There Is a Lot Between Zero and One

For our 10th San Diego Hardware Meetup, we focused on The Road to Scale: Zero-to-One HW Story. The meetup took place on June 25 at Pure Project, and this time the main part of the evening was built around a panel discussion and audience Q&A.

We had Alex Cordeiro, Industrial Designer & Founder, Derek Jackson, VP of Sales at SEACOMP, and Aliasgar Morbi, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Velavu.

I liked the mix of perspectives because the road from an early idea to something that can actually scale is never only about engineering. Product design, manufacturing, commercialization and the company itself all start affecting each other pretty quickly.

A working prototype is obviously an important milestone. You start with an idea, go through the first concepts and iterations, and eventually build something physical that works.

But in hardware, that first working unit is only one version of “one.” It proves that the idea can exist, but it does not automatically prove that you can build it again, manufacture it consistently, source the parts at the right cost, or support the product once it starts reaching customers.

That is probably where the road to scale really starts.

The product keeps changing as the company learns

Early hardware is full of assumptions. You make decisions about size, materials, features, assembly, components and how the user will interact with the product. Some of those decisions will work exactly as expected. Others won’t.

And I think that is normal.

The first prototype is not only there to prove that something works. It also helps reveal what needs to change.

Customer feedback can change the product. Manufacturing constraints can change the product. Cost can change the product. A component that works perfectly for twenty prototypes may create a completely different problem when you start thinking about thousands of units.

That is why I think design, engineering and manufacturing need to start interacting earlier than people sometimes expect.

For this meetup, SEACOMP brought the manufacturing perspective into the discussion and also sponsored the evening. Their work is focused on supporting hardware companies as they move toward scale, with manufacturing operations in China and a newer 60,000-square-foot facility in Mexico.

What becomes interesting at that stage is that manufacturing is no longer just the final step where someone builds what engineering already decided.

It becomes part of the product-development process.

A manufacturing partner may see that a part is difficult to assemble, that a tolerance is unrealistic, that a supplier creates too much risk, or that a design decision could become expensive once volume increases.

Those conversations are much easier to have before tooling and production start. The later you discover them, the more expensive the lesson usually becomes.

Scale is not only about building more units

I also think it is easy to talk about scale only in terms of volume. You build ten units, then one hundred, then ten thousand.

But being able to manufacture ten thousand units does not necessarily mean you should.

There still needs to be demand. The economics need to work. The company needs to understand how it is going to sell, support and improve the product. The supply chain needs to be reliable enough to support the volumes you are targeting.

The business has to scale with the hardware.

That is where commercial and technical decisions become very connected.

A component can improve performance but make the product too expensive. A custom part can solve an engineering problem but introduce tooling cost and additional lead time. A customer request can sound simple commercially but create significant complexity in production.

Those are not isolated engineering, sales or manufacturing decisions anymore. They are all decisions about the same product.

The more time I spend around hardware companies, the less I think of product development as a straight line from idea to prototype to production.

It feels much more iterative.

You build something, test it, learn something, change it, talk to customers, discover another constraint and change it again.

That does not necessarily mean the process is going wrong.

That is often the process.

The important part is making sure that each new lesson becomes cheaper and faster to absorb as the company gets better at building the product.

One last thought

This was also our 10th San Diego Hardware Meetup, which made the evening a nice milestone for the community itself.

I think the topic fit that milestone well because hardware is rarely only about making something work once.

Eventually, you have to make it manufacturable, sellable, supportable and repeatable. There is a lot between zero and one. And there may be even more between one and scale.

A big thank you to Alex, Derek and Aliasgar for joining the panel, to SEACOMP for sponsoring the evening, to Pure Project for having us, and to informal for continuing to support the Hardware Meetup community.

We also kept the community open mic, giving people in the room a chance to share a prototype or talk about what they were working on before the rest of the evening moved back into conversations and networking.