โ€ŠThe opinions and information shared on this podcast are for informational purposes only. We always recommend that you seek professional advice before taking any action related to your business or personal ventures. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you enjoy the episode. On today's episode, we have Bridget Hunter Jones from Impact Biosystems, and her product is a very integrated hardware product. So we're going to be talking about a lot of very important topics with her when it comes to her ethos and her approach, , into hardware development. More specifically, we're going to start from how she went about defining the problem and understanding and feeling confident that it was a problem that was worth solving and the solution she had was the right solution to solve the problem. And then we're going to dive into her, , perspective on make or buy decisions, insourcing and outsourcing, specifically industrial design, and then other pieces of engineering also talk through how to negotiate with vendors and suppliers from a low leverage position and how she handled it. And we'll also talk about working with overseas vendors and how to engage those conversations, find the right supplier, get there, and, , making sure that you optimize for, high quality deliverables. We'll get into our fun segment where Bridget chose to share a hardware hack which will be, really interesting around wiring and harnessing. And then finally we'll dive into the biggest failures that you, that she learned the most lessons from in terms of, , whether it's engineering, design, industrial design, production. And as always, we will have the TL DL at the end. We'll, I will summarize the key takeaways, actionable items that we discussed, and when you have more time, you can pop right back in and listen to the whole episode. I really hope you enjoy it. Episode Intro All right. Hello. Welcome to the Builder Circle. Today I have Bridget Hunter Jones from Impact Biosystems. Bridget, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you and talk about all the things that are related to building a physical product. Of course. Thank you so much for having me. , so Bridget, just so our listeners know who you are and what Impact Biosystems is, could you kind of give a quick rundown of your background and how you kind of, fell into the entrepreneurship world and went into impact Biosystems? Absolutely. So I started my journey at MIT, specialized in mechanical engineering, always had kind of a business interest in in my bones, and ended up really enjoying product development designed for manufacturing. and ended up going straight into consumer products after, after school. So I worked at Sonos, the speaker company for six years, started on the engineering team and then got pulled over to the product creation team to lead accessories for the company. And just got an incredible experience there of what it took to make a hardware product, both from the product development side as well as the manufacturing side. Many, many trips overseas, tour manufacturing in China. And then I, I always had the name and the brand to stand behind and was ready for that next big challenge of having to build that up from scratch. And so my two co-founders ended up coming up with this incredible sensing system that had an amazing application in the health and fitness space, which was right at my alley and I just, I couldn't turn it down. And ended up joining the two of them as well as another hope on our ours. And we were off to the races of building Impact Biosystems. That's such an inspiring story specifically. Because I feel like once you go into the physical product realm in a big company and you have that kind of leverage and backing and then going into the trenches all by yourself in a completely kind of new way, that's a very scary undertaking. And I, I respect you a lot for going for it. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's definitely a big leap. Lots of factors to weigh, but I would say I'm always up for a new challenge and, and this was, you know, I had always thought about, you know, do I go to business school? And I keep telling myself every day, even on the tough days, you know, this is real life business school, , you're learning it on the job. totally. It's, , it's gaining street smarts every day. I'm assuming. Mm-hmm. ImpactBioSystems Intro So could you talk a little bit more about the product that impact Bi Biosystems is working on? And then I wanna ask you about how you felt like it was a good problem to be solving and how you felt confident that it was worth solving. Yeah. So three years prior to me coming over and, and starting the company, my two co-founders were approached by a professional athlete here in the Boston area who challenged them to think about why are we still measuring muscle stiffness with our hands and subjective inputs, and why can't we have, you know, a robot or an actual device objectively measuring these changes in your muscle properties? Because we know that these impact injuries, that they help guide better performance recovery and the PT trainer, massage therapy chiropractor spaces is enormous and people really do. you know, lean into using hands and touch to, to track these things, but why can't we do it with an actual objective measurement? So that's why we got really excited about this problem and trying to solve it, is we thought that this could have a huge impact on both injury prevention mitigation, as well as allowing people to continue to be active and perform and live active healthy lifestyles without the risk of overdoing it and overexerting. So we thought of this tool as a kind of both a readiness tracker of are you good to go? Do you need to focus more recovery work or, or stretching or mobility here? Is there a strength issue? And having objective data to do that you know, would unlock a whole new way of, of, of tracking, tracking these things. And so that's how, how our original idea started and then, you know, how that's developed and rolled out has, has pretty much stayed true to that. And, and we're still. It's definitely in the very early phases of proving this out and getting it into the hands of the right people and making sure that, you know, the human body is, is the, the place that we land with this. But it's it's been an incredible journey. I completely agree. And all of the things that you were saying that inspired the, the product make a lot of sense, especially because I feel like a lot of people are not aware, but globally there's a mobility problem even if you're an athlete or you're someone that's really active what happens through either a hyper exertion or just improper understanding around muscle groups and how you work them it could really cause some long-lasting effects and people are not quite aware of that. And I feel like your product will really not only help people to be able to kind of diagnose early on. and then just work on it and be better in the long term. So I, I, I'm, I'm a big fan of your product. It also looks gorgeous. , I, I was looking at your website and it's stunning. So for people who are athletes or who are active, definitely check out Impact Biosystems. Super interesting product there. So diving into when you kind of first started and you knew that this was a problem, you knew you had a really good solution in hand, how did you do, I guess, some level of market validation enough to kind of get into the r and d and design phase being like, yeah, you know what, we've talked to so many people, or like, we've done this research and we feel really good about this product. What were the steps that you followed to do that? Market Research Deep Dive I would say, yeah, all three of those. So it was research into the market and that, you know, 2019 was right when the Thera Bodies, the whoop, the Hyper Ice, those were all just starting to really boom in popularity. And we saw the numbers of what these percussive massage tools were starting to sell out and the revenue numbers that they were, that they were making. Mm-hmm. And so we leaned in on that. And then I would say that was kind of our first check mark. And then we spoke with a bunch of people that are using these tools and said, you know, what's missing? Is there a need to have better precision personalization and guidance with these tools? And there was, everyone came to us and said, you know, I've bought one of these massage guns, but I just hammer away on the pain point. I don't actually know if what I'm doing is working. And that we kept hearing that over and over again and. We, we created what we, this we called the, the Pac sensor Muscle scanner, to really fill that void of precision personalized recovery, of not only taking in, you know, where you have pain or what your goals are, but using the objective data that imbalances the asymmetries in your body to