{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fops-i-did-it-again.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2F400-cac-100-msrp-t1BBaAUO","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"$400 CAC, $100 MSRP: why it’s so hard to build hardware, with Erynn Petersen","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/60e2b59f-ca09-4dc7-8d7c-c565a7f46186/3a139378-be4b-4c78-8690-b7dea842bf56/s2_intro_boilerplate_square.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"<iframe src=\"https://player.simplecast.com/599f1914-1fb1-4493-96cd-9f7b3517d523\" height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" title=\"$400 CAC, $100 MSRP: why it’s so hard to build hardware, with Erynn Petersen\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>","height":200,"description":"Emme started as (and still is!) a smart pill case. Beautiful, award-winning, Apple-level-designed, beloved. It was so well-designed that nobody needed to buy a second one and they’ve only had 5 returns in 3 years\n\n\nThe CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) was $400 and the case retailed for $100. I think you can see where I’m going with this\n\nErynn Peterson, CEO of Emme, walks through what it took to flip those economics and what every hardware founder learns too late: your margin isn't 80%. It's 5%, if you're lucky, and that's before you've spent a dollar on marketing. Also you should know that it’s really expensive and fraught to market in women’s health, much less women’s reproductive health\n\nThe conversation covers the full stack of hardware reality: minimum order quantities before any supplier will take your call, ad channels that shadow ban women's reproductive health products, the shift from SEO to GEO that reshuffled the deck just as Emme had figured out content strategy, and the firmware versioning nightmare that AI has (only recently) made tractable."}