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Guest: Filip Valica, product development practitioner, interviewed by Khierstyn Ross of Crowdfunding Uncut.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
Making Better Manufacturing and Prototyping Decisions
This episode answers recurring founder questions about manufacturing, quality assurance, and the role of 3D printing in product development. It also considers how much time and money to invest, what evidence should justify the next step, and when a product venture may need a different direction.
Episode transcript
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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by
Filip Valica: Mako Design + Invent and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.
Filip Valica: The Product Startup, Episode 54. Khierstyn Ross of crowdfunding Uncut, interviews me, about manufacturing.
Filip Valica: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, where we talk about turning ideas into successful products step by step. I'm Filip Valica, and thanks for listening today. In the last episode, we talked to Alice Orozco about selling made-to-order draperies online
Filip Valica: via Pret-a-Portiere. So make sure to check out episode 52 if you want to learn more about how she creates custom made-to-order products and sells them online. We're going to do things a bit differently today. Instead of me conducting the interview,
Filip Valica: Today's show is hosted by Khierstyn Ross of Crowdfunding Uncut, a podcast that dives into the details of successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Filip Valica: Today we're going to focus on manufacturing and quality assurance, answering some of the most popular questions that we get asked on these topics. So let's get started.
Filip Valica: Hey guys, this actually wasn't meant to be an episode up until about five minutes ago, but we are working with a, like a crowdfunding university that I launched about a month.
Filip Valica: ago called crowdfunding hustlers. You can sign up for the next wait list at crowdfunding hustlers.com, but it's a six-month incubator to take a group of entrepreneurs from zero to launch.
Filip Valica: And as part of that, I asked Phil to come in and do a bit of collaboration with me to really dissect the manufacturing process and fulfillment. And what are some things that creators need to be aware
Filip Valica: of before they launch to help them with pricing and all that jazz? And luckily, he has a very awesome 12-year engineering background as well as doing a ton of other crap.
Filip Valica: So what we did for this episode is, first, it was just supposed to be course content. So I pulled the group and I asked them if they had any specific questions around the skill sets that Philip has.
Filip Valica: And we have some amazing questions that I thought I would feel terrible not sharing them with you guys. Awesome. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to talk about this stuff. It's great to get into the meet.
Filip Valica: I know. This is the meat. I find that not enough of you guys, the audience members, email us,
Filip Valica: your specific questions. And a lot of the time, like, Philip, do you, you have a podcast too? And do you sometimes feel that you're guessing on topics that people want to find more of?
Filip Valica: Definitely. I think podcast engagement is one of the things that we all struggle with. I heard some stats just from polling some friends that are podcasters. And it's something like 5% engagement. So for every, you know, every hundred people,
Filip Valica: that listen, you might get five emails from people saying, hey, good job on that episode or that interaction that you're getting is just really limited because everyone's driving or doing other things, right? Yeah.
Filip Valica: And I find, like, a lot of the topics that I get for my shows are because I ask my clients, like, hey, you listen to my show. What is something? And, like, it's pulling teeth.
Filip Valica: But it's amazing because it's the shows that are created by feedback from you guys that are the most game-changing for you. So, guys, step up, engage with us. Ask us these questions.
Filip Valica: And I think you're going to really like this episode.
Filip Valica: So getting into this, first off, we're talking about the manufacturing, fulfillment, and product development side of things, which some people new to crowdfunding or product launches may think, well, why don't I have to deal with this now? Don't I have to wait
Filip Valica: until after I have funding before we have this conversation? And it's actually opposite. Because when I look at what makes a campaign or a product launch fail. There's two points of failure. The first one can be if you don't get funded.
Filip Valica: But the second point is something that's not commonly talked about, which is what if you do get funded?
Filip Valica: And then there's that step two,
Filip Valica: which is what if you don't fulfill the product? So you've raised thousands of dollars, but now all of a sudden you don't fulfill product. And that is the second point of failure, which is something that can be avoided by having a conversation like Philip and I are having today.
Filip Valica: which is it's important to know what your manufacturing process looks like, what your supply chain looks like, what your costing looks like, and all before you launch,
Filip Valica: because how are you supposed to set a funding target on Kickstarter? If you don't know how much you actually have to raise, or if you don't know how much your minimum order number is,
Filip Valica: or what if you say, oh, I think I only need $50,000 for tooling, but then you really get into it and realize you need quarter million dollars what happens then if you only raise 150,000 you need to have plan fee you need to have
Filip Valica: investors who really really need to scope out what you are looking at in order to be prepared
Filip Valica: crowdfunding is a start up we have to be careful with this and i think that it's important to have these conversations earlier so that you really know what you're getting into and you can
Filip Valica: plan for that so i don't know like philip why do you think it's important for people to have the prototyping conversation before a launch. Well, I think if you don't know what you're selling,
Filip Valica: it's really difficult to set pricing and to know that you could fulfill your orders. I mean, bottom line, if you need to understand your cost well enough to fund, and if you're funding a pipe dream, that's just, I mean, you've seen a lot of kick starters out there that don't have a good
Filip Valica: handle on what they're creating and how much it will cost and the effort that it will take to get there. And that's just a recipe for failure, I think. Yeah. And, I think there's a big correlation between the amount you raise and the risk for failure.