better guide how you're prepping and how you're recovering for your, for your workouts. And then the last piece would be the, the fundraising. So that was kind of our last, you know, check mark of do, do people wanna invest in this? Because you can have a great idea and you can really see an opportunity in the market, but unless you're able to really execute on it and do it, it's gonna be really tough. So we actually raised and if you, so boots, strapping a little different, right? If you can cobble together some funds initially and, and move forward, then you don't need this last check mark. You can say, you know, we're just gonna try something out on our own and, and then go do tests and, and. Then raise a larger round. We actually raised a round first, and that was partly to see that if people were interested, help see that, you know, we have better chances on the next round, for example, to, to be able to rate more funds. As we know, hardware is very expensive, always takes twice as much, or 10 times as much, and 10 times as much time to actually complete. And so, we ended up raising a pre round early on to really get input from potential investors on is this market something that is growing, that's getting invested in and something that we believe that could continue to raise money in the future That is such an excellent point and I never, I guess I never really thought about it that way, using the due diligence of investors as a form of validation. Whi which makes sense. And will continue to be it, it won't be the last time that you'll do that, right? You'll have to continuously. Absolutely. And I mean, I guess it's like a little bit of a tricky game because investors are sometimes, I mean, some of them are great, but oftentimes they will always try to convince you that your idea is not good enough so that they can get a better deal. And so it's like, it's a tricky game, but with the, with the right with the right partners, at least you'll definitely get some good data. And I feel like it, you, you have to be a pretty thick skin person to be able to kind of filter through the noise. But that's really, that's an excellent point. I, I never really thought about it that way. Yeah. And you'll get a lot of input as well on what your biggest hurdles will be, which are gonna it that list from external folks obviously is not like your ground truth, like you know, your product or your idea or what's going on better than anyone else. But some of those early conversations are when I started realizing our biggest challenge will be how we present this. it will be how we make this digestible from a team of engineers to the average consumer. And day one, we highlighted that and we are still battling through that. So it's very interesting to think about and, and get these conversations going really early with these really brilliant people to, to start really understanding what lies ahead and what will be the hurdles. Yes, definitely. And I think especially early on, what serves a company best is if they're good storytellers and oftentimes very deeply technical. People are so in the trenches, so nose deep into the technology that it could be really difficult to get it to a point where you are describing the product in a comprehendible way for like the mass audience. And not that a lot of the investors, I think in the ecosystem of Boston for example, are very technical, but still, this is such a niche thing that you need to be able to explain the jargon and you really need to be able to take them on that journey and have them bought in. And that's, that's a whole, whole thing of itself. So, totally agreed. So going right into the kind of nitty gritty of physical product development and kind of what you've went through both with Sonos and your current company. When you are deciding a make or buy decision or insourcing outsourcing , how do you go about that decision and what have you learned through your experience on how to tackle that in a proper way? Make or Buy Decision Yeah. It was really, yeah, really challenging early on to figure out what the best path is. I would say before we officially. maybe closed the round and saw how much and how much runway and what we'd be doing. We were pretty convinced that doing this really quickly and with a team that was already together, which looked like hiring a engineering or design firm, was the way to go. Mm As soon as we started chatting with these folks and started to do a bit of development on our side, we realized that this was something we would have to do, majority of the engineering in-house because it hadn't been, this was nothing else like this out there. And yes, there are some brilliant engineering teams that are already put together in these firms, but the ability to stay very connected with what we're doing on the research. Felt like that would be, would slow end up slowing us down in the long term. So we ended up pulling all the engineering in-house, hiring a mechanical engineering team, systems engineer, and then outsourcing little bits that we didn't have the expertise for at the time. So industrial design was a big one. Ux, the app development, all things that we outsourced early on. But again, we ran into that mismatch in being able to adjust and react to our learnings on either the research side or the business side. To be able to roll that. Into the development with an external firm, if you have everything in house, you can move so much quicker. It's just a, typically the mindset is, is just easier to adapt, react, pivot. Whereas if it's a larger firm, you know, they've gotta adjust the SOW (statement/scope of work), they've gotta rescope the project. They might have to bring in new people and it just becomes a real burden. So we, we've done both. We, I would say we started off kind of doing half and half, and then today we are, you know, fully developing it in-house. So that's both the software and the hardware side. All the hardware is completely custom as well, which makes it really challenging to, again, kind of leverage external teams that have experience in, in building something very similar. And so doing that in-house allowed us to, to change things on the fly much much faster. Yeah. That's something I feel like a lot of startups fall into early, early stage because developing an internal team to do all of those things is also incredibly expensive. You have to train people. You need to You need to establish teams in a quite a mindful way because oftentimes the way that I describe work in a startup, especially when it's a product that doesn't exist or you can't really draw an example from the industry is there is actually a lot that needs to get done, but it's kind of disorganized in this like massive pile in front of you. And so it's really hard to kind of categorize and say, okay, like this bucket of work needs a mechanical engineer. This bucket of work needs an electrical. You actually kind of learn through the process what kinds of engineers you need, and so it it, it becomes quite challenging and that's why a lot of startups are like, oh, we'll just work with a firm that has done this before, and has much more resources that they can plug and play. They don't ha they can use like 25% of this person's time. And that whereas when you're a startup, you're nimble, you have very little cash flow, so you're trying to make sure that if you have someone, you utilize them and. So that makes it really challenging. But you're so right, because at the very early stages of discovery and r and d, you learn so much and the things that you knew yesterday are no longer relevant and you need to be able to switch quickly. And you mentioned s o w for those that don't know, that means scope of work. And with working with external firms, you have to have a pretty robust and bulletproof scope of work. And any type of change to that is going to probably come at an extra cost and hours of negotiating. And oftentimes you basically surrender a little bit of creative control, even on your product, even if their communication is excellent. I feel like there's always some level of discrepancy between what you have in-house and what you communicate with external people. And there's, I'll just mention one other piece of it. The it especially really early on in the ideation and, and discovery phase, having a team that has many different people and I, and perspectives to bounce those ideas off of is, is amazing. So like our really early industrial design work, if we had done it with an individual contractor or hired someone versus working with an agency, I, I think would've definitely changed our, our outcome. The fact that this group of. Amazing designers had, you know, 20 people that they could put different sketches up and, and, and move ideas. Is, is kind of why I think we got to the point, the beautiful design that we have today is because they were able