Kommand696

Everyone keeps saying building hardware is tough, but sometimes it takes being involved in the process to understand what tough really means. Since the last update on Krop AI last year, the team has made tons of progress, but not without times when they almost wondered why they were doing what they were doing. I asked them if they had to articulate what really were the issues, now would they, and they sent me some notes. Here they are, if they help others in the ecosystem. - There is no hardtech ecosystem in India. Building hardware in India means building the supply chain alongside the product. We couldn't find an Indian vendor for the HVAC components we needed. We had to import high-end sensors. Mechanical assemblies, the kind that a US or China-based startup would order off a catalogue, we had to design in-house from scratch. Every problem took 3x longer to solve than it should have, simply because the ecosystem doesn't exist yet. - Sensors went silent. Our PCBs failed. We lost sensor communications across the farm and didn't know what was happening inside our own container. Downtime hit 30%. Plants suffered. The fix wasn't better sensors; it was better hardware design underneath them. We've since rebuilt our PCBs from the ground up. - Lighting was one of our largest capex line items, and the unit economics didn't work at that price. So we started designing our own lighting in-house. Capex came down 25%. The monthly energy bill came down 30%. Plants don't need constant light; they need the right light at the right time. That single rebuild opened up the entire business model. - LEDs throw heat, plants transpire moisture, and a 40ft container needs a perfect climate 24/7. Our first HVAC build cost INR 24L. We had failures, rebuilt the thermal architecture from scratch, and brought capex down to INR 5L. - We picked the wrong pumps. They failed, and the farm flooded. Inside a sealed container with sensitive electronics and live plants, that's about as bad as it gets. Industrial reliability was tough to figure out. But we have re-specified every pump in the system. All of us @Rainmatterin are super proud of the team. Not because they had revenue numbers to show, or had a large valuation bump, but just because of how they dealt with each of the hurdle. They are focused on figuring answers to problems. They are doing it thoughtfully. That's what it takes to build stuff. Good things await. ❤️