Mentoring Hardware Product Startups

Ever wondered what are the possible challenges one is likely to encounter while mentoring hardware startups? What more could be done to improve the startup ecosystem of India?

–By Srinivasa Moorthy

I have been working with three startups who have an excellent product idea and have good potential. I am mentoring them in their development and engineering. All the three startups are in the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage (the idea is proved and work very well). I am going to share the challenges that I have seen so far in this multipart series and this is the first installment!

Most of the promotors miss that a hardware-based product actually is

Product = Hardware+Firmware+Software.

I am seeing they don’t envisage all three together and have taken decisions which have resulted in wastage or missed deadlines and product features

1. Selling standalone hardware will not bring revenue. It is the connected software that brings in revenue. Hardware is now becoming more a vehicle for the revenue. Corollary HW cost has to be minimal to avoid losses!
2. Ecosystem for HW development still doesn’t exist. Creating a product from an idea or research work needs different skill which is not available. I have seen simple aluminum/sheet metal enclosures are a challenge. Issues like painting, metal finishing and more than all these if you want 5000 numbers delivery with the desired quality is a challenge.
3. C Programmers are a rare commodity and Embedded C programmers are extinct species. This is killing HW projects. Even freshers have no programming knowledge.
4. Product Verification & Validation and Final product testing is never in the plan (remember 737Max fiasco!) and leads to multiple revisions of releases. Basic Testing and test methodologies are not known.
5. If the product has instrumentation situation becomes scary as most designers don’t know the basics of measurement, calibration and Gage R&R ( to produce products with consistent accuracy and precision). I see this with almost all IoT products!
6. Design of the product for manufacturing is a big issue. Don’t blame the contract manufacturers. Basic component selection is a big issue. This particular issue reminds me of Murphy’s law ” Any new product should have 2 parts which are obsolete, 2 parts which have long lead time and 2 parts which are under development”.

This time I decided that rather than whining I should do something. Along with my friends, I am now testing a workflow software (cloud-based) which provides guidelines and checklists so that designers can create projects under guided environment and don’t miss any steps. Let me come back to with more details when the system is fully ready. Also, let me know what features you would like to see in the work by leaving your thoughts in the comment section.