to really look at all the different aspects and all the different important pieces that they shot, thought, thought that we should highlight with the, with the design and shape of this of this tool. And same with the, the UX as well. And so there's kind of maybe a model where you do that team agency upfront discovery work and then maybe do, you know, hiring someone to, to keep that going. Or maybe a one person consultant to keep that going. But a, a, a mix of the two can maybe be a better outcome for some creative. Yeah, I actually for one of the episodes I have PROWL Studio, which is a industrial design studio, and I was talking to them to just learn as a mechanical engineer how to involve industrial designers better in a process. And they were saying essentially what you said of just like early on because especially with consumer products like yourself like impact biosystems, it's, it's really important what it looks like so that the technology doesn't suffer. Poor looking thing, because , your system is very mechanical and electrical and it, it's pretty complex. And I could totally make that and it'll look like a, cement drilling device, and no one will use it. So industrial design is really important. And that's a great point because I feel like maybe a middle ground is to hire a industrial designer early on and have them manage that external partner, but have the scope be split so that you're not overspending. But also keeping that institutional knowledge. Because I think you mentioned like early on there's so much development, so much that's happening so much you're learning that if you have an external partner that's doing it, they might document it well and give it to you, but that living in the company is also just so valuable. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you can create those internal structures, right? Where you're, you know, you work with your engineers to say, what is that internal box that we need to fit? Fit this around, okay, here's the industrial design team. What 11 different shapes can you fit around this that fulfill the requirements of handheld? easy to, to use and hold you know, easy to charge, things like that. And then you can use that work. Obviously it'll change, it'll get bigger. I won't say it'll get smaller, it'll never get smaller , but you know, and you'll have to keep adapting. But then that work is a lot easier to manage with an individual versus some of that upfront work of really like, what are these different shapes can really be beneficial to have many minds thinking through. definitely. So you have, I'm, I'm, I'm very much assuming this, but please correct me if I'm wrong with Impact Biosystems all of your raw materials and also just like the builders assembly part of it, I'm sure that you've had to deal with a lot of suppliers. So you have such a wealth of experience where you have the, the part of the spectrum where like you're Sonos and you go to a supplier and they basically just welcome you with a red carpet And then going at a, a supplier from a point of lower leverage when it's a company that they haven't heard of. It's, it's, it's not generating revenue yet. They see it as a risk. How have you gone through those conversations and negotiations to get what you wanted and make the supplier happy in some capacity? It's the same. Way you have to pitch which goes back to your storytelling. Again, it's the same way you have to pitch to potential investors. You're pitching to suppliers that to buy into your vision and your mission, and here are the people backing this. Here is the team of experts. Here's how it started. You're selling that whole picture to them to be able to say, this is something worth investing in. Because you're right, I'm, you're not part of a proven organization that will clearly make it, and that will clearly have the volumes that they want to see in the future. Definitely I had, some credibility from my Sonos state. Like I could go to the suppliers and they knew who I was, which made it you know, a little easier. It wasn't just, I was cold reaching out, but then I. Dragon Venture, Scott Miller. Shout out to him to, to help partner with us and, and find other suppliers as well. And he has that credibility and track record. But at the end of the day, you're still, you're still pitching and selling this vision in the same way that you would for fundraising. Yes. And it's so funny because my episode with Scott, we, we touched on this topic as well, and that's exactly what he said. And I actually wanted to make a point because you you got me thinking. It, it, it is really important to be able to get suppliers on your side, on, on your mission, get excited so that they basically make the investment. And some people might be like, what investment? You're paying them, but it's like, no, it's the investment into the risk because this company might not exist. Obviously we think it will and we think it'll thrive and you'll make a lot of money. That's what we're trying to tell you. But there is a risk there's a lot of people that are knocking on contract manufacturers doors and supplier doors that are way less risky. So they don't really have a lot of incentive to to choose you. Oh, totally. It's a huge risk. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I actually have experienced personally working at startups is I spoke with suppliers without co-founders with me. So I had to pitch the company and I had to pitch the mission and I needed to be bought into the mission. So I feel like it's a good place to maybe say that if you have a technical team that is working with suppliers or procurement team that's working with suppliers, make sure that you train them or make sure that your culture is so bulletproof that your mission is well understood, and they have the ability to speak on your behalf because, At the end of the day, a co-founder is spread so thin that they might not be able to go into all the supplier conversations and engineers might need to take it up from a point. And it's super important to have everyone aligned with your mission. Mm-hmm. So, okay, so when you go into the consumer electronics realm and you have all of these kind of injection molded pieces and you have a lot of intricate raw materials and your bill materials is a long list you are always working for cost and timeline and. When doing so right now the, the situation is that Asia is definitely the actor of choice when it comes to cheap, good enough quality items that are listed on your bill of materials. So for those who don't know what bill of materials are, it's basically a list of all of the raw materials and the sub-components that you need to build your product. So you've had a lot of experience working over with overseas vendors and specifically in Asia. First of all, when you are kind of making that decision, how do you make that decision? Is it just cost or are there any other pros to working with overseas vendors? No, I think it's also, I mean, if, if I go back to the fundraising analogy, it's also the relationship. . I haven't taken every check that's come my way when I fundraise. There's some that you can really just tell it's not gonna be a good partnership or a good relationship, or there's just a mismatch and it's just not worth it. If you're really that misaligned early on, it's only gonna get worse. . So I would say a, a huge aspect of it is the personal relationship as well. How you communicate how you build trust together and how you're both really aligned on, on the vision and the mission of what you're trying to do. So yes, cost is a huge factor. Did we choose the lowest cost supplier or c at contract manufacturer for this project? No, we didn't. So when we were shopping around and the quality comes in as well we looked at heavily at the us. This was Hmm early 2021. It wasn't. Very clear that there was an end in sight for the pandemic and travel and getting overseas. So we said, okay, well we could save a lot of money and potential headache if we did this local, or at least close by to, to the us. And for, for those that haven't experienced manufacturing cycle for, it's so essential to be on the ground in any builds. Even for early on development to just make sure that the knowledge transfer of what's important and what's sort of the critical dimensions and connection points. It's really hard to communicate all of that virtually. I think we've gotten a lot better at it, don't get me wrong, but I think, you know, having, having actually boots on the ground is, is so important. And that's why I went over, you know, once a month for three years. But for me it was, I couldn't get there in terms of trust with some of the local suppliers here. It. Was partly tied to cost for sure, because there were these, proprietary line items that I, you know, I would ask like, what is that? And it was like, oh, we can't tell