The protractor annoyed him. So Wenxin Fang, a teenager in Redmond, Washington, built a better one. His version is machined aluminum, precision-cut, meant to replace the flimsy plastic half-circle every kid has snapped or lost. He started a hardware company to make it. The thing is called the ZeroPivot Protractor.
Not an app. Not a subscription. A physical tool for measuring angles in math class, the kind of object you’d think was finished being invented sometime around 1600. A kid looked at it, decided it stunk, and went and made metal. You can read the story over at GeekWire.
A teenager building a machined-aluminum protractor won’t move markets. But it’s a small proof that hardware startups still start where they always did: one person annoyed enough by a bad product to make a better one. Watch the crowdfunding and small-batch tool space, because that’s where the next round of these kitchen-table product companies is coming from, and a $30 protractor is cheaper to launch than an app.
Sources: geekwire.com
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