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Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

136 points · 95 comments · willcarkner

ac29 · 1786033928 · focus · HN ↗
Any idea what pricing will be like? The fact that you call out Drone and Defense industries on your page suggests to me this is extremely expensive.
I recently priced out getting a PCB done in China and its insanely cheap. My design isnt complicated, a few ICs, a few connectors, an a dozen or so passives. PCB manufacturing, parts, and soldering/assembly is on the order of $10-20 total per board and that is with zero volume discounts. The parts alone would cost that much in the US, and I suspect the sort of companies that you contract out to also aren't really interested in tiny orders so they would probably quote huge setup fees (looks like your average order so far is ~$7000).
1. willcarkner · 1786034155 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes, pricing is much higher than China over here, mainly due to the non-existent support for high-mix low-volume work. NRE adds a lot, and so the prices are high right now. This is why we need to own the stack, optimize for high-mix, and drive down costs over time. It will take a lot of work.
2. walrus01 · 1786034423 · focus · HN ↗
  Think of this service basically for the same purpose as why Crye pants and stuff are manufactured domestically in the USA. But applied to circuit boards.
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
  More specifically there are a number of new wide-spanning bans on import of mainland china made drone components such as flight controller boards, ESCs, power distribution boards, motors.
  The definition of "Blue UAS" pre-dates recent more aggressive changes made by the current US executive branch of the government, but is still relevant:
  <a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+definition" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=blue+UAS+...
  1. willcarkner · 1786035338 · focus · HN ↗
    This is exactly our initial market. We realized you can't beat China for a long time, so what do you do in that time? Service demand where you have a structural advantage.
    walrus01 · 1786037466 · focus · HN ↗
    Can I ask if you are working with any established US defense-oriented electronics firms that go further up the supply chain in auditing/documenting sources and chain of custody of components and the whole BOM? Having US made circuit boards is great but if a certain model of microcontroller only comes from one or two sources and they're in mainland CN, that's a known caveat that has to be documented somewhere... Or if the same product is available at a higher price from a different location. That sort of thing.
    One example I could offer is APD, the ESC manufacturer in Australia. They sell ESCs used both in the commercial cinema/filming industry (big quads and coaxial octos carrying RED Komodo size cameras), but also for defense...
    willcarkner · 1786037712 · focus · HN ↗
    Haven't yet worked with them, but that is one of our goals. We produce documentation to trace all components up the supply chain. In cases where the part is truly only available in CN, we clearly state this.
3. irishcoffee · 1786037078 · focus · HN ↗
  Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense. It is 100% about getting on the approved vendor list, at which point the prices go up.
  It’s not like PCB boards in the defense industry are somehow special, though they probably should be.
  1. walrus01 · 1786038010 · focus · HN ↗
    > Drones and defense have nothing to do with expense
    I would disagree? Look at Helsing, the german manufacturer of loitering munitions, and its direct competitors who are trying hard to get per-unit costs way down. Without even mentioning the myriad of Ukrainian manufacturers who are building cheap and cheerful things under $10,000 per unit (or even under $2500 per unit). There is a very real push within all NATO militaries now to basically copy many of the capabilities the Ukrainians have built in the last 4-5 years.
    Not saying that we won't still have lots of huge dollar items and massive programs like the AGM-158 JASSM, but there's a reason why the US paid a company to basically clone the Shahed-136 as the LUCAS at under $50k per unit.
    willcarkner · 1786038713 · focus · HN ↗
    Volume unit costs matter a lot. What matters less is cost during prototyping and development, where speed to iteration becomes way more important.
    walrus01 · 1786038904 · focus · HN ↗
    I absolutely agree, if you have just a few people who are each paid 180k a year sitting around waiting for something to arrive because the low-quantity prototyping vendor is slow, it's not the best use of resources at all. One of the reasons why certain companies spend a lot of money buying their own laser sintering 3D printers for low volume test-fit protoypes in the aerospace industry, or invest in their own small-scale CNC stuff to do similar.
4. makeset · 1786038312 · focus · HN ↗
  It's also the immense know-how Chinese manufacturers have accumulated at this point. For a 5-piece hobby order $25 shipped, I got feedback confirming a wrong-looking part of my design before they printed.
  1. ThePhysicist · 1786038586 · focus · HN ↗
    Which manufacturer was that?
  2. mrloopex · 1786040988 · focus · HN ↗
    And their ability to pollute without regard for life or the future.
5. tamimio · 1786039511 · focus · HN ↗
