The Tive Pivot: Why Disposable Beats Reusable in Hardware Business Models

The Tive Pivot: Why Disposable Beats Reusable in Hardware Business Models

Nokia was using their product. Customers loved the technology. The tracker had over a year of battery life and cost $250 with a $50 monthly subscription. By every product metric, Tive had built something remarkable. But the startup was dying anyway, down to just three months of runway.

The problem wasn’t the hardware. It was the business model.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Krenar Komoni, CEO and Founder of Tive, shared how switching from premium reusable trackers to disposable ones saved his company and unlocked the path to shipping 1.5 million devices. The lesson for hardware founders: sometimes the obstacle isn’t your product’s capabilities—it’s the operational friction your business model creates for customers.

The Hidden Friction in “Premium” Hardware

Tive’s reusable tracker was engineered to perfection. It had all the features supply chain customers needed: GPS tracking, temperature monitoring, long battery life, and real-time cellular connectivity. Customers like Nokia bought them. On paper, everything looked right.

But Krenar kept hearing the same problem in customer conversations: “The challenge was they couldn’t use it a lot because they had to figure out how to, they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be one of my first customers was Nokia, but then they would have to return these trackers back,” he explains.

The logistics were brutal. A pharmaceutical company would ship temperature-sensitive products from their facility to a distribution center. The shipment arrived safely, data logged perfectly. But now someone at the destination had to package up the tracker, arrange return shipping, and get it back to the origin point. Every successful shipment created a reverse logistics problem.

“They would do everything to ship their product from A to B. Now they have to return a tracker from B to A,” Krenar notes. The very customers who needed real-time visibility most—those shipping perishable produce or life-saving pharmaceuticals—couldn’t afford the operational overhead of managing tracker returns at scale.

When Running Out of Money Forces Clarity

By 2018, Tive was down to three months of cash. Krenar made the hardest decision of his entrepreneurial career: laying off half the company to extend runway to nine months. “In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that,” he says.

Those six months weren’t just about survival—they were about intensive customer learning. Krenar and a small team of college graduates started cold calling and cold emailing 150 to 200 potential customers every week. The volume of conversations accelerated pattern recognition. Proof-of-value engagements jumped from one per month to two or three per week.

“Throughout that process, we learned a lot about this issue and we learned that we got to figure out how to make more cost effective trackers that could be used once and if the customer doesn’t return them, it’s okay,” Krenar recalls. The insight seems obvious in retrospect, but it required hundreds of customer conversations to surface clearly: the return process was killing adoption.

The Economics of Disposable Hardware

Making disposable trackers viable wasn’t a simple engineering challenge—it was an economics problem that required rethinking the entire supply chain. A reusable $250 tracker could justify its price through multiple uses. A disposable tracker had to deliver value in a single shipment while generating profit on the first sale.

Krenar and his VP of technology flew to China and visited eight different manufacturing sites across Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangdong. They weren’t just looking for cheap manufacturing—they needed partners who could execute on their vision while hitting aggressive cost targets.

“We figured out who can make cost effective trackers for us, but most importantly, who can listen to us, because we have the ideas, we have the way on how we want to build this, how we want to design it. What’s important, we don’t want to just buy something that doesn’t work for our customers,” Krenar explains.

The goal was clear: build trackers they could sell for $40-60 while making money immediately. “I couldn’t afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like over the first sale,” he notes. No venture-backed subsidy of hardware. No negative unit economics justified by future scale. First-sale profitability or bust.

The Psychology Shift: From Asset Management to Operational Tool

The pivot to disposable hardware changed more than Tive’s economics—it transformed how customers thought about the product. A $250 reusable tracker was a capital asset that required tracking, maintenance, and return logistics. A $50 disposable tracker was an operational expense, like packaging materials or shipping labels.

This psychological shift removed friction at every level. Logistics managers didn’t need to train staff on tracker return procedures. Finance teams didn’t need to track asset depreciation. Operations teams didn’t need to build reverse logistics workflows. The tracker simply became part of the cost of shipping, included in the operational budget rather than the capital expenditure process.

By January 2020, Tive released what Krenar calls “the world’s first single use 5G ready tracker.” The market response validated everything those hundreds of customer conversations had revealed. “I would say we hit product market fit with that because customers were using these single use trackers that go on shipments, but they were 2G, like GSM. And 2G was phasing out,” he explains.

The Broader Lesson for Hardware Founders

Tive’s pivot reveals a principle that extends beyond supply chain tracking: in hardware, the business model is product design. You can build the most technically sophisticated device in your category, but if the business model creates operational friction for customers, adoption will stall.

The question hardware founders should ask isn’t “What features do customers want?” It’s “What operational reality will our business model create for customers?” A reusable model requires customers to manage assets, handle returns, track inventory, and maintain equipment. A disposable model eliminates all of that—but only if the economics work on a single use.

For Krenar, those economics required flying to China, visiting eight factories, and finding manufacturing partners who could deliver cost-effective production while remaining flexible to a startup’s needs. “I think that’s one of the things that just people think things are impossible. You just, I guess, get on a plane and go actually figure it out on your own,” he reflects.

Today, Tive has shipped over 1.5 million trackers and raised $80 million. The company tracks everything from strawberries to rocket parts for 700 customers and is preparing for an eventual IPO. None of it would have been possible with the original reusable model, no matter how good the hardware was.

The best product doesn’t win. The product with the business model that fits customer operations wins. Sometimes that means building something disposable instead of building something that lasts forever.