Great Product

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Ben Einstein

Great product is rare. Unlike most things in business, it’s nearly impossible to rationalize. This is because us humans are emotional beings. We usually make purchases with our heart and rationalize them once the store clerk asks for the credit card. Because of this, it’s difficult to pinpoint why a product is great even when you know that it is.

I’ve spent the better part of my life refining this sense. It has definitely gotten better, but it’s still pretty lousy numbers-wise. If I design five different products maybe one prototype of the bunch feels “right” (and “right” is still a long ways off from “great”). Modern masters of product design like Jony Ive and Yves Behar shoot 50/50 on a good day. If an entrepreneur is lucky, she’ll get to develop one great product in her lifetime. I’ve worked on a bunch of products, some of them were lousy failures and a good portion were big successes, but I wouldn’t put any in the “great” category. This is hard to admit, but continually helps me to refine that sense.

Despite how difficult it is, some companies almost miraculously churn out great product. It has always puzzled me why this can happen, so I started spending a lot of time on trying to figure out how they do it. I’ve come to the conclusion that building great product requires two essential raw ingredients:

Instinct
A lot of people have it, they just don’t know how to listen to it. I would actually argue that we’re all born with this instinct, but it get’s lost in our left-brain dominated culture. I’ve gotten very sensitive to subtle hints of a product or feature that signal it’s exceptional: wanting to continually play with it, the kinds of words I use to describe it to someone else, taking it apart to find out how it was made to look so damn good, sheer delight when I discover it does more than I thought, and watching other people smile when they pick it up for the first time.

Ruthlessness
This is the kicker. Ruthlessness is not a quality we want to put on display, but building great product is impossible without it. Having great instinct is worthless if we’re afraid to fight for it. When there are looming deadlines, money being burned, company politics, manufacturing constraints and a million other things, fighting for a soft goal like “great product” usually feels impossibly difficult. It’s why ruthlessness needs to be sewn into the DNA of the company. There have to be a few people towards the top of the payroll that possess great product instinct and ready to wield influence to fight for it.

I’ve learned to get good at telling people that a product or feature sucks. After the inevitable deflation, a great team is ready to admit it to themselves and get the whiteboard markers out. Don’t take it personally when a mentor or employee or customer tells you something isn’t as good as you think it is. In fact, if your opinion is more positive than anyone else’s, chance are you’re wrong. Listen to feedback carefully, it helps build great product. If you figure out how to do it perfectly, my email is ben@bolt.io.

Bolt is ALIVE!

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Ben Einstein

Despite the lack of activity on the interwebs around here, Bolt is more alive than ever. In the past few months we’ve been busy closing our first fund, building out our new 9,000 sqft office, setting up a boat-load of prototyping equipment, hiring our world-class staff, and of course talking to hundreds of hardware startups.

Now that much of the framework has been setup for Bolt, you should be hearing from us a bit more regularly. Over the coming weeks, we’ll introduce our A+ team and start showcasing some of what Bolt will provide to accepted startups.

The application for the Bolt 2013 program closes on May 22nd. So hurry up and get your application in! It’s safe to say competition for this first class is going to be stiff. More at http://www.bolt.io/#program.

Y Combinator and Hardware? Beware!

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Ben Einstein

As you have probably seen, software startup luminary and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham posted an interesting article on his highly respected blog yesterday: YC is now encouraging hardware companies to apply to their 90-day program. As much as I respect Paul, be very careful of attending YC with a hardware product. Here’s why:

Not Enough Time/Cash/Staff…

Building a hardware product takes a significant amount of additional resources (time, capital, person-hours, expertise, etc) than a typical software or web service product. Y Combinator and pretty much every other seed acceleration program are built around the constraints of the sw/ws development cycle. They provide two primary pieces to satisfy this part of the life-cycle: mentorship and investor relations. These resources can be applied to companies extremely quickly and across their entire portfolio in sufficient quantities (although some disagree with the latter). When it comes to hardware, it’s simply not enough.

Limited Expertise

There are a few mentors in the YC network that know about hardware, but it’s a tiny (really tiny) minority of their community. The amount of exposure a portfolio company gets to this kind of expertise is extremely minimal, which is exactly the opposite of what hardware startups need (more than sw/ws). Asking one of the YC mentors about what the draft angle on your injection mold tool may not yield a prompt (or correct) response.