Filip Valica: Like, Coolest Cooler raises millions of dollars and they're still struggling to fulfill like three years later.
Filip Valica: Or Scully, the motorcycle helmet raises $2.6 million and they couldn't deliver product because they just couldn't get a working functional. I mean, there were other issues in the background too.
Filip Valica: Like apparently the founders ran off with the money and he had some fun. But that's another show.
Filip Valica: You know, we can go on and on and on about multiple points of failure. Like I have a friend who, you know, was on a recent episode of the show, Gareth Everard of Rockwell Razors.
Filip Valica: Like he made the rookie mistake of trusting some random Chinese manufacturer to deliver quality of product. And he never once went to China to make sure that the product that was delivered is what was promised.
Filip Valica: And so he ended up having this nightmare of a situation.
Filip Valica: where he almost failed and had to pull himself out of it by some ingenious things. But he was very naive and didn't understand the supply chain or manufacturing and stuff like that.
Filip Valica: So there's some pretty big horror stories that can come out of crowdfunding if you don't do these things. What does the prototyping process look like from developing prototype to manufacture?
Filip Valica: Yeah, so for me, the prototyping process is just about iteration. and people, I think, have this expectation that they're going to have the right prototype
Filip Valica: in all its features, basically just adding parts to something in the hopes of creating this complete product. And I try to look at it in almost the inverse where you're, you get the feedback from your audience that says you need these types of features or these specifications that have
Filip Valica: these benefits to the client and you break it up into pieces. And so maybe if it's a armband that has some features on it, you prototype. just the armband portion and forget the intelligence behind it because you want to make sure that
Filip Valica: it's comfortable wear and you're picking the right materials and things like that parallel to that you're perfecting whatever that interfaces or the electronics behind it or you know you're basically
Filip Valica: decoupling all of the things that make your product unique and sellable into individual prototypes and then at the very end you're adding them together that way you're not having to recreate a prototype
Filip Valica: and constantly interringing this really big expensive thing, you're just honing what that unique benefit is and making sure that that is right. And you can do this in parallel. It doesn't mean that you have to do it in a stepped fashion. You can have three prototypes running at the same time. Okay.
Filip Valica: And to my knowledge, there are a couple different kinds of people we can work with on this. Like for prototyping, I think, design firm or engineering team. And then I see once you have that can you, so can you walk me through?
Filip Valica: Once you have a prototype, you think is pretty solid. Is that the point you go speak to a manufacturer? You can. It depends on what you got from the output of that prototyping stage. But you're right.
Filip Valica: Once you have a pretty good feeling that you're solving the problem in an elegant fashion, and what I mean by that is it's very easy to over-engineer, over-design something because you just keep adding features to it.
Filip Valica: And people talk about the MVP, but it's the reason that it's, the reason that it's, so important is because when you get to the manufacturing stage and then you price out all of those features,
Filip Valica: you may be in for a surprise. So it's really important to create an elegantly simple product at the prototyping stage and be happy with that. And usually the outputs of that prototyping stage,
Filip Valica: especially if you're working with designers or engineers of some kind, should be a drawing 3D model or at least some specifications if it's something really complicated. So founders like to have this,
Filip Valica: a friend, Yana here who is designing a really cool standing desk. And before she spoke to a few people in the field, she wanted to have the standing desk that
Filip Valica: solved so many problems and had, it was a very complex model. And then in talks with people, she was, I'm like, no, I think I can't crowd fund for this.
Filip Valica: I think what I really have to is strip this back into something really, really simple.
Filip Valica: I'd love to have more of a conversation on that because so many founders see problems. launches is like, oh, I want to have this be like really intricate, awesome, but you are bringing in so many different levels of complexity. So I'd love to have a conversation around
Filip Valica: why exactly we need to have a very simple product if this is our first time. Once you go into manufacturing, you're going to have some trade-off type decisions. It's going
Filip Valica: to be either this or that. It's not going to be you can have it all. You know, there's definitely going to be some cases where you have to make a cut on something. And if you don't understand
Filip Valica: what your audience really wants, and it's going to be really difficult to make that call. And so what you end up doing, because you don't have enough information early in the – let's say you didn't validate the product well enough, and so you added all of these
Filip Valica: extra features, it's just going to make it, like you said, so much more complicated. And in some case, it's almost impossible to create a working design. For example, the trade-off between
Filip Valica: adjustability and simplicity so you want a product that can adjust to all these different situations or body types or whatever that is it needs to be flexible right the design has all these features that make it adjust yet you
Filip Valica: want it rigid and strong and simple to use and cheap well you're probably gonna have to knock out some of those requirements got it yeah and then at least you can
Filip Valica: build on those in future iterations right yeah that means you could have a more You can have a deluxe version of your product, or maybe you build an accessory after the fact that helps that product being used in a different way, but you don't necessarily have to
Filip Valica: put it into the main feature set. Got it. What would you say is the number one pitfall that you see during this early stage of development?
Filip Valica: Getting the manufacturer involved early is a good idea because you want that feedback to make sure that people can actually build what you're designing. But sometimes people will ask the manufacturer to do the design for them. And we talked about that on a previous episode last time I was on.
Filip Valica: And I don't think that's a great idea either because you want to have ownership of that design in a sense that you want to shop, be able to shop around and have that freedom. You're the champion of your product. And so you want to control that.