you. It's like, well, come on, like , I can't be having, I can't have like a, a line item on the cogs that I just don't have any idea what it is. If you just, if, if you just wanna call it profit, we can call it profit. No, it's not profit. So it's you. That was a, a tricky point. And at the end of the day, the relationships that both I had with folks in China and, and that Scott had made it just kind of an easy decision for us. And we did definitely struggle through getting our engineer to China, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But you have to weigh all the factors of, of the relationship as well. Definitely. And before we get into the specifics, like starting from the kind of the most important part, how do you most reliably and efficiently find a supplier? Because in, in my mind, it feels like such a black box because there's so much noise on the internet if you were just researching. So what are the best ways to find those people? Yeah, you can you can start by looking at some Proto shops, but I would really just reach out to your, to your friends and your network. Reach out to other startups and see who they've used. Everyone. That's, that's been in harbor, we'll likely have one or two connections and then just start building your list there. You know, weigh the pros and cons. I don't think anyone will, will ever say that they've, they've had a perfect supplier. You always have a lot of things that could be improved upon. And everyone's very vocal about those things. But put, start putting together your list. You know, reach, if you're in a, a tech hub area like Boston or San Francisco, start start finding some folks. Everyone loves to, to chat about their experiences. So either cold reach out, show up at events but start finding people to help make those connections. And because I wouldn't just go research on. Definitely. And also there are a decent amount of trade shows where you can actually go and meet suppliers and oversee suppliers. And sometimes just having that human connection can be more trustworthy and could get you, you could also see some of the stuff that they've done and kind of see if it's a good fit and what their general portfolio looks like. So that's another approach that I've seen taken. Absolutely. Yeah. Just make sure they're startup focused. Because once you start having these conversations and they're like, oh yeah, are you 50,000 units year one? Then you'll be like, oh, okay, maybe this isn't the right supplier. . So And, and the, the, the kind of jargon there is a, a good, good way to ask that quickly is also what is your m o Q, which is the minimum order quantity. And if they give you in the thousands, no well, thousands might not be too, too bad, but sometimes like couple thousands. Okay. Yeah. yeah, tens of thousands, then you're probably running, you should not order tens of thousands of the first design that you make. definitely not a good idea. So, okay, so you were talking about kind of how you sent, sent engineers and worked with suppliers to kind of gain confidence and trust and kind of go along with the, the production of your raw materials. Could you just kind of talk about your experience and if there's any advice there that you could provide? Yeah. I'm hoping things have changed. But we took three tries to get to China. , Oh, as in my engineer, went to, I think he ended his layover, was in Germany. I think the first time it was in Canada. Vancouver, next time was in Germany, and he had to be sent back because he didn't have the proper testing or documentation from the US and had to physically. Covid tested here before the next step. Before the next step, but he made it. And there's, I think, just a small learning there. If you do go through that, I think there's some. insurance that you can get to help cover all of that upfront. So if you do wanna prep for things, kind of travel, like travel being chaotic and really expensive, I think that there's probably some work we could have done to find a good insurance coverage for that. Or a credit card that helps cover that. But we ended up making it there, which was great. Quarantine ended up being 10 days, so it wasn't the three weeks that, you know, everyone had talked about initially. So not horrible. And then he was there for, I think about six weeks after that. So definitely a long trip. But lots of, lots of, of, of progress while he was there. I mean, getting through the, he, he basically put us through the finish line of getting through our, our DBT and P V T builds which are the final two before mass production. So, just the. Starting to really understand like the comments and the concerns that the supplier had became so clear when he got there. Oh, I completely understand why heat's staking this insert was such a tricky problem. Cause from our computers and our design and our engineering and our f e A, you know, it looks very solvable, but it's not until you really see it. And again, that's that trust piece too, because there's definitely a, you wanna push back on your supplier too, of like, Hey, we're here to solve really challenging problems. You might not have done this before, but here's how we think we could do it and do it together. And again, you wanna find a supplier that is definitely up for those challenges, but also grounded in reality of what we can do without being super risky in our processes. And you know, having a high throughput because we're doing something crazy. So there's a middle ground there, but then you wanna push back at times as well. Like, Hey, could we do it this way? Could we lower the temperature There better fixtures that we could use for this? But once he got there, he was like, oh no, this is like really hard. Like, I think we could change, I think we could change the design to have a an insert molded and it would like really help us. And so it's like, oh, okay. Finally he, he was able to really see what they were trying to describe. And that will just always come up. It's like you, you'll be able to try and walk through, you'll take videos to describe these problems, but it was not until you really see it that you can help solve it. Definitely. And I think this runs true to what you said very early on. It's just with manufacturing, you need to be present at some point. Like, , it's okay to, it's okay to trust your supplier and let them run with it for a little bit. But like in the beginning, before they start production, it's really important for them to flow through what they're doing so that things are caught early. And then as they go through the process, if they're running into issues, it's so important to be there and comprehend what's going on. And that I feel like is. Something, sometimes people are like, oh, it's not quite my area of expertise. Because sometimes startups are so nimble, they don't they either have like a single engineer or not a huge team, so they're like, ah, we'll trust the supplier. But even your presence there will have them act in a different way and prioritize your project in a different way. There's like a soft human element to it as well. And the more you ask questions, even if they're not like, this needs to be better, this quality metric needs to be better. Even if you're asking questions, it will make them think more and feel document more. There's just so many ripple effects of kind of being on top of it and. being present in the whole production process. So when you kind of were transferring from E V T to P V T and going into mass production, how did you deal? Did you have like quality or optimization, kind of like lean engineering as a priority at any point? Just to like reduce the time it took to make these or anything like that? Or was it just like, let's just get it done? I would say to some degree that was always in my mind because I. that's my experience is being able to ramp and scale this to be able to produce, a hundred thousand units, you know, a year and then millions of units a year. But the, I had to, I had to scale that back. Because at the end of the day, we're a startup. We have limited runway. We want to get this out. We have to understand that what we're, what we deliver initially is really the minimum Bible product. Like it is not gonna be perfect, and it will not have all the little aspects of the assembly line ironed out and optimized. And that's, , it's okay if your units take three x as long to build for your first batch, then they would I in an ideal setting. And so I had to, I had to adjust for sure on that because it's not the way I was trained to do it. Right. And so you have to really, you as amazing as my real world experience and my corporate experience was, you always have to adjust for being in a startup. It's just not, you don't have the same luxuries, you don't have all the same challenges too. It's very different. That's so true. I guess this is a slight tangent, but I'm very curious when going through the build process, did you have. A target unit cost to at least prove your market viability because you're so, so right In saying that the first few batches are going to be expensive, and they're going to be more expensive than they will in the, in the long term, that is a hundred percent the case because your, your quantities are lower. Your design is not fully optimized because you're running super fast and you don't have as much negotiation power. So all of those, accumulate to making it more expensive. But there's that kind of other side of the coin where if it's too expensive, then your investors are gonna come back and say, this is not a market killer. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I've, I've heard so many startups that come back with, oh, I just wish I didn't sell it at a loss. , you know, I, I, I, I took it to the extreme right of just wanting to get this out there, almost giving it away for free. And that ended up really hurting us. So there's definitely two sides of this. And if you're, if you're building a really expensive consumer product, that's super tricky as well. We ended up, so our target, I think I'm fine with speaking numbers was 80, $80 initially for the cogs of, of the, the scanner. And then we ended up making it, I think today our landed cog. So that's with shipping. And so shipping is actually a lot more expensive than we had budgeted for. But again, that's something that we can talk to and be able to say. It's high now, but we know that it will, you know, hope that it will come down in the future, especially if we we're doing all air shipment now, and when you start looking at rail and, and see it's a lot cheaper. And so, the, the 110 that we have now, That didn't even cause us to increase the price because our price was actually grounded in what else was in the market. As well as, yeah, what, what, what we've heard people will pay for this. So we sell it right now for, for $399. And that was because as we started chatting with PTs and, and chiropractors and and all these kind of experts, professionals, then if I said $299, the next thing they would say is thousand? And so I was like, no, no, no, it's not 299,000. It's just 299. And so it was the, the reaction was like, something like this that delivers so much value should be a lot more expensive. So that's how we kind of started adjusting and, and understanding, you know, what the What the best price was for our initial market. So knowing our cogs, we have plenty of room right to, to do discounts and come down in the future when we do our larger consumer push, which is amazing. And we actually hope to be able to give this away for at cost and then kind of bump up our subscription with the app and that service and, and you know, get this to be really easy initial cost to overcome. So hopefully being able to sell it for $149 and then, and do a larger subscription which is great. And so you get to kind of play, play those games if you're in this space. But you're right that if you do have a really high cogs and you're selling it for just a little bit more than that, then it, it makes it really tricky. Yeah. all of what you said is incredibly impressive, by the way, . It's so true. It's so interesting because when you think of minimum viable product and you're putting these out there, you really want to have a really good user engagement and experience. So it's always kind of catered to like, how can I make this the cheapest? How can I make this? But there, there's, there is a kind of like a social value put on certain things, and if you make it significantly cheaper than that, it almost somehow plays with the trust of the product too. So sometimes kind of adding a premium is really good and increases user engagement. I don't wanna scare consumers that are out there that maybe don't know that this is a reality. The amount of times that have added weight to a product just because of user perception is a very high number. that happens all the time because there's something about picking up something heavy that makes it feel premium. Definitely. , now our iPhones are like bricks, . I feel like that I, I found my very old iPhone in, in a storage closet. and it was so light, and I was like, wow. Like mine now feels so much more technologically advanced for some reason, . So I, I definitely understand what you mean. And as you kind of go through going back to kind of the, the production realm as you go through quality assurance and acceptance how, how did you think of metrics? I have a lot of startups that I mentor kind of ask me like, what's a good yield? And I, I just really wanna get your thoughts on what, what your experience has been and what is a acceptable yield in the early stages. Yeah, I think um, there's thresholds, probably standard thresholds for every build, you know, 70, 80, 90% as you kind of go through the final stages. And yeah, definitely on the quality side, you wanna really ask yourself if this is a, would you ship it every time you get like a, a quality problem or you know, a either cosmetic or a, I mean, if it's an engineering and design issue, obviously I would solve it. But if it's something with an extreme test, a salt fog test that comes back and it's, it's not perfect, you have to always be thinking, will, will, will this stop me from shipping it? Will this, will I cause a delay to our launch because of this? Mm-hmm. answer is yes, you gotta solve it. And you, you've gotta fix that quality issue now because if you don't fix it now, it's gonna to continue, continue going on. If those little blemishes or a slight color mismatch is. is something that you wouldn't ship or that you wouldn't want the first 10,000 units to have then solve it now. But if you're thinking, okay, that's probably something at the, at the tens of thousands of units that we can solve, then I would say you gotta, you know, refocus on what are the big issues. That makes sense. Kind of thinking it almost as a as a trade off of I, is this worth the delay? And is this worth the extra money? Is this worth the extra? Because I mean, if it's, if it's a design problem or a color problem or something like that, there's a whole supply chain that's associated with that. So it's a ton of effort too. I, I really like that. Like, would I ship it? That's, that's great. Yeah. Like if this was in a review if this was at TechCrunch reviewing your product, would you be okay with that? And if you're like, yeah, I'd probably be okay with that, then you'd probably should just ignore it for now. ๐Ÿ“ I, I really like that. 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. Well, with that we're going to go into a quick podcast break for a fun segment. So Bridget is going to talk to us about some hardware hacks. Okay. , the, the two that I had thought of when I was thinking through this one were kind of little tricks for cabling and wire routing. Maybe not the most interesting, but when I learned these and then I bring them to new teams, it's like, oh my God, I wish I thought of that. For flex cables, if you've got a flex cable in your design, cut it out on a piece of paper mark the contacts. That are gonna be on each side and make sure they line up. You wouldn't believe the amount of times that we've gotten to a build and had the contacts on the wrong side had to redo all these cables because the, just transferring the, the, the actual um, drawing to reality, it just like never seems to completely transfer. And there's always like a little mismatch. And what side of the connector on each end has the contacts. interesting. out. Highlight, highlight, you know, what top of one, the bottom on the other. Put it in your, your mockup and make sure they match. It'll save you so much headache for, for your build. And then with length as well as you're routing it through, cuz paper's just really nice and easy. You don't need the I, I, I never thought of that. Yeah. That's so smart. Yep. And then, you know, also see where you wanna stick it to the side walls or the, the PCBs or the other pieces. Put a little sticky tape on there and then, you know, might as well get that in the drawing as well. Or at least get sticky tape ready to have on the build and put on. And then the other one was wire routing. Again, so many times have I've been burned with wrong wire routing lengths at a build. So get some string or get some wire and mark that out. Always give yourself an extra, how do 10, 15 millimeters on the end and practice routing that through. Practice the parts that are gonna be there as you're routing it through. What step of the assembly is that? Can you do it earlier and tuck things away when there's not as many pieces in the way? Super helpful. Again, especially for complicated wire routing. If you have any wifi or r RF challenges in your box and why routing is so critical to that. Do it early to make sure it's consistent. I love that. I will definitely be applying that myself and it's so true. Wire routing does not get the spotlight ever. I really appreciate you bringing that up, And there's great tools, right? We love, we love the wire routing tools in our CAD programs, but it will just never be as perfect as it looks in cad. And so doing in real life is, I completely agree. And also like when you, when you produce something you have it, you have it in cad, you do the wire routing, but then the, the piece comes out to have errors with it because with manufacturing comes errors and imperfections, and now your wire needs to be 10 millimeters longer because that little lip that you created that was going to hold the wire is 10 like a, a, a quarter of a inch away from where it needs to be. And then you run into all kinds of issues. yep. That's so funny because that reminds me , when I was working on CubeSat satellites, I was assembling them in a clean room with my my partner at, in the company. And we had a huge sign in front of us that said, think before you cut. Uh, Because we had a lot of issues when we would be, be like, oh, like this, this length looks fine. And we'd assemble an entire battery stack into the satellite and then it would be like, like a centimeter short and we can't plug it into the port and we cannot. And we had to disassemble the entire thing and reassemble it. And there's a lot of risks associated with that. So it was just that, that is such a good point. I'll do. I love that. Yeah, that's fantastic. And I'll do one more that just came to me. Light leakage. Just get ahead of it. Just get ahead it. , get ahead of your light leakage issues if you have an external facing l e d on your product which so many consumer products do plan for that to be, have a snug gasket or something on it because it'll bleed through your materials. So especially if you have a light product, if you ever, if maybe you're all in on, on black or, or a dark blue now. But if you ever go to a light color in the future, you're gonna have light leakage problems. And even as materials, you know, get thinner typically around that certain area. So prioritize that get ahead of your light leakage issues of making it uniform and not bleeding through. The plastics I bought, I got a product the other day I think it was like a blender or something and it had a horrible light leakage issue. And it might be just because I'm so aware of it now. But I was like, God, it just takes a little piece of foam, but they could have put it here to solve this one. So, Oh, interesting. When you said light leakage, I didn't quite follow what you were talking about, but that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, LEDs bleeding. Like yeah. Yeah. Like a curtain. not, yeah. Yep. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it just, it just takes a, a sheet or of some sort to be Yeah, a gasket in there. Yep, yep. Yeah. And it like, makes it look so, so much higher quality once you have it in there. So much better. Oh, very cool. That, that's awesome. Thank you so much for that Yeah, no I learned so much. And also one last comment that I thought of in terms of wire routing. Always check for your minimum radius of a cable, because oftentimes people design assuming that a cable will you're, you're like used to your headphone cable where you can bend it. So, so. Tightly, but a lot of cables and uh, wires cannot do that. And especially if you're working with like specialty uh, like fiberglass or something, like those aren't gonna bend. So , look at your minimum radius book forward even in like very early on in the design phase, That's a great one. Okay, so, going back, so you, you, you've had a lot of experience with a multitude of products and if, if you're comfortable sharing, I'd love to ask about what kind of the biggest failures that you learned the most from in terms of engineering design, industrial design, production, be it, I'll kind of like set you free and I'll ask follow up questions. If. Yeah, I would say the um, again, coming, coming back to having industry experience and trying to hold everything to those standards definitely make cause for some challenges. So be, be definitely willing to be flexible in terms of what are the most valuable pieces to your product, what are the marketing claims that you really think will be a deal breaker and stay really connected to your marketing team or whoever's doing that research of, of what you can claim. We tried to do a lot really early. So we were actually at first a percussive massage tool with the sensor embedded in it. That was a really challenging problem to solve because there was conflicting requirements for the motor for these two systems. Hmm. and trying to hold both to this very extremely high standard of accuracy, precision for the scanner. And then really high force and intensity for the massager was very challenging. And then we ended up pivoting and the only kind of good thing there was we pivoted really quickly. Like we said, once we made the call, it was like, okay, these are now two separate pieces. We've got the massager and we've got the scanner. We saw a third option of making the scanner so small that it was like an attachment head for the massager. Which is now something that we're actively exploring today. And actually puts us in a much better position to be able to approach other percuss and massage companies and say, Hey, we've learned a lot. We know what we can't do, so don't come to us and say make this into the one motor system. We know that that's not gonna be possible, but we know that we have a path here where we make this smaller modular and able to actually integrate in with your system. And so. Pivot quickly and try not to really over constrain the system. I mean, I've been part of so many discussions back at, at Sonos too, where there was a conflicting requirements for a system and like there, there was no, no solution with all those requirements. And so you have to really start listing out P0's P1's P2's what are your priorities? And you have to be okay with not hitting the, the P2's and knowing that these will are nice to So then now I'm going on a whole other path, but as you're, as you're defining your product it's really nice to have a product requirements document or a PRD and that's where you, as the product owner or the product manager, are defining those must haves. . And those nice to haves really helps the engineering team focus and give them flexibility to push back too on. There's, you know, the system that you've created with the, with the must haves will probably take us six months longer if we can get rid of this, this, and this. We think we can pull it in and those honest discussions where your team is coming back to you with, with real, you know, changes that will come. From, from dropping some requirements are, are really important. And then kind of jumping to the engineering side, it's, it's, it's not enough to just push back and say, I don't wanna do 'em, because they're, they're challenging, right? As if you're in a tiny startup. If you're in a large organization, no one's gonna listen to that. You have to come back with the real reason why it's gonna be more costly. It's gonna add $30 to the BOM (bill of materials), it's gonna add six months, it's gonna add 12 months of product development, or, you know, all these things. And they can be really rough estimates. But speaking in those terms are what I allow the product owner to really understand. Mm, okay. Is it really worth it for that? Or would I rather put Gen one without that and add it in the future and make those calls? And they have to be so willing to be like, okay, that's 20, that's next 20. I'm aware of that. And like, when the system's designed, you can't come back and say, make it cheaper here, here and here. It's like, Nope, I was up front. I told you that if you wanted that and that, you know, it's gonna add. So having those discussions and, and those trade-offs really early on, if you can. Mm-hmm. , definitely. I feel like the, sometimes I, I don't know if you ran into this, but sometimes when you're building something pretty novel, it is difficult to put together requirements at times because it's, you don't know what you don't know. And when you put those requirements together, oftentimes there's this, it, it's, it's again to your point, it might. by accident over constrain because you don't know what the requirement is. Have you ever run into that and have you had a chance to solve it in a creative way? Yeah, I would say it's always a working document like that is never something you, you stamp and you all sign off on and you're like, yep, that's it. It is always changing. There are always conversations happening about what to give and, and what to remove and what to add, and even like big numbers to change on