No Space

Founders at YC usually camp out in coffee shops and rented apartments around the Bay Area. Completely sufficient if you spend all day in front of TextMate and the command line; not nearly enough when you’re building prototypes of physical goods. Hardware startups need equipment and space, even if they’re sending prototype parts to be made elsewhere. TechShop and others can help satisfy this need, but their equipment isn’t suited or within tolerance for most later-stage hardware prototypes.

Investor Expectations

Demo Day for YC is an adrenaline-fueled day with rapid-fire pitches to the who’s-who of the investment community. When investors come to the event, they expect widespread traction, minimal burn, continuous builds, lots of metrics, and other web startup buzz-words. Sorry folks, hardware has a few differences. Mileage may vary.

Community Focus

As much as I would love YC and other programs to build communities around hardware folks, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Seed accelerators will remain software and web-service centric. This means hardware companies take a backseat and programs/events/meetings/expertise and pretty much everything else is catered around software.

So if you’re a hardware startup looking for some early stage help, I strongly suggest avoiding Y Combinator and the other seed accelerators and going with like-minded experts. In case you don’t them: Lemnos Labs in the Bay Area, HAXLR8R in China and of course us at Bolt in Boston.

Startups! Stop! Don’t hire a design firm!

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Ben Einstein

I have all the respect in the world for product design consulting companies (I even used to run one). For those of you that aren’t product designers, companies like IDEO and Frog and Continuum charge clients on an hourly or project basis for assistance with developing a concept into a physical product. It is an extremely common practice for major, brand-name product companies to hire these kinds of consultancies to shape their products and business models. They help deliver better products through a world-class user experience that’s been carefully thought out. For a price.

When it comes to first-time hardware entrepreneurs building their first product, design consultancies should be avoided like the plague. Here’s why:

Reason 1: Know Your Users

Startups building hardware should think of themselves less as builders of hardware and more as curators of user problems. This a very common methodology in the web startup space and it holds true (maybe even more so) for hardware teams. Your company survives infancy only if your users love your product. Know your users. By hiring an outside firm to design your user experience, you’re missing out on those key early user conversations.

Reason 2: Know Your Product

Every tiny decision you make to a product in the early design stages will usually have drastic effects down the road. This so-called “long shadow” effect can cause significant problems with things like manfuacturing and technical support if it’s not intimately understood. As founders, you should be responsible for understanding as much as possible about your product so you can predict side effects and learn from your experience. Offloading this process to experts means you won’t be able to learn from it with your next product, even though it may save you one or two headaches early on. Know your product better than anyone else on the planet.

Reason 3: Cold Hard Cash

Hiring a design firm is plain old expensive. Hourly rates are typically between $150 and $500 depending on what kind of work is being done. It’s not uncommon for functional prototypes to cost $500K for a full development cycle. Even if you’re fresh off an oversubscribed Series A this is a lot of cash for the service being provided. Would cutting-edge web startups would be successful if they hired a muli-million dollar software engineering consulting company to build their first product?

Reason 4: Be Nimble

Without question, the primary reason two people in a garage can eventually overtake billion dollar behemoths is agility. Startups are able to maneuver around just about anything if they focus on the things that really matter. Timing is critical and anything that gets in the way of warp speed will likely hurt you in the long run. Involving another group of people, politics, profit margins and delays can easily destroy your ability to be nimble.

The allure of having experts design your product is strong. Resist! Own your product and your business will grow more reliability with you in control.

The Value of US Manufacturing and Why It’s Not Coming Back

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Ben Einstein

Bolt helps teams build physical products. Manufacturing is a big part of what we provide assistance with, so you can imagine we are asked a deluge of questions about manufacturing on a daily basis. One of the most common is “can we make X part here in the US?” The answer is always yes, but at least with products we typically work with, it rarely makes sense. Here’s why.