Filip Valica: You don't want someone else to design it around their capabilities because they might make a call that is in the best interest of the manufacturer, but not in the best interest of your product.
Filip Valica: So I would, and I'm biased, obviously, because I'm an engineer and a designer, but I would I would much rather work with a third-party designer and or engineer to do something than work with a manufacturer, especially because it gives you options.
Filip Valica: In case something happens with a manufacturer, you want the freedom to pull that order from them and go to somebody else. And they're basically not likely to do that if they've spent all this time designing it for you, right? Definitely.
Filip Valica: And I know a little bit about this, but when you are getting ready to source a manufacturer, you have a few options. You can do it domestic made in the USA or you can outsource that to something overseas.
Filip Valica: Pros and cons and why? I agree with you. I think a lot of people say, oh, well, I can't compete unless I go to China. Or some people will say, you know what, it must be made in the USA. I prefer to let the data speak for me on that.
Filip Valica: So, number one, you need to know what's important to your audience. If you have a very artisan-type product that would benefit from being made in the U.S. or where people appreciate the quality of goods that come from the states, absolutely do that.
Filip Valica: The other benefits of having local manufacturing to you, regardless of where you're located, but it's in the same country, is that you're reducing these communication issues. If you're a first-time buyer in China, there's going to be a slight barrier,
Filip Valica: and I don't mean just through the language, but culturally in the way that they approach things. If you can find a manufacturer in your city locally, it just does so much better, where you can walk over there, shake their hand, get a feel for their,
Filip Valica: operation, touch your product as it's coming off the line, that type of thing. There's a huge benefit to that. And then also one of the tangential benefits for that is finding the problems early
Filip Valica: on, right? If you're there locally and you can keep better tabs on things, you can run over and look at the sample, the first sample that's being made off the line. Whereas if you were doing this abroad, you'd have to get somebody in QA to do that. So, and then the upsides of manufacturing and
Filip Valica: abroad is the huge cost savings. People aren't willing to pay some of that premium to have it manufactured locally. And I've, I mean, I've seen products that are 50% less, even more than that,
Filip Valica: just by having to go abroad, you know, some of it's 70% less, depending on the types of products. So you really have to know what is important to your audience and if you're, how important hitting that price point is for you. And then as well as some of the manufacturers abroad have
Filip Valica: really specialized labor and equipment that are able to do things that people have gotten out of doing locally. And I've, I mean, I work in Houston and there's a lot of specialized manufacturing
Filip Valica: that's, you know, CNC and highly automated and their capabilities are amazing. But they might not, you know, it might be really difficult to find a, I don't know, a custom ceramics manufacturer that will work in limited production runs for you here in the States. And I'm just kind of
Filip Valica: pulling that out. Yeah. This is your realm of expertise. So, uh,
Filip Valica: okay. So when you look at cost benefit analysis and you would say, okay, I've decided I want to outsource overseas, which is what a lot of people, majority of people that I speak to, want to go that route first because of the cost.
Filip Valica: How do you go about finding a manufacturer, not just about searching and finding one, but how do you vet one to make sure that you are getting one with a great QA department
Filip Valica: or whatever? Like, can you just walk me through? Because I know. there's so many different ways you can find a source agent for you that will find a manufacturer for you or you can go and find them yourself.
Filip Valica: So can you just walk me through how you would go about finding a manufacturer overseas? Sure. And this is going to definitely depend on your budget, but I'm going to outline about four different ways of doing this, three to four different ways. So number one, I would research what parts of the world are really good at building
Filip Valica: what you want to build because there's some areas of the world. For example, Vietnam is known for some of the wood products, clothing. clothing, you can get really good clothing made in South America. There's different manufacturers
Filip Valica: like hubs in different places. And so it's to your benefit to know if, because there's definitely places outside of China. China doesn't have to be the only stop for you. So I'll research that first.
Filip Valica: Second, if you have the ability to, and you mentioned this already, attend a trade fair in person, meet the manufacturer in person. This is probably by far the most effective way
Filip Valica: of finding manufacturers, especially because it's important to create that relationship. And again, especially in China, where the time that you spend with a manufacturer is really
Filip Valica: important with them, you will probably get a better deal, and you'll find manufacturers that aren't listed online. If you're looking for the right trade show, Canton Fair in China is huge. It gets like over 200,000 people that attend every year.
Filip Valica: But you can also find it at the trade show news network. It's a tsnn.com. Cool, we'll link to that in the notes. So that's the best way of doing it is attending a fair.
Filip Valica: And that's whether you're doing it locally or internationally, by far it's the most bang for your time because you're able to meet people in person and meet like tons of people in one day, basically.
Filip Valica: The next way you alluded to is using a sourcing specialist, which has the similar benefit of where you're hiring somebody that's local to the market so they understand the benefits of using one manufacturer of another. They also can work with manufacturers that aren't listed.
