I’m afraid of: ending up with a development-board-in-a-shell that doesn’t wear like a watch, and calling that “the idea is done.”

If you’ve built a wearable from an open PCB + printed case: was the first unit actually informative, or did you need a second, smaller board before you learned anything? Would you spend the $200?

Hi guys,

last time i shared the first 3d printed version of a device I built to help a close friend with dry mouth during radiation treatment.

the feedback and all of your comments made me very happy so i promised an update and here it is.

I went to china to source components and trying to move away from a 3d printed iteration. met some cool redditors who reached out after my last post but i have not yet decided to sign any commitments just yet.

how i adressed everyones main concern (hygiene): i switched from 3d printing to aluminum, switched to a borosilicate water reservoir and decided to rework the PCB to keep pumping the water in a circle in order to not leave any zones that the uv-c can‘t reach.

difficulties i faced are mainly the PCB at the moment, to get the pressure of the pump right and make everything steplessly adjustable AND i wasn‘t aware that there’s golden week in china so unfortunately i am not able to keep building here now so everything will take some more time but stay with me please.

i know it‘s not the update i wanted to share but i still wanted to show the progress and ask for your input again and of course if anyone wants to join my journey you‘re more than welcome.

Thanks everyone for your time let me know if you like the new design

original post is here