Comment by tonyarkles

I think you’re actually asking good questions!

> scalable business beyond being yet another Oshkosh

OSH Park is fabulous for what they do, but they don’t do PCBA.

I’m not OP, but I think I can provide some insight anyway:

> Outside of targeting specific sectors e.g. defence, how else do you plan to remain competitive globally

I think that trying to be competitive globally would be a dumb play for these folks, they’re optimizing for something different.

Defence is one sector where this model works, no doubt. But there’s a bigger market that doesn’t have a great domestic story yet (I’m in Canada and work with a variety of CA and US PCB/PCBA houses): fast-turn low-volume PCBA, either for prototype iteration or for industrial one-offs. While I work on a specific “sort of defence adjacent” project right now, my past consulting work would’ve benefitted quite a bit from being able to turn around full PCBA work in 7 days. Macrofab end-to-end was usually 3-4 weeks and cutting that iteration time down would’ve had a solid effect on reducing project timelines if it could’ve happened for a reasonable price. There are domestic manufacturers who have optimized for that… but the price was not something my clients were willing to pay to accelerate their projects. If this hits a sweet spot there… that’ll be really exciting for me.

(I’ve already sent it to my team to start looking at)