“So, when do you ship?”
You haven’t shipped your first product into the wild yet…
“So, when do you ship?” I’m sure you’ve heard this before. And there’s a good chance that you have to answer this over and over again. All entrepreneurs and employees at early stage startups know what I’m talking about.
Well, if you’re working on an iOS app, you might have to answer it a few times only, as it could take anywhere from 2 to 6 months to ship a MVP. Not too bad, right?
But…If you’re building Hardware? You probably have to answer this question 100, 3000 times? Why count? You’ll lose track. Since we’ve started building Ily in September 2014, I understand why people wonder why it takes that much time to ship an actual device. So, I’d like to briefly outline what goes on behind building a Hardware product, that’s different than building software alone, by telling our own story building Ily.
It’s about the people
It’s always about the team, we know that. But in Hardware, you absolutely want to count on people (electronic, mechanical, embedded software engineers) who have experience and a history of building multiple devices before, have been to China, have failed on the production lines, etc. Not only are those people very hard to find, you also have to convince them to join a super early stage Hardware startup, because let’s be honest, most fail.
Also, you’ll need more employees, early on : hardware, software, supply chain, UX design, Industrial Design (often outsourced at this stage), then operations, marketing, sales, etc.
Product Design
Working with an industrial design studio is not always easy. They might be far away from you. They’re not exactly part of your team. There will be lots of iterations. In our case, we were super lucky to work with MAP, based in London. Here’s what made the 1-year long design phase for Ily go extremely well.
1. We had weekly video meetings with them. Yes, every single week, even when we had nothing to say to each other (we always had something to share though).
2. We have our own mechanical engineer in-house who helped bridge the gap between design and manufacturing feasibility. MAP was very good at this already, but having someone focused exclusively on mechatronics helped tremendously.
China — Manufacturing
This is obviously the toughest part, and where most of us, Hardware startups get stuck at for a while.
We’re working with Dragon, who eases the process of finding a great Contract Manufacturer. Once you find a great partner in China, the production starts to ramp up. First tooling, then EVT, DVT, and PVT. This is a long period where engineers will spend a lot of time in China, fixing things between the different phases, making sure the production line is optimized and handling mass-production on D-Day.
Software
When building Hardware, you often “forget” about Software, or usually start worrying about it later. But Hardware without Software is kind of useless. For a bunch of Hardware companies, it’s mostly about some backend work and a companion smartphone app. For us and a few other companies, it’s all of this, plus, building our own OS layer on top of Android. Challenging is one way to put it. Today, our software team is actually bigger than our Hardware team.
Testing
The thing that I found to be the most challenging is user testing. When building a device with software on top it, the day you can actually start testing your product with actual users comes pretty late in the process. But because you want the data you collect to be as accurate as possible, it’s hard to rush that phase.
Certifications
FCC, CE, those logos you see on the back of any electronic device actually mean something. It is a lot of work and a lot of preparation to pass multiple tests on multiple fronts. This can take a few months and sometimes more than a year to obtain, and those are things that are hard to control.
Overall, it takes anywhere between 18 months (if you have something super simple, it could take less) and a few years to build and ship the V1 of a Hardware product.
By now, I know what you guys are thinking : “So when do you ship?”. Very Soon, I promise :)
Ilan Abehassera is the CEO of NY-based Insensi, maker of Ily