there. Mm-hmm. and so always, yeah, you have to definitely think of it as, as a running document that will have many, many iterations throughout your development cycle. Because you're right, especially early on, that's gonna be pr probably over constrained, probably have too much on it. But the, at least being able to put it down of and aligning on what are we building here and what's important, what are, and tying it again back to the marketing claims, right? What are we trying, what are we trying to articulate to our customer that this is, so even putting on there, it's a handheld device, you know, that was one of our first ones. Or it was a battery powered device. That way we can stop start thinking about it in that way, knowing it's not a hair dryer, it's not always tethered. Or that it's not a mass piece of equipment that's sitting on your desk because it has to align with you know, what the marketing team is about to go sell. Yeah, absolutely. And if it's, if it's a product that's not quite consumer electronics, but like a more complex system your, it's, it's not marketing claims I guess, but it's like performance metrics that you're telling people. It like the same thing essentially. What, what is the main problem you're trying to solve? What is your solution that you're pitching and how close can you stay to that within reason. In, in your engineering, a lot of people, I think would say, oh, how do you actually prioritize? And how do you know that certain requirements either can't be met or you how do you ca categorize that? And that's kind of where r and d comes in, right? Like you, if there's an unknown or a risk that needs to be mitigated, you spin up r and d projects to actually, like, you have that closed loop with the requirement document where you have a requirement, you're not really sure. You put it in a red like color, and then you spin out an r and d project to exactly. Solve that thing. And then you close the loop that. and then that's when it gets handed over to engineering so that it can become a design. Yeah, exactly. And, and it's, yeah. Even if it's not a consumer product or a marketing claim in that regard, it's, it's still your, when you're talking to your customer, whether it's b2b, whether you're selling equipment, whether you're selling a service, whether you're selling you know, to, to teams or whatever. But just think through what are you, how are you delivering that, what are the, the metrics that you are selling them on? And that's kind of what starts to, to frame this document. Yeah. That, that's very, very much on point. And I feel like a lot of people miss out on that. And I, I'm going to have a completely kind of dedicated episode on systems engineering and how it's not a one size fits all. And systems engineering in a big company looks very different from a systems engineering approach to a small company because it, you don't have these robust requirements from the beginning. And you need to have kind of system interfaces and be very mindful of those things, but at the same time, have the terrain a little bit more open so that creative ideas can continue flowing. And that balance is pretty difficult to strike. And I think it is, you, you, you really hit the nail on the head in engineering design. It's super important to have these conversations very early on and then close the loop as you go through your r and d and discovery phase. Transitioning to kind of production what are some like big lessons learned that you've had of just like, oh man, like I should have caught that early, or , you know, anything really? I would say start early but, but talking to a supplier, definitely to get more feedback on costs on potential manufacturing challenges and even having them. , you know, if possible, kind of build up some prototypes really early as well. Again, always helpful if you can be there to help them build it. For something that most, most of us, and most of your listeners are probably doing is, is very novel and new. Back at in the Sonos days, we actually would, would put out there to a supplier to go make a mockup. And that was actually part of their bidding process, which was really cool. So that they would actually have to go prove their engineering, their manufacturing and a little bit of their design skills to, to build something to then show off to us. You know, it's not, doesn't have all the inner ins and outs, but at least it kind of helps 'em understand, okay, what are we, what are we making here? And so. As you move, move to production, making sure that they really understand as much as possible how this thing comes together. What are the really important pieces of it, whether it's the calibration or the design or the weight or the speed of connect, things like that are really, that all that knowledge transfer is incredibly important. And then just having your documentation in a really good spot. It's, I know it's never the funnest part to do all the drawings and do the you know, the what's the word? G d p? No, the geometric positioning tolerances. GD&T g and t I've been outta it for too long. Doing all that, doing all that. G and t is not the, the most fun. But setting up your data structure and knowing how what's important and comes together and alliance is, is always really beneficial to do early on. Yeah, I, I completely agree. And if your documentation looks well put together so it's not just like a Word document with just the list, but actually , has tables and , has an approval signing place. Like those things have such value. The more polished you can make it look, the more legit you will be perceived. So , hi. Highly recommend and documentation can be fun. You can put on some focus house music and just go for it. That's what I did at least when I was doing quality documents. I love, I loved it. I love like all, all the, putting together the, the drawings and the requirements so I can, things like that. It's, it's a very satisfying process once you get it done and everything is just like squared away. And then because you did a good job, the, the products come in nice and it's just like the whole like full circle moment or they complete royally, mess it up and then you have to go back and highlight the stuff that you wrote in the document being like, you did not read this Yep. Yep. Well thank you so much Bridget. This was such a wonderful conversation and I feel like there's a lot of key takeaways and actionable items that people can really sink their teeth into and hopefully clears the fog a bit on what physical product development looks like and what to prioritize. So thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure to have you. Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, and I'm always available to, to chat and reach out if anyone needs any more support. Awesome. Thank you. TL;DL All right, you made it to the end of the episode. Welcome. we're gonna dive into our too long, didn't listen segment So if you didn't have time to tune into the entire episode, I'll kind of go through the bullet points that I was able to extract and then you can come back and listen to the details and the wonderful conversation I had with Bridget later on. So getting started, we started talking about, market research. And the questions that you should always start with are, is this problem worth solving? Are there other players in the market? Is my solution the right solution? And what Bridget did was she started looking at her competitors and went into listen to consumers and really identify what was missing, which inspired her product. So she looked at what was out there and found. Key features that didn't exist and that consumers were actually asking for. So that was her corner in the market. And then in addition to that, she cleverly used kind of venture capital responses to test out the market appetite. So basically she was saying like, if there's someone that's going to invest in this, then there has to be promise but obviously this can be tricky, because VCs often might not, be the most reliable source. , However, if you have any interest in investment, um, it's just to kind of have a, a nice to have check mark on your validation as well. If you have a relatively complicated system or your product is based on a data collection or translation model, then one of the biggest challenges, maybe telling the story of what the data means and how the system works to a wider audience, having a level of deep understanding around what. Your consumers and customers and audience will be able to understand and how they'll be able to understand it is incredibly important, , for widespread adoption. Another thing we talked about was, insourcing and outsourcing decisions because when you're a small, nimble team, , oftentimes you might not have all the expertise to complete your product. , so she had a lot of questions around like, do I keep