Insight certainty 5/5 debate potential 3/5

Consumer hardware V1s must choose to be Feature King or Budget King

Hugo Barra · Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 9, 2022 · at 22:07

Hugo Barra (CEO of Detect, former VP of Product at Meta and Xiaomi) outlines his framework for consumer hardware product strategy.

0:00 / 0:54exact quote · 54.2s
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“When you're building a consumer hardware product, you have to make one important decision for V-One. You either go for customers who are willing to pay a high price for a full feature product that does the job they expect without cutting any corners, or you focus on value customers who won't even consider your product if the price isn't right. I call these two approaches Feature King and Budget King. Feature King are products that have all the features and are for that reason more expensive, Budget King products are built under a cost constraint that requires the product people to make really, really hard choices, and you need to choose where you're going to play. If you fall somewhere in the middle, you fail to make either of these customer types happy, your product is a stinky dead fish, your brand suffers, and you probably are going to die.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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