Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to We're a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that made and shipped “hardware”
We took a goofy idea with some truly horrible designs made in Google Slides and ended up contract manufacturing custom bobblehead trophies that we send to every team that subscribes to Water Cooler Trivia. It was a 9-month labor of love.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. We're a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that made and shipped “hardware” launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
We took a goofy idea with some truly horrible designs made in Google Slides and ended up contract manufacturing custom bobblehead trophies that we send to every team that subscribes to Water Cooler Trivia. It was a 9-month labor of love.
2021 · trivia.co · its alternatives →
- 2
canitbebuilt▲143Your hardware idea, inspected. Verdict, BOM, 3D model.
Jul 2026 · canitbebuilt.ai · its alternatives →
- 3
Customizable weekly trivia contests for your team via Slack
2020 · watercoolertrivia.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Trophy 1.0▲356Hey HN! I'm Charlie, one of the co-founders of Trophy. Trophy is a platform for developers to build and ship gamification experiences for any web or mobile app without having to roll any of the backend yourself. We provide APIs and SDKs to shortcut a lot of the legwork building features like Achievements and Streaks, and a dashboard where you can tweak the experience without having to make any code changes. My co-founder Jason runs campfirewriting.com and always wanted to build a gamification system to boost retention, but always pushed it back in favour of other core features. So we decided…
Jan 2026 · trophy.so · its alternatives →
- 5
Bunchoballoons▲149Make 100 water balloons in under 1 minute (pre-launch)
2014 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
- 6
The smart reusable bottle funding ocean plastic collection
2021 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Why hardware is actually software wrapped in plastic
2016 · content.libsyn.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9
Brave indies face product failure, say goodbye and reboot
2023 · its alternatives →
- 10
2012 · reddit.com · its alternatives →
- 11
2020 · watercooler.work · its alternatives →
- 12
Roast (+fix) your startup idea in 3mins before wasting 3mths
2025 · dontbuildthis.com · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Weekly office trivia quizzes for you and your co-workers 🎯
2018 · watercoolertrivia.com · its alternatives →
- 15IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012 · readwriteweb.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Trophy's Gamification UI Kit is an open-source library of gamification UI components built on shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS. Drop-in React components for streaks, achievements, leaderboards, points, and more — ready to copy and customize.
Jun 2026 · ui.trophy.so · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey devs :) With 15+ years of UI kit building & design systems, my team is launching a platform that allows developers to build consistent & fully functional UI kits / web projects in days, instead of months. Giving you best practices with the most advanced system design/system design for reusing UI components, combined with access to 500+ open-source components that you can build anything with. Yes it’s open source tech with no vendor lock. Which means you can export any part of your UI kit / project at anytime. Our goal isn’t to enhance your tech stack, not to lock you in.…
2024 · symbols-beta.framer.website · its alternatives →
- 18IS
Hey there HN! So for the last few weeks I decided I wanted to learn more about selling on Amazon and FBA - so I did what any normal hacker would do. I bought a website - https://www.chargeduck.com - Wrote some funny copy (Well I think its funny, but I suppose thats subjective) and then I went a step further. I called up suppliers, had samples made, designed packaging and even through some of that cheeky copy on the box. As I've been talking to people over the last week or two - especially other entrepreneurs its become apparent that this is a world a lot of people don't understand…
2018 · its alternatives →
- 19
I will build the top crowdsourced project idea in 1 week.
2021 · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 22IC
After 6 months looking for an idea, procrastinating and over analyzing what I should build. I built a tool that allows people to find problems using custom plugins built with Grok and Claude.
2025 · gotaprob.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24IW
I've spent years watching hardware teams make the same mistakes — tooling committed before thermal was resolved, manufacturing processes not validated in PVT that only showed defects at volume, components going EOL unnoticed until the factory tried to order them. The pattern was always the same. The costs were always avoidable. Nobody had written it down. The result is The Hardest Hardware Lessons — covering the full journey from first prototype to end-of-life: EVT/DVT/PVT, factory evaluation, supply chain risk, mass production operations, field failures, and product lifecycle…
Mar 2026 · thehardesthardwarelessons.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →