Hardware startups fail for predictable reasons. Ryan Walker's article at rootkitlabs.com catalogs five of them, and none require bad luck or bad engineering. They require bad business judgment, which is far more common.
The two most punishing mistakes are skipping market research and skipping market testing. These are not the same thing. Research asks if customers exist. Testing asks if they will actually pay. Walker's framing of the second trap is precise: a product everyone likes but nobody buys is not a near-miss, it is a total loss. Premature optimization gets its own entry, and the argument scales cleanly from a hobbyist buying one unnecessary component to a startup burning runway on tooling for a product with no validated demand.
The article is worth reading in full because Walker does not moralize. He documents. The distinction between each failure mode is specific enough to use as a checklist before a funding round or a production run. Pair it with Hackaday's 2019 piece on product development solo versus team, linked in the original, for a more complete operational picture.
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