Filip Valica: online like Alibaba and some of those places. They can also consolidate samples for you, take photos, ship the best ones to you, that type of thing. You're going to pay additional fees
Filip Valica: for that, but it's worth looking into if you want that additional help. You mentioned finding a manufacturer that has good quality assurance. So I like to use third-party quality assurance
Filip Valica: so that they're beholden to me instead of the manufacturer because my motto is always a trust but verify and a lot of these third-party QA firms also offer sourcing work or they at least offer
Filip Valica: some sample consolidation type services so that would be something that I would check out and then the last way of finding manufacturer if you're absolutely on a tight budget is to go to the traditional
Filip Valica: route where you're looking them up on alibaba or on global sources.com and you want to make sure that they're a manufacturer and not a distributor because they need to have those capabilities of manufacturing and you don't want to have to deal through a middle person.
Filip Valica: And then, of course, ask them to ship you the samples directly so you can confirm before you make your call because there's a lot of things that you can't identify unless you get it. For example, I was working with somebody that got a product that looked great,
Filip Valica: but then when they brought it back to the States, it smelled terrible. Got it. So, say, hypothetically gone to China. I've narrowed down my search, the six manufacturers that I really like. and then there's a quality, the QA, right?
Filip Valica: That separate third party, when did they come in? Did they come in to help me vet the manufacturer or did they come in when I picked the manufacturer to make sure that they represent me in China while I'm in Canada? Yeah, it's a good question.
Filip Valica: So what you can do is you can hire third party verification firm to get a like a report on a company. I haven't used these personally, but there's a company called China Checkup and there's also
Filip Valica: one called Glow Biz, G-L-O-B-I-S, and they both will give you a report on the firm. So you can do that. Some of these Q-A firms also have that as an added service, so you could always ask them about that.
Filip Valica: You can use Q-A as often as you would like. It runs about $3 to $400 a day to have an inspector come out to a place, depending on the firm that you're using. It's essential to use one before your product ships.
Filip Valica: If you are doing something custom and you want to make sure that it's being done, done right, I would definitely hire an inspector to come in and pull a sample of the first product off the line and make sure that it's okay or the first 10 and have them report to you. That way
Filip Valica: you can stop production if you need to to fix some things because in the U.S., you don't usually don't pay up front and the manufacturer creates something to a specific spec. And if they don't
Filip Valica: meet that spec, they're going to eat that cost. In China, it's a little bit more loose than that. So you're, because the margins are so tight, because the pricing is so aggressive, you're paying
Filip Valica: 30% up front usually, and your whatever comes out of the line, you've already paid that 30%. And it's not like they're intentionally trying to swindle you, but they've made an interpretation
Filip Valica: based on your requirements and based on their capabilities, and they're going to put the two together, and something's going to come out. And so you might roll the dice, and it might be okay, or it might not be. And so if you're doing something that they haven't done before, you probably want to do a
Filip Valica: check up right when it comes off the line. Okay.
Filip Valica: So I've narrowed it down to six I really like.
Filip Valica: How would you then go about like? What are your top three criteria that are non-negotiables for you when you select a firm and you narrow it down to your partner? Before we get to the non-negotiables,
Filip Valica: I would say you definitely want to look at their capabilities, look at the range of products they produce and make sure that if you're going to be expanding on your product or if there's going to be some issues that they can handle it, and then also confirm that they can work with your payment
Filip Valica: terms and your MOQ, your minimum order quantity. You don't want to lead with those questions,
Filip Valica: not the payment terms or the MOQ because it's going to make you sound like a rookie. And the reason I say that is because people are overly concerned about cost up front. And if you're concerned, if your number one concern is cost and you're leading with that question, then the manufacturer is
Filip Valica: going to say, oh, okay, that is the main issue with this person. And so we're going to make sure that we hit that target cost. And as a product champion, you don't want to, you don't want to set the stage for that because you'd rather have a quality product, right? Exactly.
Filip Valica: Because then they're going to cut costs to keep you happy if they think that they're being judged on a price for. Exactly. Yeah, cool. So that's why I say always when you're vetting from your six, and actually it's probably
Filip Valica: going to be even more than that, you might start with a net of 10 or 15 possibles, and then you ask their capabilities and you send them, you get samples from them, and then maybe you get down to six or five or four. as you're communicating with them, you want to make sure that they're acting as a partner,
Filip Valica: not an order taker. So are they looking to, this is a little bit different in the States because in the States people are more willing to provide solutions. So you can say this is the end result. I'd like to achieve this. How can you help me do that?
Filip Valica: And in China especially, they're very much, well, you told me that you needed this and I'm going to just make sure that that happens even though it is cost prohibitive to do that or even
Filip Valica: though we have to jump through hoops on our end and the price is going to go up or whatever that is. Our capabilities don't meet that. And so you would like to do is try to establish that
Filip Valica: conversation and have a relationship with them and see what their willingness is to work with you. Like for example, when you bring up outside QA and you say, oh, I'd like to have this outside QA
Filip Valica: firm come by and take a look at your operation or do an inspection of whatever, see how they respond to that. And if they've if it's been done, you know, they've done that before. So don't be afraid to connect on Skype, social media, that type of thing.
Filip Valica: A lot of the buyers on the manufacturing side, the manufacturing reps, want to have that personal connection with you. So they're going to reach out to you and ask you if you've got a dog and show you pictures of their kid and like all this stuff. And that's just really normal because, again,
Filip Valica: business relationships or personal relationships there. Yeah. That's what I've been learning, which is I really like them. Like I have a lot of Amazon seller friends and I'll be out for.
