I'll have you know that I'm Matt's top contributor to Ghost Pepper and I'm nearly fifty
But I did it because I wanted it to work exactly the way I wanted it.
Also, for kicks, I (codex) ported it to Linux. But because my Linux laptop isn't as fast, I've had to use a few tricks to make it fast. https://github.com/obra/pepper-x
I mean, we're a two person company. I can assure you that all that writing wasn't about content marketing.
But, just for completeness sake, the list of people who got blindsided by the con artist who was ultimately behind a lot of the crazy included both our experienced local on-the-ground project manager and the factory owner.
Author here: This was indeed a quick hack. And Perl is still my fastest language for banging out a quick prototype. (I used to be the Perl 5 project lead. I’ve spent a lot of time with Perl.)
We've started with Codespark Academy for our pre-literate kiddo. At first he said "I don't like this, it's boring."
And 20 minutes later came back with "Daddy, can you help me? This program is in a loop and it will run forever"
Flash-forward a few months and he bursts into the bathroom while I'm showering to show me the game he made in their side-scrolling platformer authoring environment: "You need to grab the jetpack, then you can fly over the wall of fire to get the coin and win."
If you're using a pre-certified BT module, the costs can be dramatically lower than you might expect. Ditto doing your lab testing "over there" rather than in the US.
If it's not an intentional radiator, you can get multiple rounds of FCC+CE testing for USD650 in Shenzhen these days.
That's a pretty common pattern. To a first approximation, you will never outcompete clones on cost or distribution. Chinese patents and trademarks are actually helpful if you need to enforce, as are good contracts written by a Chinese lawyer in Chinese.[1]
You can outcompete them on customer service, community, brand, and quality.
For most consumerish products, I would not be worried about a clone stealing your design files. It is incredibly cheap to clone the mechanical parts of a product from photos or a single copy bought retail. For most consumer electronics, the clones would be unlikely to use the expensive western parts and designs you would. Instead, you're likely to see really fascinating cost engineering around parts you didn't know existed.
[1] I have sued a supplier in China, who did some sketchy stuff. It was a fascinating process. Contrary to the conventional wisdom and to our expectations, the court actually helped us get back our tooling and inventory.
And they've been lovely to work with as we got this put together.