An Easier Way to Manufacture Your Hardware Product: Product Hubb
In my last blog “Hardware Development Guide — The Design Phase,” we went over everything needed to design a hardware product… but designing is only the first step. You still need to figure out how to get all your parts and pieces manufactured and ready to ship. In this blog, I want to introduce you to a new tool that may just make your life easier when manufacturing that product you have so meticulously designed and tested.
In the last 10 years working at Jaycon, we have built literally hundreds, if not thousands, of products for all kinds of industries.
- Medical Knife? ✔️ *check*
- Doggy Pooper Scooper? ✔️ *check*
- Remote Heart Monitor? ✔️ *check*
- How about a stuffed animal monkey toy that goes “Ook-ook! Eeek-aak-eek!” when you press a button? ✔️✔️ *check, check*
Want to see some pictures? You can check out our portfolio page. Even though there were so many different kinds of products entrepreneurs were working on, there was always one thing in common. While working with the founders and engineers on these products, I realized a simple problem… Entrepreneurs and small businesses don’t have a method to structure or organize the output (such as files, documents, bill of materials, etc) of their product development process. They often don’t think about this until they have made it through 2–3 rounds of production runs.
If you spend some time googling Product Life Cycle Management or BOM (Bill of Materials) manager, you will find some software packages to manage your product, but none of them are really geared to the person just starting out with their first product. They market to the big companies with extensive product lines and are all very expensive ($15k — $40k/year), clunky, and need months of training to fully utilize all their features. This is why a small group of us decided to work with a full-stack software development team to bring you Product Hubb!
Product Hubb is an online tool built using 10 years of product manufacturing experience. It gives its users a simple but powerful template to define all the raw materials needed to build a product (or a product line!). It also offers users easy-to-use tools to help quote their project and get it into the right hands for manufacturing. With Product Hubb, it’s easier than ever to create and share hardware projects with your teams and vendors. Users will also be able to manage vendors, order inventory, and monitor the lifecycle of products all in one place.
Teams no longer need to manage their files in random folders and manage their costs using Excel sheets. Don’t get me wrong, I love Excel and can’t live without it, but can you use Excel to view a 3D Step/STL file? Can you quickly see tiered pricing in the same cell? Probably not. On top of that, teams often have a hard time keeping track of all the raw components and lead times to make their product.
Another benefit of using a system like Product Hubb is that it gives you data you didn’t even realize you needed, such as: How many products can I build? How long will it take to get all the parts I need? How many resistors am I short? How long will my inventory last? If you build your project from the start using Product Hubb, you will always have your finger on the pulse of your product.
We have a whole host of new features coming online in the next few months, including 3D viewers, Gerber Viewers, and many other tools that we use all the time in manufacturing hardware products. We created Product Hubb to develop and share valuable tools with Entrepreneurs and small businesses developing a new product. It is an easy-to-use, one-stop software package to help you create and sell your products to the world.
Of course, Product Hubb is a brand new product and will take time to mature, but if you are just getting started designing and building a product, this would be a good time to suggest to your design teams to look into a PLM tool like Product Hubb. If you are interested in giving it a try and getting a one-year free membership, you can sign up as an early bird with your email using this link, and we will reach out to you when we are ready to add you to our beta testing. Currently, it is only available in partnership with Jaycon, but it will be available on its own later in the year.
Two Final Reasons (& Anecdotal Evidence) to Try Product Hubb
We had a client come in one time with a thumb drive with all of his production files. We spent weeks reviewing, quoting, and finally assembling 1000 units for them… Only to find out the thumb drive was missing the latest version of their PCB files. That means we ended up building the wrong PCB version. This ended up costing them thousands of dollars worth of rework, and it all could have been avoided had they been a little more organized. Believe it or not, this kind of error happens more than you can imagine.
At the end of the day, being a Contract Manufacturer (CM) for some of the products we design, we are the ones doing a lot of the hard work to truly understand our client’s projects. We have to quote every single part of the project, make estimates about lead time and pricing, leverage relationships with component vendors, and of course, build the actual product. With that said, the way customers present their product often tells the CM a lot about how serious they are in bringing their product to market. Most of the CM’s I know just want to work on stable, long-term projects. So if they have two projects on their quote list, but one is organized and clear, and the other is a mess of files… Which one do you think they will prioritize? They would much rather work with a client who seems to have all their ducks in a row and is serious about their product.
About the Author
Hi, I’m Jay, the founder of Jaycon Systems. I’ve been developing hardware ever since I can remember and love learning about disruptive technologies. In my blog, I share tips on building great hardware products; my take on new technologies; and other random & relevant thoughts about tech and entrepreneurship. If you like my posts, don’t be shy — give it a nice round of applause and add me on LinkedIn; I’d love to connect with you!