  It will definitely be expensive, and if you raised any eyebrow, you will get “made in the US” remarks immediately. Regarding “drone”, it’s a buzz word, in the past two years everyone is piggy backing on it like how all industries did with “crypto” years ago and “cyber” years before, or others with “AI” in software world now, “drone” is the word for hardware related, any new product or startup that has hardware involved, you will see this word quickly. I hate it and I hate how they ruined this amazing hobby with all their corporate defense BS, but oh well.
  1. willcarkner · 1786039756 · focus · HN ↗
    It's important to focus on where real innovation in the space is happening, and to me that's in drones. Some of the hype is overstated but drones are the new additions to conflict, and they're clearly not going away.
    tamimio · 1786040205 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of the hype is overstated, and I have been in drone world since 2014, but because of the weaponization of them and the global atmosphere of militarization, there’s a LOT of money pouring in now, so everyone wants a piece of that cake. In reality, their (the fpv ones specifically) success rates are around 1/10, but only the successful ones are shown for obvious reasons.
    Also, I did mention back in 2020 that drones are the only practical type of robotics compared to others, although I meant for good purposes not how they are used right now.
    willcarkner · 1786040354 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes even if the success rates are 1/10 they are still causing serious damage for their cost in modern conflicts. Agreed that the hype is overstated.
    crtified · 1786041921 · focus · HN ↗
    One of your major choices is how much you want to specialise, vs be a general service. I expect you're in the phase of discovering that. Now, with the disclaimer I'm just a random guy who knows not-much about business - and is just a small hobbyist electronics guy - it seems clear that your stiffest headwinds are at General Service. I would be leery of how much success you'd have there, because general PCB service is something the world has A LOT MORE of than it had 10 years ago, and the economics are on balance unfavourable to you.
    But to (very slightly!) paraphase you, you think it's important to focus on drones/defense and other nationalist areas where the future is canted toward you, and while that is not an area I'd enjoy working in myself (no personal judgement on you, but I'd rather spend my life doing things other than conflict and war), that is clearly what you know to be your first-rank business chance.
    willcarkner · 1786043317 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes I agree. If it turns out that there is not enough demand to service in defense, we can use the optimizations found from the defense market to take a stab at the general market. It doesn't make sense to start with that off the bat.
  2. Arch-TK · 1786040944 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
6. cryo32 · 1786041886 · focus · HN ↗
  medium to large defence companies tend to have in house board fabs. I worked in one.
  1. willcarkner · 1786042170 · focus · HN ↗
    yes, what was the utilization like?
    cryo32 · 1786044275 · focus · HN ↗
    20-40% capacity. Reserve available. Turnaround same day on a board. Parts placed next day.
    willcarkner · 1786044531 · focus · HN ↗
    Very interesting, I'm wondering if that low-utilization rate justifies the capex of building a line.
    cryo32 · 1786045785 · focus · HN ↗
    It's mostly for security reasons.
7. ford · 1786042826 · focus · HN ↗
  I'll hijack this point to talk about robotics - I think we agree 1) It's not ideal for China to control production for _all_ of the things we use here.
  2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because of domain knowledge & ecosystem
  3) The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate (and intentional government investment)
  4) The only way around this is for the US to invest into robotics (labor) & subsidize american manufacturing (ecosystem)
  1. willcarkner · 1786043100 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed completely. The recent bans are one way of doing this but not the most sustainable long term at all.
    We have two options, give up and allow China to control all production, or start the hard battle to improve manufacturing here.
  2. veqq · 1786043829 · focus · HN ↗
    > The reason they are ahead in the first place is labor cost & the QOL workers will tolerate
    That hasn't been accurate in a decade. Chinese labor costs have been higher than Mexico since before Covid. They have more efficient firms, business processes and so much more. The parenthesized "(and intentional government investment)" is related to how they developed nimbler systems, but ignores the totality of industrial policy.
    willcarkner · 1786043989 · focus · HN ↗
    In this case specifically they also have a huge amount of automation and process learnings from being around for 20+ years.
  3. apercu · 1786043961 · focus · HN ↗
    I totally agree that we need to reinvigorate manufacturing in the US and that it’s going to take the government (federal level) to make this happen. But for some reason we’d rather give those tax dollars to billionaires and elect incompetents like the current president.

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