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I wrote a pretty extensive post on Quora about how to build hardware products. Here's an excerpt... Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible

by grinich 14y ago

I wrote a pretty extensive post on Quora about how to build hardware products. Here's an excerpt... Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products. The challenges of negotiating with suppliers, verifying components, orchestrating supply chain logistics, and maintaining quality standards will swiftly kill a cash-constrained startup. But there's good news: unless you're on the cutting edge of a specific technology (like Apple with displays or metalwork), the problems you encounter at scale have very likely been solved by others. So the task then becomes to find those individuals or companies and hire them quickly. PCH International is probably the most well-known of these firms. They notably make Kindle, products for Jawbone, and all the accessories for those dudes in Cupertino. Because they often work with big players, they're able to leverage large contract manufactures' (CMs) quality standards and economies of scale for smaller production runs. Currently PCH is also aggressively going after hardware startups and recently launched PCH Accelerator, which is essentially a strategic investment group to fund partnerships with startups. Another option is Dragon Innovation, who works with Pebble, Makerbot, Sifteo, Leap Motion, and others. They're based in Boston and have recently partnered with the brand-new hardware accelerator/investor BOLT. They're certainly less flashy than PCH, but still know how to deliver. HAXLR8R (Shenzhen) and Lemnos Labs (San Francisco) are other startup "accelerators"-- kind of like a hardware-flavor of YC. They seem to be more focused on the R&D stages (pre-Kickstarter) than production. For some personal anecdotes by others, see What startup incubators exist for hardware companies? [link] One way to think about contract manufacturing in China is with the "smile curve" popularized by Acer in the early 90s. It's essentially a graph of a product's extractable value as a function from creation to sale. On the left is brand, high-level design (IxD, ID, PD) and any specialized R&D. In the middle you have component sourcing, supply chain management, manufacturing, assembly, and shipping. And then on the right you have distribution, retail sales, marketing, and partnerships. ... it goes on with more examples. Full post: http://www.quora.com/Michael-Grinich/Posts/Product-manufacturing-for-the-newbie-from-prototype-to-production http://www.quora.com/Michael-Grinich/Posts/Product-manufactu... Funnily enough, Liam Casey actually often calls PCH the "APIs for manufacturing."

dakrisht 14y ago
Great post. On the money.
andyjohnson0 14y ago
"Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products." I'm sure that is true. Possibly because the people with experience of this come from a different community (established consumer electronics) than some of the new people coming onto hardware via the startup scene. Bunnie Huang recently wrote a series of detailed blog posts about how to take prototypes to manufacturing in China. There is a lot of hard-won knowledge in them. Part 1: The Quotation (or, How to Make a BOM) http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812 Part 2: On Design for Manufacturing http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2831 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2831 Part 3: Industrial Design for Startups http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2850 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2850 Part 4: Picking (and Maintaining) a Partner http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2911 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2911
- grinich 14y ago
  I totally meant to link Bunnie's blog posts in that Quora bit! Thanks for the reminder-- he's awesome. :)
andrewmb 14y ago
>Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products. I both agree and disagree. For cutting edge products and extremely large volumes, yes you need experience. For a very complicated product, I again agree. But for the majority of what we're seeing with "Kickstarted, low to mid-volume production"? Disagree. If you have a mechanical or manufacturing background you can absolutely get a new product launched without paying Dragon or PCH exorbitant amounts of money. Will there be hiccups? Yes, but nothing catastrophic if you follow good engineering principles. Design, validation and simulation can all be carried out in advanced CAD packages (or by not-advanced CAD + lots of labor). Depending on your timeline, you can prototype locally for higher costs but faster iteration (design, build, test), or you can prototype with suppliers more slowly but save on production verification and testing. The speed benefits are variable too: I've had US proto houses come back with ridiculous lead times and Chinese factories turn around a production verification sub-assembly in less than a week. YMMV. I love the smile curve; I've never seen it before, but that is exactly how things work. But the situation is changing as more and more Chinese factories of all sizes integrate engineering teams and work to become OEM/ODMs for the local market. The other changes are in the labor rate: as China gets more expensive that curve is going to flatten. For small scale stuff in the 100's to 10's of thousands I think that you can go it alone for the right product class, which happens to be most of what we see here on HN/Kickstarter. Find factories on Alibaba, spend a minimal amount of money testing them out, place small orders to protect yourself and voila! I think the hardest part is dealing with demand prediction/logistics, but that's inherent to any hardware enterprise that doesn't have its own manufacturing capabilities.

by grinich 14y ago

dakrisht 14y ago

Great post. On the money.

andyjohnson0 14y ago

"Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products." I'm sure that is true. Possibly because the people with experience of this come from a different community (established consumer electronics) than some of the new people coming onto hardware via the startup scene. Bunnie Huang recently wrote a series of detailed blog posts about how to take prototypes to manufacturing in China. There is a lot of hard-won knowledge in them. Part 1: The Quotation (or, How to Make a BOM) http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812 Part 2: On Design for Manufacturing http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2831 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2831 Part 3: Industrial Design for Startups http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2850 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2850 Part 4: Picking (and Maintaining) a Partner http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2911 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2911

grinich 14y ago
I totally meant to link Bunnie's blog posts in that Quora bit! Thanks for the reminder-- he's awesome. :)

andrewmb 14y ago

>Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products. I both agree and disagree. For cutting edge products and extremely large volumes, yes you need experience. For a very complicated product, I again agree. But for the majority of what we're seeing with "Kickstarted, low to mid-volume production"? Disagree. If you have a mechanical or manufacturing background you can absolutely get a new product launched without paying Dragon or PCH exorbitant amounts of money. Will there be hiccups? Yes, but nothing catastrophic if you follow good engineering principles. Design, validation and simulation can all be carried out in advanced CAD packages (or by not-advanced CAD + lots of labor). Depending on your timeline, you can prototype locally for higher costs but faster iteration (design, build, test), or you can prototype with suppliers more slowly but save on production verification and testing. The speed benefits are variable too: I've had US proto houses come back with ridiculous lead times and Chinese factories turn around a production verification sub-assembly in less than a week. YMMV. I love the smile curve; I've never seen it before, but that is exactly how things work. But the situation is changing as more and more Chinese factories of all sizes integrate engineering teams and work to become OEM/ODMs for the local market. The other changes are in the labor rate: as China gets more expensive that curve is going to flatten. For small scale stuff in the 100's to 10's of thousands I think that you can go it alone for the right product class, which happens to be most of what we see here on HN/Kickstarter. Find factories on Alibaba, spend a minimal amount of money testing them out, place small orders to protect yourself and voila! I think the hardest part is dealing with demand prediction/logistics, but that's inherent to any hardware enterprise that doesn't have its own manufacturing capabilities.