Three Challenges Hardware Startups Face — And How the AtomLeap Accelerator is
Solving Them
Sleighdogs is partnering with the Berlin-based accelerator for their first Collider Camp this July. Summer is looking bright!
Interview by Alicia Kroell
If you’re developing hardware it sure helps to have a balanced team of experts — one that combines software, hardware, marketing, business, and legal know-how. Of course, you’d have to be a superhuman to possess all of these skills. Even with a small startup team, it can be hard to cover all your bases.
Here at Sleighdogs we’re huge fans of collaboration and calling in outside experts to make great ideas into products that can change the world. Which is why we’ve partnered with AtomLeap, the Berlin-based international hardware accelerator.
We’ve been excited about AtomLeap since the idea first surfaced, and were thrilled when they announced the program at our Relate280 event-Hardware Edition. The event was also the first meeting ground for AtomLeap and VR Union — the two have been working on “pre-testing” ever since. Next up? Their first accelerator batch, Collider Camp, takes place this summer. We’ll be there sharing our expertise on cross-border startup action, product strategy and design, user experience and marketing.
Collider Camp applications are open through 31 May to startups throughout Europe. Eight will be chosen to participate in the two month accelerator, and co-founder Robin Tech’s hope is that at least half of these come from outside of Germany.
“We are really looking forward to the international teams bringing sophisticated technologies to Berlin. I think that one sentence touches on most of the things we’re excited about,” Robin said. “We want to expose startups, especially from Eastern Europe, to Western Europe and the rest of the world. We want the teams to work together and inspire each other.
“I’m also very excited for the technologies that we’ll be seeing, and for the innovative way of tackling real world problems because that’s where I come from and what I’ve always loved — these visionary technologies that depart from how things have been done and create new ways of solving problems.”
AtomLeap will provide support when it’s needed, from their well-balanced founding team and partners. Teams will have access to everything from German Mittelstand manufacturers to venture capitalists pledging €200,000 for the final teams.
“All of our mentors have a very specific focus, so as not to repeat the mistake of many startup accelerators, which is to stay on a very meta level that is not really relevant to the startup itself. It wouldn’t make sense to go through ‘how to develop a product’ university-style course when a lot of these startups know the general vibe of hardware development,” Robin said. “They have one specific need to address and for that we have experts who will be on campus and on an individual-basis help the group to move forward.”
Robin and the team at AtomLeap have pinpointed three roadblocks that trip up hardware startups in the early stages: product development, design, and business and legal expertise. He breaks down why these are crucial early in the process, and how the minds at Collider Camp will offer support in each domain.
1. Product development
Product development includes the engineering part, which is soft- and hardware engineering. For example, you have a lot of components that you want to fit into your product. One of the biggest challenges is to find the right components that a manufacturer can use.
Another big issue on the technology side is printed circuit board (PCB) design and multi-layer design. What it comes down to is how to miniaturize your product, bring all the components together, and make it manufacturable. A lot of times that is a major, major step that requires a lot of manufacturing expertise — that’s something we help with on the technological side.
The Solution
We work with engineering offices and companies that solve these problems on a regular basis. For instance, our PCB experts are Alphaboard. We’re also working with small- and medium-sized companies that are experts in their technology sector and can help with a hands-on, practical approach.
2. Product Design
The second branch we recognized was design, so the exterior design as well as interaction design. We found that product design becomes more and more important to hardware startups, but it often receives attention at a rather late stage. A lot of hardware startups are really engineer driven and they want to get every functionality right before thinking about the product design itself, as well as the interaction.
The Solution
Our approach, and I think that’s quite fitting to Sleighdogs’ approach as well, is to get this notion of design thinking into the company at a very early stage. It’s important to start thinking about the prospective consumer — how they behave, how they want to use the product, and so on.
We do that by having a few design experts on our team. We also have design students from two universities in Berlin who will work on our startups’ designs for their semester project.
3. Business and Legal
What we expect, or have seen, from these prototype startups is that a lot of these teams are dominated by engineers, which is a good thing. We’re particularly looking for those teams because we want technologies that are sophisticated and have some kind of research-based foundation. But that also leads to a lack of business and legal expertise on the team. That’s not a bad thing at a very early stage, when it’s all about product development, but it can become a challenge if you want to get from prototype to product and from team to startup company.
The Solution
We really focus on accelerating the teams and ideas to become a startup company — a real startup company that not only has shareholders but one that knows its business model, markets, supply channels, and that has a sound legal framework to stand on. For that we work with KPMG and Lacore. KPMG is one of the biggest four advisory firms and Lacore is one of the leading startup advisory firms in Berlin.
One of the general goals in the business and legal branch is to make the startups investment-ready. And what we mean by that is we want to help the startups to figure out how to adapt their way of doing things to what investors find attractive and what investors want to invest in. Ultimately, developing a prototype into a sellable product means needing money. And most of the time founders don’t have that for themselves.
Sound like something you’d like to get involved in?
Collider Camp runs 20 July to 12 September and applications are open until 31 May. The only prerequisite for applicants: a physical prototype.
Rather than sticking with one industry, each iteration of the camp focuses on a different hardware technology. And for the inaugural Collider Camp, Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor technologies are taking center stage.
“We think it makes sense for teams to collaborate on the technological level without cannibalizing each other on a marketing and sales level. Because if you have a lot of teams that are focusing on the same industry chances are high that they will be targeting the same customers. Our conviction is that we should encourage teams to work together on the technological level because they know that they won’t compete on the market side of their product,” Robin said.
Head to the AtomLeap website for more information and the application. And like their Facebook page for regular updates.
Alicia is the Sleighdogs Storyteller. She interviews the good people surrounding Sleighdogs for the blog, curates our Bits for the Weekend feature, and spreads the word on social media. Follow @alicia_kroell for the treasures she digs up online.
Keep up with the Sleighdogs and the entire pack @Sleighdogs.
