Have you ever had an idea for a physical product that you just knew had the potential to change the world? Maybe it was something you dreamt up in your garage or a solution to a problem you encountered in your daily life. Whatever it was, you knew it was a winner. If only you can turn that idea into something... Well, you are not alone!

Countless entrepreneurs and innovators have stood exactly where you stand filled with passion and drive, but unsure of where to begin, and that's where "The Builder Circle" comes in. My name is Sera Evcimen, and I will be your host as we explore the exciting and complex world of physical product development.



  Welcome to the Builder Circle and welcome to our first ever episode. So this is going to be the pilot and to be very honest with you, I've recorded this multiple times and it never really quite felt right because  I really wanna do a good job of introducing this podcast because it not only means a lot to me and it's truly been a labor of love and passion, but also I really wanna make sure that it reaches the right audience and gets people excited because it's a podcast here to truly help anyone that's trying to turn an idea into a Into a physical system or physical something.

It could be, it could range from being a chair to a very complex electromechanical system. Really anything that people set out to do and or audacious enough to dream to do. 

Okay. I'm going to just go through questions I would ask. Any person that would be starting a podcast and answer them myself.

So question number one, what inspired you to start this podcast?  So for me, I've worked in startups my entire career at this point, and I absolutely loved it. , it's been such an incredible journey and I've learned a lot. I've worked with incredible people. I've worked on really cool technologies like CubeSats and  ion thrusters and even fusion energy.

And that all led me to want to help other entrepreneurs because I just saw so much that didn't work, or I struggled with so much. I failed so many times where I was like, oh man. If there was someone that told me to do it this way, that would've saved me weeks and a lot of heartache. So I decided to  become a mentor.

I was I was asked to become a mentor for Techstars and I got to work with a lot of crazy, incredible entrepreneurs that are trying to really solve huge problems. And I was lucky enough to become a mentor in residence for the Techstars Paris program, which is actually very much sustainability climate tech which personally is something I'm very keen on working on.

And. To put my  brain energy towards, so I got to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and see a lot of the problems that they were facing and a lot of issues that were coming about when they were trying to build their physical systems and  as I wrote email after email, Going into meetings after meetings, I just started picking up on patterns.

I was just like, man, like really people are not getting this right. So I decided to come on here and talk to my little microphone and look into my LinkedIn connections and meet a bunch of people and say, Hey. You know a lot about this thing. I wish you were next to me when I was talking to contract manufacturers.

I wish you were next to me when I was doing my first iteration on program management on how to even scope this innovation product. So I just gathered people that I knew more than me in the niche space that they were in, and I knew enough to ask them the right . Questions. Okay, so that was a very long-winded answer to that question. Second, what makes this podcast unique? There's a ton of podcasts out there.

There's a lot of podcasts that are working on product development stuff. And what this podcast is going to be different is that I intend to make the content incredibly consumable in a very easy way where.

All of the episodes are going to end with A TL;DL, which is too long, didn't listen. Episodes are about 50 minutes long. I totally understand how entrepreneurship life is. I understand how hectic an engineer's life can be, or even someone that has a great idea, but also has a full-time job that they can't just.

Completely divert their entire time into doing this.  So the TLD L is going to have all key takeaways, important lessons learned, important pieces of information that were given in the episode, , After that, if it's intriguing enough or you wanna learn more of the details on how we got to those key takeaways, you can go right back to the top and listen from the beginning at any point in time.

In contrast to a lot of other podcasts, a lot of podcasts  talk about success stories. Whereas this podcast, although there will be success stories and things that work, we're also gonna really dive into  things that haven't. How did people fail?

How did they get themselves out of it? What actual steps did they follow? How did they think about things? That's where we're going to dive into. And what I intend for it to be is actionable. So getting out of the podcast, the most ideal scenario would be someone being like, I know exactly what I need to do next, or I know exactly who to call because I don't know what I'm doing.

And. What listeners should expect from the podcast is we're gonna have case study episodes where I talk to founders we're going to really just learn about what their ethos was into. Going into product development, how they did all of their decision making, what worked, what didn't, how did they pivot, what did the pivot cost them, et cetera.

Tho those are gonna be the case study episodes. And then, and one of the episodes that I will be releasing is a case study episode with Bridget Hunter Jones. So you should definitely listen to that. And then we're going to have expert discussion episodes where I have someone that is an expert in a field like Scott Miller.

He's  a veteran of manufacturing and production. He knows exactly how to set up a supply chain. And get the production rolling. And I'm gonna be talking  to him about that. And then we're going to also have specialty episodes, which are gonna be slightly shorter, but Tangentially related to hardware.

So it's not gonna be like hardy har hardware development. Let's talk about gears and actuators. It's going to be more like technical pitching. How do you tell your story? If your product and your technology is really complex, how do you get that out there? 

 I do intend for the podcast to evolve over time.  Potentially expand its scope from just being hardware to diving into some software or at least integrated system products.

I intend for the podcast to evolve in the best way that it can, and for me, how I define the best way that it can is listener engagement. I want the listeners to feel that they're a part of the podcast strategy because at the end of the day, the podcast should help you and If you are someone that really requires help and this is the field that you require help in, whether it's something that like related to development, you have a great idea.

You don't know how to validate it. You really just want to, you really wanna build a company. You really wanna build a product. You already have a really good problem you wanna solve, and you feel like you have the solution. 

It's really for that kind of group of people. I really want you  to be able to comment or review the podcast and give me feedback give me feedback and say, Hey, like I really wanted to get an answer to this question. I didn't get that from this episode or, You haven't covered this topic, and it's a pretty big pain point for me right now.

These will be so incredibly valuable in determining the trajectory of the podcast. What I will do is I will keep a tally of all these questions. I will try to group them up so that I can find people that can answer strategically and systematically ones that. Correlate with each other. And then I'll go into my network, I'll ask around and I'll find someone that would be able to give the best answers I might have.

My own I might have thoughts of my own that I always add into. The T L D L. You'll also see through the episodes that I am an active participant in them. It's and o oftentimes other podcasts. There's  a very clear interviewer and interviewee. But this podcast is truly just a collaborative discussion amongst, me and my guests.

To say a quick,  few closing remarks. I am very proud of this podcast. I am very grateful for the amount of support and encouragement that I have been exposed to by my own support network, but also the people that have participated in this podcast, so the guests that you'll see  in the episodes ahead are truly just wonderful people  

 The podcast was something that really came about incredibly organically and had a snowball effect of its own. I was just having a Zoom call with, , prowl Studio,  Lauren and Bailey, and the conversation was just so invigorating that I was like, Man, I wish this was a podcast. And they were like, yeah, I know it'd be so great.

And after that, I just continued having these great conversations on Zoom and  the light bulb moment kept lighting up.  So I just asked these people, I was like, Hey, would you be on a podcast episode to talk about this topic? And all I got was resounding yeses, so I cannot thank enough. Every single person that's been a guest on this season of the Builder Circle.

And I am incredibly grateful for those who are about to embark on the Builder Circle Podcast and actually give it a chance and listen and hopefully learn and get a lot out of it because. The way that I see it, the future of hardware starts here, and I want people to keep building, keep innovating, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the physical world.

 I really hope that this podcast acts as a catalyst to that. Thank you so much, and I really hope you enjoy the episodes. 

 This podcast is presented to you by Pratik, a startup advising and coaching company that is geared to help hardware entrepreneurs get their ideas from a napkin sketch into a lab and out into the world. 

The music at the beginning and the end of this episode was brought to you by my dear friends and incredible musicians, Tom Stoke and Joel Caffey. Thank you so much for listening.