The Value of US Manufacturing

Before getting into why we should continue making things overseas, it’s important to understand manufacturing in the US. Most people believe that sometime between Henry Ford’s Model T and the production of Apple’s first iPhone, we just shipped off all of our manufacturing jobs to mainland China. Not only do we still have big manufacturing industries, we actually still manufacture more good than any other country in the world (based on value). But the kinds of manufacturing we do is very different than what most people think of when the image of a factory pops up.

Since the founding of this country, we’ve been innovators. From the start of the American Industrial Revolution through most of the 20th century, we created much of the world’s manufacturing technology. We had to. You couldn’t develop products without developing the manufacturing processes to enable you to build them at any kind of significant scale. So it’s only natural that we did most of the world’s manufacturing.

But as our focus on innovation began to shift away from creating consumer goods (to aerospace, biotech, computers and finance), we stopped innovating with manufacturing of these consumer goods. We got really good at developing products (and having them manufactured elsewhere). And we became great at manufacturing high-tech products. When you need to build a faster jet engine or a stronger hip replacement, you have to also invent the manufacturing process. But when it comes to consumer goods, manufacturing has become commoditized.

And Why It’s Not Coming Back

Most people think that we make things in Asia because it’s cheaper. They believe any company looking to manufacturing something goes straight to Shenzhen or Hong Kong because labor costs so much lower. Price is definitely a factor, but it’s rarely the driver of factory selection.

One of the key drivers of building any product is parts. Consumer products that we typically work with have a few kinds of components: a PCB (circuit board), a handful of electrical components, usually a few pieces of injection molded plastic, sometimes a piece of metal or two, and maybe a few screws to hold everything together. Getting all of these pieces to the factory at the right time in the right quantity, verified for quality and at the price you expect/need is overwhelmingly complex for first-time hardware entrepreneurs. It seems trivial but often winds up providing a major point of failure for startups. Successful manufacturing is nearly impossible without successful supply chain management.

Because places like Hong Kong and Shenzhen produce so many consumer goods (particularity electronics), they have developed something critical for manufacturing success: supply chain elasticity. SCE means that if there’s a problem with a resistor I ordered, I can get 100K new ones extremely quickly from someone else. If my mold tool develops a cooling issue, there are literally hundreds of people that can fix the problem in a few mile radius of the factory. This means I can keep the factory running and make my shipping deadline. It can easily be the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.

It’s Good!

Supply Chain Elasticity is not something the US will ever be able to compete with and so we won’t be making the world’s iPhones anytime soon. But this is okay. We continue create overwhelming value. We still design and develop the world’s best products. We still manufacture the really interesting ones, and we still have innovation sewn into our DNA. I’ll take that over making millions of pieces of plastic any day.

The 3D Printer “Revolution”

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Ben Einstein

The tides are shifting. People are starting to make things again. Maybe it’s from the democratization of capital (most notably from crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter). Or maybe it’s the democratization of tools (Arduino and SparkFun, to name a few). Or possibly from the inherent limitations of a digital-only interfaces that have made all our thumbs pretty tired these last few years. But one thing is for sure: we’re in the midst of a movement.

Conveniently, this movement has already been given a name: the Maker Movement. I’m a vehement supporter of this movement. I hope it continues to sweep the world by storm and convince kids to beg their parents for soldering irons and microcontrollers for their birthdays. There’s simply no substitute for the kinds of learning encouraged by assembling atoms. Once you watch someone weld two pieces of metal together for the first time, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

In every article/conversation/presentation about this movement, the term “3D printer” is inevitably mentioned. And by mentioned, I mean placed on a pedestal as the single piece of breakthrough technology that is propping up this movement. Everyone from consumers to expert engineers to press throw around words like “amazing,” “spectacular,” “futuristic,” and of course “revolutionary.” I think recent advances in digital fabrication are truly important for proliferating the Maker Movement, but I hope to quell some of the hype surrounding 3D printers and focus on what really matters: the impact these tools have on education and business.

First of all, 3D printers are not new. They’ve been commercially available for about 30 years and prototypes have been functional in various labs for even longer. The technology hasn’t fundamentally changed over these years, other than some major advances in polymer technology and accuracy/precision. By the early 2000s, these advances led to printable, functional parts that looked nearly identical to injection molded plastic. Unfortunately, these machines were extremely expensive and purchased by only the wealthiest of design firms and OEMs, so most people didn’t even know they existed.

