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I have recently been part of a pseudo startup effort to build something entirely out of Made in the USA, no really material. I knew it wasn't going to work because I've actually touched a real machine instead of a computer at least once in my life, but what the hell, I thought. I made sure I wouldn;'t have to do anything email related and we set off into the high You See!'s.
The Final product required several subassemblies, including sand we tortured until it could think, some injection molded fiber reinforced plastic, some Widgets, Some Gizmos, and some fairly precise metal stuff.
We begin! The US pcb supplier cost more than 10 times as much as the equivalent shenzhen house. They took the order (nothing special, an OTS bit you can get by the 40 foot container from china), made promises, delayed for a couple weeks before providing samples which failed to meet requirements, delayed for a couple weeks before providing samples which failed QA, delayed for a couple weeks until providing samples which were great, delayed for a couple months and then shipped the first tranche, which failed QA, then dipped.
We could not find someone who had the capacity to injection mold parts in the size needed, with the reinforcement needed, for love or money. Anyone who could was either locked in to military contracts for 110 years or had retired.
Alright, move on to the next step: We could get the gizmos made in the USA. They were of lower quality than foreign made, cost more, and had more lead time, but they were from a legacy manufacturer (remember this!) and hadn't changed in 500 years, you are paying for support and legacy at that point. Worth.
The gizmos were a problem, they were in the gap between generic and specific that is entirely occupied by eg. Vietnam or Taiwan. We would have had to have them individually C&C'd.
The precision metal likewise. Someone can get it made in the USA, but not us.
Final result? Everyone involved in this project has options. I was basically there for free to help out a friend who already had money, and so was everyone else. After 18 months of someone else dealing with american business, he eventually realized what I had: American industry is straight garbage at the mid level. The top dogs are fine, the small houses are great, but everyone in between is some flavor of hustler, scammer, incompetent, or never was.
You cannot make anything new in this country without starting from the top and building out 70% of your entire production chain that you could not make 1000 times easier somewhere else, period. This is an inarguable fact; dude who had the idea has moved to australia. You WILL be seeing this produce in the next 12-16 years, either his version or someone else who had the idea at the same time, but when you see it it will have been made in china.
To make this culture war-y: This is what comes of believing the bullshit chicago school econo-cultists and capitalists tell you about how the world works instead of trusting your lying eyes. The free market is great for communicating certain information, and historically has been the only way of sending the signals that it does send. Unfortunately, it as a dogshit way to coordinate a complicated series of production and logistics processes, and will always lose out to central planning.
All the suppliers that we worked with that were worth a damn were legacy companies that got their feet under them when the US was basically a war communist state. Everyone else was worthless. When you compare this to chinese/Vietnamese/Taiwanese manufacturers who compete within a limited sphere but are incentivised and coordinated by the state, or Japanese/Korean manufacturers who have a light touch from the state but internally centrally plan their output and relationships inside a larger conglomerate or even between large conglomerates, the output of the US is more expensive, slower, lower quality, and less reliable. This is true across all productive industries.
We have the lead in tech because it is the only remaining industry where everything happens under the same house; where at no step other than the final step do you need to touch the free market; which is the step that the free market is uniquely suited to. There is a reason that firms do not adopt free market principles for internal management, that Amazon is run as a totalitarian state and not an ancap association.
Unfortunately, I don't think we are getting out of the pit the ideological capitalists have dug and the boomers have jumped in to for another election cycle or two. The republicans would rather the country collapse like England than let the state manage anything at all, and the dead hand on the tiller of the Democratic party is pointed in the same direction; about 300 boomers need to retire or die or be convinced (good luck!) before they even have the capacity to think about course correcting.
All this to say: If you have a revolutionary idea for a product and you aren't already Elon Musk, don't fucking try. Do what bro did and move to Australia and work directly with productive systems that aren't ideologically forbidden from doing the thing that works.
I don't want to give too much away here, but I PM at a company that makes stuff in the US, with an annual revenue for just this product line in the 10s of millions. Our success largely comes from being in a small Midwestern city and forming relationships with dozens of local small-medium fabricators. The kind of relationships where we invite them out to baseball games, when our parts are ready we drive a truck out to them, we stop by every once an a while with something that shouldn't have passed QC and point out to their faces what went wrong, etc.
About 50% of our success is that persistent and somewhat masculine relationship management. Flatter when they do well, reward when they do sufficiently, call out to their faces when they do badly. Call them cowards if they look hesitant. No matter what, never go a month without taking over the phone or in person. Solicit their input if they think there's a better way to fabricate what you're after. Oftentimes ignore their feedback, but in a way that shows you considered their input.
Rather reminiscent of what they say about doing mid-level business in China. I wonder if there’s some structural factor?
Anyway, always interesting to hear from people with experience.
You have to be a real person to them. They have to feel like they're disappointing a real person if they mess up or take too long. You can't just be a customer where a failure is just a business problem, it has to be personal.
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