Edit: oh and congrats on the success this year! I’d have to imagine it feels insanely rewarding!
>Shipping a hardware product as a bootstrapped founder sounds (at least) an order of magnitude harder than a software product.
Yeah, it ended up being way harder than I expected.
I actually didn't even mean to make a hardware product. In the beginning, I thought people would just buy off-the-shelf components and pay me to make nice software to tie everything together.
It became pretty obvious early on that people were a lot more interested in a pre-made hardware solution than a DIY project with ready-made software. And I'm glad I made it to the point of profitability and worked hard at it, but I also definitely got lucky a lot. There are so many more existential threats to a hardware business, especially in the early days.