There are a host of 3D printing technologies, but the two most common types are FDM (fused deposition modeling) and SLA (stereolithography apparatus). SLA is straight out of Star Trek: laser beams directed by mirrors are used to cure photosensitive polymer. SLA machines are expensive, finicky and still relatively rare. FDM on the other hand, is the technology that powers pretty much every “consumer” 3D printer out there. From $1,200 MakerBots to $40,000 Dimensions. They build up parts by heating ABS-like plastic and spraying it down through a tiny nozzle like an inkjet printer, layer by layer.

These technologies are crucial to maintaining the breakneck pace of innovation. 3D printers are one of several key tools that enable design and development of physical prototypes an order of magnitude faster/cheaper/better than just a decade or two ago. However, the idea that everyone will soon have an FDM printer in their kitchen to print out a quick dinner or a replacement car part is simply ludicrous. I could drone on about cost, quality, durability, ease-of-use, and a dozen other reasons why this isn’t in the cards, but none of this matters.

3D printers are amazing, just not for the reasons people usually point to. It’s not about materials or manufacturing or speed. These things are helpful, but not revolutionary. It’s all about inspiration. More than any other accessible tool I’m aware of, 3D printers “wow” young and old minds alike. They spark creativity. They convince kids to tinker and explore. They let imaginations run wild. They are right now inspiring a new generation of engineers and designers and will create fields that don’t yet exist.

So we are most definitely in the midst of 3D printer revolution, but to borrow from one of my favorite films, it’s a revolution of the mind.

Build More Prototypes

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Ben Einstein

I may be a bit biased because I’m most happy in front of a Bridgeport with a face full of metal chips, but hardware startups should take one giant cue from web startups: prototype more sooner (homage to Brad Feld and David Cohen).

I’ve heard countless war stories from (now successful) hardware entrepreneurs of rampant feature creep, horribly difficult-to-assemble products, millions of venture dollars sunken into scrapped tooling, and most often: products that simply fail to move off store shelves. We spend so much time worrying. Worrying about that draft angle on the mold tool. Worrying about that microcontroller that keeps overheating. Worrying about impressing buyers at retail stores. Worrying about costs. Oh the costs! But far too often hardware startups fail to worry about the most important thing: am I building a product that people will love.

Most investors/engineers/buyers/CMs/designers/bloggers will say “they just know” great product. I’ve even been known to mutter it on occasion. But the truth is, we’re just making educated guesses. I can play with a product for a few hours and decide if I want to keep playing with it or even buy one. “Just knowing” great product is an illusion. It’s the engineering equivalent of 20/20 hindsight. What makes a truly revolutionary product is foresight. It’s seeing a dozen prototype models and being able to pick out the perfect one that will be irresistible to millions. After all, it’s only the products that quietly weave themselves into every day life that are truly great.

A later-stage foam model of Dyson’s Airblade hand drier. Dyson is known for exquisite designs born from copious prototyping.

Building these types of products is hard. Really, really hard. Some say it takes luck. Some say it takes vision. Some say it takes fantastic dedication or a great team. It takes all of these things. But more importantly, hardware entrepreneurs need to master setting aside their perfectionism. I suggest teams build weekly prototypes. They don’t have to be full revisions. A foam model of a tiny feature by itself is more than enough, but you should find yourself in a shop at least once a week.

These prototypes become invaluable to the product development process. Give prototype models out to users or even random people around town. “Does this handle feel right to you?” Carry prototypes around in your pocket. Give them to “fringe customers” that aren’t in the sweet spot of your market’s bell-curve. You’ll be amazed at how effective this kind of thinking can be towards quelling some of that worry. Doing it more and more often will only hone your critical thinking about how features and products will be viewed by customers. Prototyping more will save you countless dollars and years of development time. Even though spending a day per week in the shop will seemingly slow the development process down, your first hit product will come much sooner.

Note: many may recognize my pedaling of Eric Reis’ Lean Startup methodology. Readers should be aware that the ‘lean’ actually comes from the manufacturing world and our beloved Taiichi Ohno. So to all you skeptics out there: hardware can be lean too!

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