Have you designed, produced, and sold your own product?

Come up with a great idea.

Talk to people about it and find out what people want.

Get funding and gather your development team.

Develop the product

Go to market

This is a most basic steps and it appears intuitive and rather obverse.  However, we have helped many clients who have not gone through each of these steps.  Some have even changed the order of the steps and as a result have failed miserably. If you would like more information and want to achieve success take a look at how we can help.  Pinter Electronics Consultants.

Chris Pinter

Chris,

The most difficult step is "Get funding."

Any thoughts and experience you can share on this perpetual issue?

Cabe

Well,  I would agree that getting funding is very important.  However, I would argue that talking to people and getting buy in from customers is far more important.  Engineers do not generally understand the important roles marketing people have.  Marketing is the key to knowing if a product will sell or not.   If a product cannot sell...if you do not have a customer then an investor cannot see how they can make money.  Why would an investor put money into an idea that is not well thought out and has no indication of possibly making money?

Get the market research done right and money will be available.  

If you need specifics in where to get money or you are looking for funding help in developing your next great idea you can submit your marketing plan and product idea to the "Pinter Technology fund".   We can take a look at the idea and help you fund the development.  This is a great fund for early start ups and can offsetting the costs of development.  It also leads to more funding opportunities as the product become commercialized.

NEED DEVELOPMENT FUNDING?....check this out!      http://www.pinterec.ca/services/business-engineering/pinter-technology-fund

Hope this helps,

Chris Pinter

president

Pinter Electronics Consultants

Chris,

Nice plug. It look like you have a lot of valuable information to offer. Do you hae any success stories? Companies turned around by your services?

Cabe

Although I haven't produced or sold it yet, I am in the process of designing a wireless environmental monitoring system. Part of the documentation for the system did require a look at the business side of the process including selling it etc, as such I thought I'd comment.

The biggest challenge I have faced so far in the design side has been converting the prototype into a final product. As the system was originally designed using a development board (An Arduino of all things), I have faced the challenge of not only converting the electronics to a new schematic (Yes, the Arduino schematic is available, but this produced some licensing issues for me and a couple of other minor things). As a software developer, my knowledge of electronics is a little vague in some areas making that part a steep learning curve and a challenge when trying to spec some parts. Although I have previous experience with preparing the layout of PCBs, doing so with a larger project like this and an unfamiliar piece of software was...interesting to say the least. Thankfully, with the software in question being EAGLE, support wasn't exactly hard to find. I recommend asking people you know who may have experience with the tools or the processes, while a forum may help, they tend not to be as clear as having someone next to you or on the phone/VoIP to talk to.

In terms of preparing the system for production, the biggest problems I encountered were around calculating costs. Although the original report considered costs, it was purely an estimate based upon the cost of the development board and the components attached to it. The possibility of converting this proof of concept to a final product meant that new calculations had to be made. A lack of experience in doing this complicated matters as there was not the local support required to help say what estimates should be based on. For example, should these figures be based on 10 devices or 100 or more?

I also started to face challenges when it came to getting prices for parts. Once a few guesses had been made to the possible number of devices (Starting low in the vague hope someone would actually want to buy such a system from me and not a larger company), the problem came with finding possible suppliers for parts such as the PCBs. Although a search on the interwebs did produce results for manufacturers, the general impression given was that some were either not interested in small runs or were simply trying to get every last penny out of hobbyists. While this may not be the case, once again a lack of experience and support did slow the process and in some cases actually put me off following this route.

These initial difficulties would have easily been reduced had there been sufficient support in the areas. Although there are various forums etc around the place, not all of these were that useful, it always felt that having access to someone with experience who you could discuss things with would be a greater benefit. I have similar feelings about the business side of things. While there are many guides out there on getting started (Business Link, Adafruit Industries etc), not many of them that I found were able to provide relevant advice. Many guides were as generic as possible. While for many queries you may have, these guides may contain the answers, they do have some gaps relating to certain products. For example, there are not many that discuss licensing for things like RF devices, or import/export of electronics. My advice for when you get to this stage is to talk to a business adviser, if you are in the UK check out the BusinessLink site, they can help you get in touch with someone. While they may not be able to help with specifics, they should be able to point you in the right direction or have contacts who can help you. Simply, take every bit of advice you can get from people with experience.

I accept this is all no doubt quite...ranty and confused, but that is pretty much my experience of the process so far! I must agree with you Cabe, there must be a lot of people out there who would appreciate tips, myself included!

I have been helping many company throughout the years overcome a variety of issues.  Many of my biggest successes have been with small companies to help develop new technology or find funding to get their idea to the next level.  Some companies include Veriteq Instruments, Massload Systems, and Safecell Technologies.   We have more companies listed on our website.

http://www.pinterec.ca/about-2/portfolio

Many of the companies have provided recommendations including some of our bigger customers, such as Microsoft.

Wireless Power & Communication, www.wpc.no, have developed several products based on our patented technology for wireless transmission of power.

The hardest part is always the last 20% of the development process. It is easy to think that the product is finished when you have a working prototype, but it is usually then the hard work starts. Ensuring thet the product is absolutely bug free and that it will work correctly regardless of how the end customer treats the product is often a time demanding process.

It is also important to start thinking of production test and ease of manufacturing early in the design process. This will make it much easier to set up the product for mass production.

We are a development comany and thus we try to have focus on development and find partners to handle sales, marketing and production. We have good experience in finding sales partner that has good experience in the market where the different products are applicable. Outsourcing the sales rights reduces our margins, but enables us to keep focus  on our core activity which is development of products with wireless power.

Audun

I have assisted with many designs to market, and from experience learned the hard way, here is some sage advice....

Product compliance is not another inconvenient paper exercise to be rushed at the end.. get it in from day 1. Get your hands on the harmonised product specific standards to conform to essential safety requirements of the applicable directives. Sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how poorly this is understood by many engineers.

This is an example I had to fix.. A finished product failed conducted a emissions test. The product housings had already been tooled and delivered, so there was NO option to re-design the housing to fit an improved AC filter. I had to redesign a sub-assembly to make room for the upgraded AC filter.

Hi all - I know this thread is a few years old, but very closely tied to a thread I posted about an article I found about crowd funding over in the Open Source Hardware group.  I thought I'd post here and get this group's input on it as well.  Have any of you used crowd sourcing platforms like Indigogo or Kickstarter for your products?

Thanks for letting me jump in here!

Nicole

Hi Cabe Catwell,

5 years later but better late then never I can show an example and answer to your question that worked out globally.

It is called Safecast, a crowd sourced network of radiation monitoring and developing, improving and selling their own i- and b-Geigi geiger counters with the help of global volunteers and some commercial companies.

The project was triggered by the great North Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster back in March 2011 which caused the subsequent Nuclear disaster of Fukushima NPP1.

History | Safecast