Hello from Shenzhen
We are thrilled to announce that we are participating in Haxlr8r’s sixth class in Shenzhen, China.
When we started working on Electroloom last year, we had a vision, a prototype, and little else. As we’ve continued to build, we have begun to see the challenges that are common across most hardware startups. Namely navigating the transition from prototype to product. In many ways, prototyping is an art. But building a product is a discipline—one that often takes engineers, artists, and makers many years to master. For us, working with HAX is an amazing, and essential, step forward toward building a better product and piece of technology.
By mid-January of this year, we had packed our clothes, electronics, tools, and pieces of our prototypes into suitcases, hopped onto a 15 hour red-eye to Hong Kong, hustled through customs and across the China mainland border, found an apartment, and settled into the HAX office. Now that we have two weeks of living here under our belts, we wanted to bring our followers into the loop on the unique advantages that HAX (and Shenzhen) will provide us.
Prototyping
As a group hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, we are fortunate enough to have worked at the epicenter of entrepreneurship and technology ventures. But as an early stage hardware startup where designing, testing, and iterating takes up much of our time, there are limitations to our productivity in the Bay Area. We were blind to most of them, as they are more or less the status quo. But even just two weeks into the sixth class of the HAX program, we are beginning to see the ways in which the next few months abroad will look much different from the way they looked back in the states.
The most obvious difference is our ability to source components locally. Finding prototyping tools and components is as easy as walking the few steps from our office to Huaqiangbei, an area in Shenzhen with the largest electronics markets we have ever seen. The markets seem to have everything — buttons, stepper motors, drivers, microcontrollers, breadboards, wires, resistors, power supplies, soldering tools, and nearly every other component essential to building hardware.
What this means is that development cycles can shorten—dramatically. Building a new iteration can be done in matter of days, as our components can be found locally and machined parts can be shipped and delivered on the same or next day. For us—and certainly any hardware startup—this is crucial. It allows us to be more nimble with our design process, having the freedom to build, learn, and iterate over a more condensed period of time. Moreover, the cost of failure is greatly reduced. Broken parts or bad designs are much quicker to remedy when we work in such close proximity to markets and suppliers.
Manufacturing
One of the biggest hurdles we will inevitably face is manufacturing. Prototyping a machine can be messy at times, and the practice of building a machine under such circumstances means that the design may not scale to a production run.
We’ve already begun to tour manufacturing facilities in the area. The capabilities of the facilities vary — from prototyping or producing small runs of a few hundred units, to facilities that can manufacture and ship entire products by the thousands.
When the time comes for production, our proximity to such facilities will be invaluable. Having the ability to communicate face-to-face with operators and factory managers is crucial when building partnerships and trying to get things built correctly.
The Future
Of course, this is only the beginning. Much will change over the 3–4 months that we will be operating in Shenzhen, China. Immersing ourselves in a new country and culture will help us build Electroloom into a company that can scale and grow. We are also proud and humbled to be working next to 14 other teams with incredible drive and vision, who are taking advantage of such a focused collection of incredible skill sets.
We couldn’t be more excited to work with the HAX team on building the future. For now, it’s back to work for us. Stay tuned for more updates, and thanks for following us on this journey.
未完待续，下次再见！
