Does one of their lessons-learned include to hire proper engineers and supply chain peoole with experience in China / with Chinese manufacturers? Ideally all the way up to, say, COO, and give those people tze necessary authority to run things? Because if not, it is just a collection of anecdotes of the clueless, a collection that is used for content marketing...

" it is just a collection of anecdotes of the clueless"

But those are the entertaining ones innit. What fun is it to read a blog (like OP) that says 'yeah we hired a bunch of experienced professionals and we didn't have any problems'. No, we want to read stories of 'so I forgot about one detail and the manufacturer completely misunderstood us so I had to fly to China and spend 100k to get it fixed and it still was 3 months late'.

By the time you do all that, effectively moved in to the Design By Committee Industry, what distinguishes your widget from ACME Big Widget Co & Sons.

And employing all those people doesn't guarantee success, but it does guarantee your failures will cost a lot.

You'd probably want to only attempt making something like this as a vanity project, where it matters less if you fail, and thereby half the fun is navigating the path to success by yoursel[f/ves].

I mean, we're a two person company. I can assure you that all that writing wasn't about content marketing.

But, just for completeness sake, the list of people who got blindsided by the con artist who was ultimately behind a lot of the crazy included both our experienced local on-the-ground project manager and the factory owner.

Then I do have a cpuple of honest questions:

Why did you go to China, as a two men shop? And not choosing a local company nearby?

And how much experience do both of you have on the hardware / manufacturing aide of things? And running global supply chains (because that's what you have, regardless of production volume)?

Thank you so much for this link. Spent the last 2 days or so reading it. Absolutely full of amazing stuff.