Other new fad for the PC modding community

Yes I want a biscuit and now I am sad as I can't eat this type.... *Yay for being a Lactose Intolerant Coeliac!*


**Shuffles off to try and find a Gluten Free biscuit recipe worth a damn**




I would add something useful about modding but now I want food..

 

This is for OP's eyes and benefit first and foremost, if you'll permit me. There is a clear disconnect between why you have been received badly and why you think you have been received badly - I suspect not for the first time ever. This is, quite genuinely, in the spirit of constructive criticism. It can be read as helpful suggestions for any future efforts in business; as a list of reasons why some might be skeptical that you are as experienced and successful a businessman as you claim; or as a speculative, partial explanation as to why you are not as successful as you would like to be.

Please understand that my purpose here is not to attack, to poke fun or to laugh at you, but to offer a sincere and sober breakdown of why there is this terrible disconnect between how you are received and how you want to be received. I think this is a worthwhile exercise because you are clearly a PC enthusiast and a modder with industry experience, and therefore if you belong anywhere, you unquestionably belong here, if you can only find a way to getting on with people.

Here is what some of this looked like to an outside observer.

This is hubris, egotism and pride - a red flag for investors and business partners, who know from experience that these traits tend not to sit well with innovation, adaptation, safety culture, good practices, worker rights, legal issues, and so on. Criticism should be met gracefully and mulled over for any valid and useful observations. If none are found, it should be sidestepped with dignity. Defensiveness is read as weakness, or worse, guilt, and should always be avoided.

This is aggression, defensiveness, rudeness and/or derision in response to skepticism, criticism and probing questions - a red flag for investors and business partners, who find skepticism, criticism and probing questions quite essential.
Note too that if you have a business failure in your past and are trying to drum up interest in an idea of yours, people will naturally want an explanation of that failure, and not providing one will read as shady. Providing a deeply disturbing one without remorse, context or concern for its reception will appear sociopathic and scary. Better yet - don't mention the business failure.

This is a criminal record, anger problems, a disposition towards violence and towards the holding of deep grudges, irrationality and emotional impulsiveness, and a lack of remorse - all of which are red flags for investors and potential business partners for obvious reasons.
Again, this should be couched in some kind of explanation and contrition; that's the only way to remain personable and viable in business in light of something so grave. Care should be taken about where you publish this information (as a rule, public internet fora are probably a bad place, even with pseudonymity).

This is a disturbingly cavalier brush-off of a fundamental issue with the product, and a disregard for the value and integrity of customers' property - red flags for investors and business partners, whose livelihoods may depend on your ability to identify and adapt to issues with the product, and to avoid damage to customers' property.

This is bigotry, stereotyping and hatefulness - a red flag for investors and business partners, who prefer to avoid PR disasters and lawsuits, and whose livelihoods may depend on your ability to not inflame tensions between demographics, invite controversy or alienate potential customers with hateful remarks on the internet.

We can all relate, but this is a self-evidently undesirable trait to investors and business partners. And failing to mention it to them is insufficient; overcoming it is crucial. Patience is probably one of the most useful qualities in business, both in its own right and as a measure of useful codependent qualities like intelligence, self-control and foresight.

This is curious in that it is clearly untrue and a self-defeating statement. But more importantly:

You respond to a personal attack with a personal attack, which invariably escalates arguments. Being able to resist doing this is a pillar of maturity and vital for any business or work life, especially a public-facing one with customers or clients.

This is a presumption that others are ignorant, inexperienced and reaching, and calls back to the first point about egotism. If you can't conceive of other people - total strangers, no less - as having experience, knowledge and insight you will repeatedly fail to benefit from them, like the aviation culture of the 50s that was pockmarked by preventable accidents due to a "captain's always right" mentality. You respond to a person's insight by trying to squash and discredit that insight when it doesn't align with your opinion, which is poisonous to any team-driven success or collaboration.

And again, a preoccupation with your past business failures is relevant and reasonable discussion material when you're introducing yourself as a man with entrepeneur credentials and a valuable business idea.

This is probably the most important moment in the thread. You see others' criticisms, skepticism and offense as abuse, rudeness and trolling. Simultaneously, you are yourself abusive, rude and occasionally trolling (if defined as an active effort to offend or upset people), once irritated or challenged.

This all unfolded from your unwillingness to consider the possibility that your own language and statements was the cause of their hostility. Faced with a room full of people who criticised your ideas and your behaviour, you chose to believe that all of those people were disingenous, irrational, spiteful bullies with an agenda against you, rather than entertain the possibility that your ideas were flawed or your behaviour unpleasant.