Filip Valica: drinks with them one night and their Skype feed is blowing up with emojis from their manufacturers in China. Like, you know, it's really cool. That's a culture, right? It's a relationship business. Yeah, absolutely. And so that's, you know, the non-negotiable part of it is the communication.
Filip Valica: And then also if they've got terms that are just a red flag for you, for example, if the typical terms in China are 30% down and then 70% balance is once the production is complete.
Filip Valica: If they're drastically moving away from that, then you need to ask yourself why. And it might be a legit reason. For example, if they have to build custom tooling and they need some money from you up front,
Filip Valica: then that's understandable, but then what's going to happen to that tooling after you pay for it? Do you get to keep it or are they going to produce other white-labeled products on your behalf? Okay. This is not a question that Jason asked, but, okay,
Filip Valica: this is becoming a, problem with crowdfunding where you've seen this with fidget cube where um they put their designs
Filip Valica: online but what if i crowd fund and what is stopping my chinese manufacturer from ripping my designs and selling them to someone else and producing a rip off like do offhand do you know of
Filip Valica: anything that we can be doing in the manufacturing agreement stage to prevent that with the tooling and ownership of like your designs and stuff like that yes.
Filip Valica: So there's a few things. Number one, as you're going through the vetting process, I'd like to ask them, and they don't have to tell you, but I'd like to ask them if they're,
Filip Valica: do they have any major clients? And sometimes people like to name drop. And so, for example, one of the manufacturers I work with works with IKEA. And that instantly gave them some street
Filip Valica: cred, right? Because I know how how tough IKEA is on quality. And they were able to kind of prove that relationship. And that made me feel a little bit at ease that they're, that they're in line with some ISO standards or they've got some quality.
Filip Valica: processes in place to produce product in a consistent quality level. And with that comes the understanding that if they're selling to a lot of U.S. customers, that there's going to be some
Filip Valica: IP concerns. So, for example, when I brought up that issue with my company that said, hey, they have a strict policy that if you purchase any custom tooling, this is the way that they're going to handle it. And obviously, there's no guarantee of doing that, but I was comfortable
Filip Valica: enough with them doing that because of some previous orders that I've placed from you know with them so it was something that that I basically I took a chance on if I didn't want to take a chance on that
Filip Valica: you could hire a lawyer an IP lawyer to draft what's called an NNN agreement which is kind of like an NDA a non-disclosure agreement but there's also a non-compete clause in there which is I understand
Filip Valica: is enforced much better in China but obviously that has to be drafted in both English and either Canaanese or Mandarin, and so there's going to be additional cost for that. So you have to decide if, you know, depends on the scale of your operation here, what are you risking?
Filip Valica: If FidgetCube had all these orders, you probably don't want to risk that. If you're just, you know, if you've got a relatively small crowdfunding campaign or you're bootstrapping
Filip Valica: and you've got a really niche market, maybe you're willing to take a $10,000 roll of the dice instead of spending another grand or $500 on creating an NN agreement. Makes sense. Okay. Cool.
Filip Valica: Because that's like, you know, like brand dating on Amazon, this is a new problem.
Filip Valica: And a lot of entrepreneurs are asking what can we do to prevent people from ripping our designs besides the obvious throwing up, like, proof that you have trademark and patent pending status and like just going to market as quickly as possible, right?
Filip Valica: But cool. I like your tip about the NNN. the additional agreements that you can put in place. I really like that. All those are still great techniques. So I still do the PPA, the provisional patent application.
Filip Valica: Like you said, they do the trademarks and get to market as fast as you can. So I can't underestimate that enough. If it's possible, I would add additional features to your design that are branding features.
Filip Valica: So if you can stamp a logo on a shell of your tooling and you pay for that custom tooling, it decreases the chance of somebody else running with it. Now, of course, there's some techniques from manufacturing side
Filip Valica: that you could do to replace that logo and things like that.
Filip Valica: Or if you're buying the tooling, for example, you can require it to be shipped back to you after the production run is run, or you can have it shipped to a third party that's in your QA office and they might hold the tooling for you.
Filip Valica: There's all sorts of creative options like that. Cool. I like that. Think outside the box. So I'm going to switch here's a little bit. to um one thing that's come up with a couple of my clients before launch is the packaging issue and it
Filip Valica: came up with sound molds because we were while the product is finished we wanted to ship product to influencers and the box was like it was just not good the thing with influencers and press is
Filip Valica: first impressions or everything i've got a little bit different perspective on this because a lot of the people that listen to you are going to go into crowdfunding and so like you said images is is super important for that. I'm coming from the e-commerce side. I'm the Amazon seller. And so you're not
Filip Valica: buying because of the box. You're buying because of the deal that you're getting. To answer your question, you really need to know who your audience is going to be. And so like you said, if you're going to have influencers that are involved in the campaign or if the look is important or if you're
Filip Valica: going to be selling in brick and mortar type places, then absolutely you need to focus on the packaging, not just getting the product to its destination safely, which is by the way pretty
Filip Valica: important, especially if you're selling an electronics product that can fail if it gets jostled around too much. So, you know, design the product to take a four-foot drop off of a table or when UPS
Filip Valica: or some other delivery agency will throw it off the truck. You know, those types of technical considerations. That's the outside packaging, I guess you could say. And then the inner packaging
Filip Valica: that's more standing apart in, you know, having that experience for the consumer to say that this is a brand, not just a way to pack my product. What will make this feel like, let's say you're trying to have a luxury type product.