engineering in-house? Do I keep industrial design in-house? And so on and so forth. So we kind of dove into that. So keeping engineering in-house versus outsourcing is a decision most hardware companies will face. And oftentimes keeping engineering in-house is quite important because it will enable accumulation of institutional knowledge. . It will give the team the ability to adapt, react, and pivot on the design pretty fast and, , in an agile way. And then the team will relatively go faster and have more creative control on the development process when it's in-house. And I mean, this is one of the things of, , you're building a product, but you're also building a company. So, Looking, looking at the longer run and looking at kind of the 10 year horizon, you probably wanna have, a good amount of built up knowledge around the product and have experts of your product in house. So that was what she did. And, , then we spoke, uh, briefly about industrial design, where we were talking about how important it is and a poor looking product could really stifle the technology as the user experience suffers. So, industrial design for consumer electronics specifically is very necessary. And, um, even if the functionality is bulletproof, you need something that looks nice and is easy to, use , And then industrial design actually was something Bridget decided to outsource as she wanted the benefit of, from the expertise because, , she knew that she wasn't going to be able to hire an entire industrial design team, in the early stages. However, To manage the relationship successfully and enable a good integration of industrial design, , certain things need to be done. So, , going through the list, having a very robust and clearly defined statement of work, including industrial designers early on in the design process. Making sure everyone has access to the product requirements document and then having consistent system design check-ins to ensure no decisions, , no decision. The industrial design studio is making is over constraining the engineering design and then no decisions that the engineering designs are actually affecting the industrial designs. So that integration point is actually incredibly important and that's where a lot of problems occur, , and then we pivoted to talking about suppliers and how to engage those conversations from a low leverage standpoint. , Bridget worked in Sonos prior to starting her own company, and . When she was working at Sonos, , suppliers would basically be pitching to the company. , whereas when you're a startup, it kind of goes the other way around where suppliers see you as a risk. So you don't have as much leverage in that situation, even if you're a paying customer, because they might, , you are still , in a desperate state where you really need to get these built and you need to get them built consistently. So one piece of, information that. Bridget gave was that it's good to treat it as a pitch to suppliers, , which is not the first time I've heard that, , through conversations and, , if you have engineers taking care of vendor management, make sure to train them on how to pitch the company and give them the tools to help them succeed. This is, this is my personal note here, because I, being a startup employee, , I was never in the presence of founders when I was talking to vendors. It was always just me, , talking to suppliers and vendors and I was trying to do my best job of pitching the company and pitching the vision and getting vendors to actually work with us and get excited. But, I was just flying off the seat of my pants. And, , for founders that have engineering teams, sit them down, have a lunch and learn and, , give them kind of how. Give them tools of how they can pitch the company when you're not in the room and you're not able to direct that conversation because at the end of the day, all of your first like 10 to 20 employees are essentially extensions of you and. Being able to , train them so that they, , emulate your voice and also add their own voice, so that it emulates the culture of your, company is a really good thing to do. So that's, that's my, take that I wanted to add in here. And then, Also choosing your vendors is a big thing. So we talked about, , choosing vendors between the US and other countries like Asia. It's important to set out robust expectations on what the partnership with the supplier manufacturer should look like. So just like VCs, don't accept every check that comes your way. Don't accept every quote that comes your way either. It's important to have a really good fit where, you need to think about metrics such as, , Fit, communication, ease, quality, cost, and expertise. And then it's also important to note that the early stages of vendor customer relationships are usually at their best in the very beginning. So if there are dis any like big disagreements in the beginning, , that go unresolved, there's a risk of them getting much worse. So, Take that, into consideration when dealing with, suppliers and vendors. So we have a second time around advice, , that came around in another episode. Exactly, exactly in the same way, where it's having boots on the ground at your suppliers and manufacturers is critical to ensure accountability of the partnership, catch and better understand quality issues and then maintain schedules with suppliers. This might be kind of like a yes, we already know that, however you would be surprised, , when things get hectic how this could be overlooked. I've definitely been in situations where we've overlooked this many times. , , good times to go to a supplier. Just kind of rule of thumb is, , before manufacturing startup, like when they're, about to begin so that you can see what processes they have and. How it's all set up, how close the stations are to each other, how, trained the technicians are how, if they have any issues with certain processes, if there's any like jigs or rigs that need to be set up, prior, all that stuff. And then, going monthly for the first few years is a really good idea to send someone, to send an engineer that. Has this as their responsibility to check in with the supplier every month. So we're, we've been talking a lot about consumer electronics. This is my kind of, side step to saying if , you're dealing with large equipment that you're purchasing or you're getting, , and it's being built for you. Depending on the customization and how off the shelf it is, , you can go monthly there as well. , but definitely go at factory acceptance and have a factory acceptance date. And then also prior to shipment for site acceptance. Those , that's my, sidestep, but important to note. , So these are kind of miscellaneous, uh, stuff that came up after that. So I'll just kind of go through them. , doing market research into what cost consumers are willing to pay early on can help you determine your target cost of goods so that you don't have to start off by selling at a lost and then going through stages of yield. So yield of man, the manufacturing, line. , it will never be 100%. Basically a reasonable start can, , be around 70%, then making your way up to 90 as you go to the final stages. And obviously then, , improvements should continue on to get that to as close to a hundred percent as possible. It will never be that even at the highest of volumes. . , And then when designing, have your P zero, P one s and P two s, which are, priorities, , going from, I guess the highest priority to lowest priority or otherwise could be categorized as essential. , and then, , needed, but won't cause any big issues if they didn't exist. And then nice to haves, , respectively and make sure to have consensus on that with the team and have discussions around it and have engineers, marketing folks, industrial designers, everyone in the room, all the key stakeholders, and have a discussion around it. Give, give space for people to push back with data. And, finalize on that before you. Head over to Design Land and, get your product going. Then finally get feedback from suppliers around potential manufacturing challenges early on during the r and d phase of the project to make sure that they get set up for success. Knowing what risks you're taking and knowing what pieces of the design will have to change, as it transitions from r and d into product development is critical. So make sure that you set that up. And that concludes our TL;DL thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoyed the episode. The music for this podcast was brought to you by my friend and incredible musician, Joel, Caffey. The Builder Circle is actively looking for people in the hardware industry and serving hardware entrepreneurs. Please reach out to sponsorships@pratikdev.com that is pratikdev.com to inquire about getting featured on this podcast. Thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed the episode.