Speaking in all humility as someone who has done this many, many times, I can assure you that this is a habit worth breaking.

This is the closest you got to constructive and contentful dialogue, and if I squint at it really hard I can believe that you were once active in the industry and collaborated with other businesses and customers to develop products. I can only speculate that prison has cultivated a really hyper-defensive fight-or-flight stance towards others and eroded your people skills since then, because:

It is genuinely sad that you got this impression from one thread in which your own behaviour unintentionally caused some minor arguments. If it's this easy for you to judge an entire community based on a handful of interactions, it will be very difficult for you to re-enter any business environment. It is also a sign of how far off the mark you are about us that you think we would want to delete/ban you simply for being acerbic once or twice. Trust me, if that's all it took, I'd have been out on my arse about a decade ago.

Simply put, the way people react to you is as much about you as it is about them. As an ex-con you will encounter mistrust; as an entrepeneur you will encounter skepticism and nay-saying; as a former businessman with new ideas, you will encounter probing questions. None of these things should offend you; rather, you should see them as material to work with. An ex-con who overcomes initial mistrust and endears himself to people is especially sympathetic; an entrepeneur who successfully wins over skeptics and confidently defends against nay-sayers will impress investors and clients; a businessman who has an answer to every probing question will seem like an exceptional businessman.

Someone who fails to work with any of these challenges is in the wrong ballpark. And I don't mean this forum - that's definitely a ballpark in which you belong. I mean business.

On a final, very minor note:

This is like nails on a chalkboard to most people. Just saying. I don't care personally, it's just a part of why people were initially stand-offish. Excessive joviality seems disingenuous.

 

So, no fleshlights than?

 

No. I won't. Stop. Please.

 

I can't see myself ever buying this idea and I don't see it ever being a good business venture.

First, I'm very grateful I only glanced at OP's comments in this post. This guy needs to learn to read the room.

But for the rest of you, here's my hot-take analysis on the idea.

• Every case is different, so this would need to be modular. It looks like it is.
• The linear portions could be extruded aluminum. That would be custom tooling. (expensive)
• The corner parts (all of them) would best be CNC'd. (expensive)
• The straight portions could be purchased at lengths or possibly just cut by the customer with a hack saw. Aluminum is soft.
• But this is why it doesn't work. After all that work, every single wire would have to be cut and terminated to a perfect length. That's a ton of work. So so so much more work than custom sleeving.
• People like the look and design of custom colored sleeving. It allows for near-infinite possibilities and this covers that up.
• This product might be more interesting as a hard line power solution that brings the power from the PSU to all the right places near the motherboard. Of course, every motherboard is different, so have fun making something compatible with 1000s of motherboards and cases. It either needs to be versatile or you have to make 1000s of SKUs for all the most popular options right now.
• People who buy products want some ease of use. If you want to be successful (sell lots of product), then you want to tell people to buy a specific thing and have it be plug and play. If it's not that, then you're catering to a small group of modders who dedicate 100s or 1000s of hours into single PC builds. These people might, and I really only mean might, be interested in this product, but they're also going to be the type of people who might opt to just hand solder hardline wire themselves and cast the whole thing in resin as a side panel similar to a keyboard I built.
• Markets are built by making things better, easier, or cheaper. Your idea doesn't really do any of those things.

 

Good points. I like it as a concept, like if somebody was really no-effort-or-expense-spared trying to make an awesome build that's just-so, and is thereafter going to stay untouched like a museum piece, these cable routers are a viable proposition. And that certainly does describe some modders. But if those people have the energy to apply this concept to a build, they probably have the energy to make it themselves from scratch, from whatever material they find most practical. (Injection moulded plastic seems more likely than aluminum, to me.)

If it was me, personally, I'd want enclosed ducting, like what's used in offices to tidy cables against walls but miniaturized. Among those modders who do their own custom metal pipework, pipes might be the...easiest option (I use the term "easiest" very loosely).

All of this assumes a totally custom chassis, of course, because none of these options is going to fit behind most back panels.

Just thought, too - all of these options interfere with airflow much more than braided cables, which testing has shown are basically a free pass in airflow and noise terms. Being cylindrical, thin and porous, air just kinda deals with them. My idea of chunky ducting...less so. I can imagine you get a duct in the wrong place, and suddenly whoops, resonant frequency/reverberations, now you have a mysterious noise.

 

Is this the 30xx is fake all over again for you?