Filip Valica: What feels luxurious? You know, Apple spends anordinate amount of effort to get the, you know, the coefficient of friction between the two boxes just right. So when you pull the top of the box off, it like slides down at this consistent rate. And that's a pretty
Filip Valica: ridiculous amount of detail to go into. But you can certainly chase that. You know, I think my general advice would be if you're selling on e-commerce and you're kind of branching out, you can use
Filip Valica: boxes that are produced in mass quantities so you can save you a lot of money and then create custom labels or stickers that will wrap that box with your branding. And then as you graduate to
Filip Valica: needing a better marketing presence, again, for crowdfunding or for, you know, influencers, that type of thing, then you can certainly look at creating some custom boxes. But as you know, with
Filip Valica: sound molds, the price of custom boxes, especially when you're talking about inserts and some of these other things that could be at really expensive. And that might even mean going abroad to find a manufacturer for that.
Filip Valica: Yeah, definitely.
Filip Valica: And then I don't want to spend too much time on this, but the manufacturer of your product and the box designer are generally different. So how do they link up? Is that through your drop shipper or? You can find package designers online on freelancing
Filip Valica: websites just like you can find your product designer and look through their profile and see what they have experience in. And they're going to output the right files to your packaging manufacturers,
Filip Valica: that type of thing. The important thing is, before you do all of this, is that your branding is consistent, right? Because whatever branding that you've got on your website needs to match your packaging, needs to match all the other touchpoints of your customers. And if it's not
Filip Valica: congruent, then people are going to get, you know, and you talk about this more than I do, I'm sure, but they're not going to feel like this is a seamless transaction.
Filip Valica: Yeah, 100% because everything, it's the customer journey has to be super consistent even with like your sales funnel. Like when you have, when you click on an ad to go over to your landing page to then get
Filip Valica: your welcome email sequence, like everything has to line up or else the customer will get confused. And if they get confused, there's,
Filip Valica: it causes cognitive business. And it's just not a good, seamless brand experience, right? Right. And you might even come across as like two different brands, which is like just not cool.
Filip Valica: But yeah, you could set really, really high expectations with your campaign and your website and then they get the box and it's like a paper envelope with a sticker on it. And it might not convey the same message that you're trying to sell. Exactly.
Filip Valica: If your whole brand feel that you're trying to convey is premium, then you need to make sure your box is premium. Yep, and that might be spending $5 a box if you're trying to get it done in the States. Yeah. All right. I'm going to try to frame the next question.
Filip Valica: How do you determine when to call it quits on an entrepreneur's idea? What point does it make sense to throw in the towel and what are the factors that can help you get an early read on that before you throw away too much money in the product development space? Yeah.
Filip Valica: So that's definitely the hardest question to answer in general. And I'll admit that there's some. aspects of that that I'm still trying to figure out. The most difficult question is definitely
Filip Valica: when do you quit? And I believe that's based on your own personal risk tolerance and belief system because so much of this game that you and I and everybody listening is doing is mental, right? It's how much do I believe in what I'm doing and how important is it to me
Filip Valica: that this succeeds? And that means that you're going to either risk more or get out of the game earlier depending. There's actually a really good episode on Freakonomics Radio, if anyone listens to
Filip Valica: that, that's called The Upside of Quitting, where they talk about minor league baseball players and the unwavering belief in making the majors. And sometimes they'll stay in it to the late 20s
Filip Valica: or early 30s, even still thinking that they're going to make it. And so it talks about some of the people that got out. And anyway, it's a really interesting example or an interesting dive into just this
Filip Valica: thought process about quitting and never giving up and what that even costs to you. I have like a weird twist on it. I don't know if this is whatever, but my thing is I find that the more campaigns I do,
Filip Valica: the more paranoid I get a failure because I, you know, my limiting belief is like, oh my God, if I fail, then I'm a fraud or whatever, right? But so that causes me to be super cautious with everything we do and run data-driven campaigns,
Filip Valica: which basically means, you know, customers come to me with a product. And in the past, I would say my gut tells me this will sell. And then my gut would also craft the positioning and the everything.
Filip Valica: But when we throw up a campaign and we see that, oh, the positioning doesn't resonate with certain people because we didn't talk to customers. Okay, let's start talking to customers. And then you like, what we started doing with their marketing process is iterating
Filip Valica: everything based on customer feedback. So I did this with my digital course where I made the assumption that people wanted a six-week crowdfunding course because who wouldn't want to learn to crowdfund? I didn't ask a single person.
Filip Valica: So I like went through this whole launch process and it bombed. And so I couldn't have quit there. And this is analogous to product launches, right? Like physical products. But I could have quit there. But I didn't.
Filip Valica: What I did was I went back to my customers. I got feedback. I iterated, came up with a better offer. based on feedback and actually ended up selling out the accelerator.
Filip Valica: And that never would have happened had I just gone with some initial product idea and tried to launch it and it failed, right?
Filip Valica: Like, I feel there's so much that you could do in terms of product development and positioning and everything just by keeping your customers or your prospects, like included in the whole process from start to finish.
