Index / Work
Suntag Co.
You have to name a price before anyone has ever paid you one. Tooling gets committed first. That is the whole problem, and I got a piece of it wrong.
The problem
Hardware pricing is set before you have demand data, because tooling and the first production order are committed in advance. Price too low and you delete the margin that funds the second run. Price too high and you hold inventory with no signal about why.
What I owned
All of it. Solar viability testing, the interface in Figma, the prototype code, and the demos I ran to watch people react. There was nobody to hand the pricing question to.
Approach
- Tested solar output first, because the ceiling capped what the product could honestly claim.
- Treated demos and the waitlist as directional signal, never as stated willingness to pay.
- Reduced it to three inputs: landed unit cost, tolerable price, minimum viable order.
Result
Funded pre-launch on a $5,000 pre-seed with a waitlist above 300. That is validation, not revenue, and I will not describe it as more.
| Input | What I knew | What I assumed |
|---|---|---|
| Solar output | Measured in testing | Real use underperforms the bench |
| Demand | 300+ signups at zero cost | Some fraction converts at some price |
| Landed cost | Quotes at several order sizes | First run holds quoted tolerances |
| Price tolerance | Verbal reactions from demos | Interest survives a real checkout |
| Order size | Supplier tooling and minimums | Run one funds run two |
Every row on the right is an assumption a buyer would test. I have not published unit costs or margins, because the numbers are not stable enough to defend.
What I got wrong
I treated the waitlist as demand. A waitlist measures interest at zero cost and says nothing about the price at which that interest survives.
Running it again I would take refundable deposits at two price points before committing to tooling. That converts a soft signal into a number I could actually defend, and it costs almost nothing.
If any of this is worth an argument, I would like to have it. fyruan@usc.edu