Filip Valica: because whatever you're starting with, you may have a plastic spoon that people don't want. But if you go and talk to your customers and realize that what they really want is, like, extra grip on this plastic spoon, then you have something that will sell.
Filip Valica: And terrible as an example is, but I have a hard time quitting when I believe in something because what I will do is if I fail, I'll just keep looking and searching for proof or a different angle.
Filip Valica: or a different something we could try until it is successful. And then once you got that, then you have something that people would kill for.
Filip Valica: So that's like, and that's how I approach it. I don't want to quit too early because I feel that there's so much validation that you could do to figure out what it is that people want, even if your initial offering isn't right.
Filip Valica: And then if you do everything that we've been talking about in this interview, like, if you go through this by scoping out the manufacturing cost, too, you'll be able to, you'll be able to able to see what is financially viable and find that middle ground. Yeah, absolutely.
Filip Valica: No, I agree with everything that you said. And the only thing that I'd add to that is for someone that's looking for a tactical way of figure out how difficult the problem is going to be and if he should continue throwing money at it, I would look at it.
Filip Valica: Like you said, identify what the problem. Is it an audience fit or is it a product issue? Then systematically, you know, we talked about iterating. So has that problem been solved before at what?
Filip Valica: scale what have have companies much larger than you've solved it have companies smaller than you solved it do you think it's possible for you to solve that problem or is it going to take you know 10x more money or
Filip Valica: whatever that is and you can start to kind of evaluate some of these problems what you don't want to do is is say oh well apple solve this problem and so it must be possible for me to solve the problem you've got slightly different resources available right and at the same time if no one solved this
Filip Valica: problem before. If you're looking to do cold fusion or something that's just way out there, I don't want to
Filip Valica: discourage anybody from pursuing that, but understand that the risks are high and you might be working on it for a long time. Yeah, well said.
Filip Valica: My last question from Jason is do you have any advice on learning 3D printing and how it relates to prototyping and manufacturing?
Filip Valica: and in your experience, how important has 3D printing been in terms of helping your clients, prototype ideas, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, so that totally depends on the type of product that you're developing. Obviously, if you've got a textile, you want to work with some pattern making, suppliers, and things like that.
Filip Valica: 3D printing helps a lot because back to that iterative process, you want to shorten that process of design, build, and test. You want to shorten it and repeat it as many times as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Filip Valica: and 3D printing allows you to do that, especially if you've got one local to you. So either you can go to a maker space or a hacker space that's near you, pay a monthly membership fee,
Filip Valica: join, learn how to do 3D printing, get access to their equipment, start printing your own stuff. That's definitely probably the lowest budget and the highest interaction with other people that know the equipment and they can help really help you out.
Filip Valica: On the high budget side, I would buy the best printer that you can. Because if you're buying a really budget one, it's just not worth it. You're going to end up spending a lot of your time troubleshooting and tinkering in the process of 3D printing,
Filip Valica: not in the output of getting a product and iterating it. I really wouldn't buy a 3D printer unless you know that you're a, I'm a self-professed geek. So unless you're a geek or a DIY type of person, you really want to do that yourself,
Filip Valica: I'd rather let somebody else handle it because, again, you don't want to mess with troubleshooting the machine and troubleshooting the prints. your goal is to get a print out so you can do testing on your product.
Filip Valica: Someone like me would not ever touch a 3D printer without breaking it, so I would outsource that to someone else. Yeah, and you can definitely find people to do that. They're local to you.
Filip Valica: If there's a place called 3D hubs.com where you can go find people that have got 3D printers near you. Oh, amazing. And our local library, our digital media zone in even Toronto has these capabilities, too. Great, great.
Filip Valica: great so um well philk this has been great in terms of um how you work with people what do you wish most entrepreneurs who work with you would come in knowing before they start working with you
Filip Valica: yeah you know it i think people are expecting a technical answer like i wish that they would read up on this or that and it's really not i feel and you've worked with clients as well you work with so many different types of problems i'm not really worried about the technical issues because we've
Filip Valica: solve those before, I want to make sure that you understand your own abilities. What do you really want to learn? What you do not care about getting into the details of? How far are you willing to go in
Filip Valica: terms of the effort or the budget that you have? What are your expectations for this project? Some people are coming in and saying, hey, I've got my entire livelihood writing on this. And that changes the equation a bit versus someone that comes in and says, hey, you know what? I've got these handful of
Filip Valica: ideas. And I pick this one because I'm really excited about it. But my whole goal is to just get this product to the market and if it succeeds or fails, I'm going to be happy with it because it's a learning experience. And that's really what I ended up looking for is clients having this attitude
Filip Valica: where they're passionate, they want to understand that it's a marathon and it's going to take some time and they're looking at it as a journey and an experience that's going to benefit them in the long term because they're going to have that additional skill set that they're going to
Filip Valica: build. And so if they come in and they have this upbeat attitude about learning and they're willing to roll up their sleeves and that's it's perfect.
Filip Valica: My last question to you is, if you could empower entrepreneurs with only one piece of advice at the beginning of their journey, what would that be?
Filip Valica: I would say to learn as much as you can about the more technical aspects of your industry. So you can ask educated questions from the designers and manufacturers that you hire.
Filip Valica: So, for example, watch YouTube videos about how your product is made. You know, just type that into the search and see. And what are the terms that are being used in that video?
Filip Valica: injection molding versus blow molding, what is the term draft when it comes to plastics, that type of thing? And you don't have to be an expert any of this, but it helps to understand the terms so that you can ask, again, educated questions. And then I would also Google, you know,
Filip Valica: your product and then regulations in your country. That way you understand that if you're making a children's product, it has to be, you have to avoid these types of materials or these are the types of regulations that govern that. And even though you're going to be working with
Filip Valica: manufacturers who hopefully have experience and all of that stuff, what you want to do is ask some control questions whenever you're interviewing them to say, and this is really obtuse, but
Filip Valica: you know, you'd ask them, do you use any lead paint in your toys? And obviously, the answer to all that is no worldwide or hopefully should be no, but there might be some more technical things that, you know, they'll tell you that they've done something before and they haven't. And so it's just
Filip Valica: good for you to kind of go through, understand your, you know, your field and your industry really well, because ultimately you're going to be the champion for your own product. Yeah, that's kind of like me and Facebook advertising.
Filip Valica: So I may not do my own Facebook ads, but I have a very good understanding of them so that when I go to hire someone in Facebook ads, I can test their proficiency based on how they say.
Filip Valica: Because I can always test them and say, okay, so if we, if this is the end goal, what is your strategy? What would you recommend we do that? And based on the limited knowledge I have in the field, I can know where if they know what
Filip Valica: that are doing or whatever, right? So it's like that as well. I was speaking to one of our students yesterday and she had, she didn't know anything about email marketing. So she outsourced it to someone else.
Filip Valica: And of course, spent a ton of money, got no results, but didn't know why. And she's like, no what? I'm just ripping this apart. And I'm learning this so that I can properly outsource this in the future. Same thing. You just need to be able to know enough.
Filip Valica: to understand, like you said, the terms in the industry and if you're getting a good deal and that type of thing. Awesome. Well, this has been fantastic.
Filip Valica: Philip, where can people find out more about working with you and your podcast and stuff like that? Yeah, just go to theproduct startup.com. And I, you know, as you mentioned early on in the show, I've specialized. I focus on the early stages of physical products.
Filip Valica: So, you know, the prototyping, validation, that type of thing all the way to do of manufacturing. So check out the podcast and where I interview other small business owners and Shark Tank winners and other people that have done it. And, yeah, we get into all the details.
Filip Valica: Guys, this has been a fantastic episode. If you are in the middle of planning your product launch, go to crowdfundingunkut.com to download the physical product checklist.
Filip Valica: But if you're actually looking at working with us at a higher level to do your campaign from start to finish, you should check out crowdfunding hustlers.com and join the wait list for our accelerator. program relaunching in August. So thank you very much.
Filip Valica: Thanks again to Kirsten for being a guest host this week. I hope that you've enjoyed this episode and hear my takeaways. Number one, understand your audience. Before you complete your design and kickoff manufacturing, you must know your
Filip Valica: audience's desires better than they do themselves, knowing who you're creating their product for and why you're creating your product can make the difference in product success and failure.
Filip Valica: Number two, develop elegantly. simple products.
Filip Valica: The mathematician Blaise Pascal once wrote, I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Filip Valica: So spend the time to iterate your prototypes and design to keep only the essential parts of your product.
Filip Valica: And number three, learn enough to ask the hard questions. You don't need to be an expert in everything, but understand the design constraints, regulations, and manufacturing methods well enough so that you can evaluate third parties effectively.
Filip Valica: Not only will this reduce your risk, you'll definitely feel a lot better with your decisions. If you'd like to get these takeaways in your inbox every two weeks, just go to the product startup.com, scroll to the footer of any page, and sign up for the weekly wrap
Filip Valica: -up. For each week that I produce an episode, you'll get my three takeaways for each guest, along with interesting articles, free tools, and inspiring innovations to help you with your own product startup.
Filip Valica: And as I mentioned talking with Kirsten, I work with clients to help them take the next next. step. So if you're just getting started, I can work with you to create a game plan based on your skill set and budget. We'll go through the product development process together and outline your
Filip Valica: steps specific to your industry or product. And of course, based on your capabilities, I can suggest ways that you can create or outsource workable prototypes, do feasibility testing. We can get into
Filip Valica: manufacturing or design, quality assurance, all those topics where you might need some of that extra help before you launch. Of course, you own 100% of the design. I'm here. to lend you my 12 years of product development experience.
Filip Valica: I really enjoy hands-on work, so if you think you could benefit from one-on-one help, let's talk. Go to the product startup.com, click on the consulting tab, and sign up for a call.
Filip Valica: Join me next time as I speak with Dan and Justin. They're long time the product startup podcast listeners, and they're also the makers of Milton, the Mealtime Companion.
Filip Valica: And we talk about industrial design, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing the product in the U.S. So tune in in two weeks to hear that episode.
Filip Valica: Thanks again for joining me today. I hope that you're taking action on developing your products, and I'll see you in two weeks.
Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success.
Filip Valica: This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design and Invent, the first firm in North America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small products. business.
Filip Valica: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to MakoDesign.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-design for design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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