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Guest: Magnus Sköld, Senior Industrial Designer at MAKO Design.
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.
How to Scope a Strong Consumer Product MVP
Industrial designer Magnus Skold explains how a focused MVP can control cost and complexity while preserving the experience customers actually value. The episode also explores MVP strategy, product requirements, prototype and testing plans, cost targets, expert coordination, and launch sequencing.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- MVP design defined
- Levels of complication
- Has it been thought through
- Free vs costly choices
- Keeping things clean/tidy/elegant
- Matching the aesthetic of the environment
- Nothing more, nothing less
- Purity of purpose
- The true costs of complexity
Episode transcript
This transcript is provided for accessibility and reference. Download the SRT transcript.
Read the full episode transcript
Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from a 20-year industrial designer on the importance of thinking MVP for startups developing a new product.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,
Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial
Narrator: idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.
Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, on to the show.
Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Magnus Skold to the show. Magnus is a 20-year industrial designer.
Kevin Mako: He started designing ultra-high-end interiors for private jets for international royalty, then worked with commercial airlines, then worked with Dell and a number of
Kevin Mako: other brands and then for the past few years is a senior industrial designer with me here at Mako
Kevin Mako: Design. Today, Magnus is going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventors start-ups and
Kevin Mako: small manufacturers to think about the importance of a minimum viable product when developing their first product for market.
Kevin Mako: How MVP is important for cost, simplicity, modern design, production smoothness, and even onto benefits and feedback from end users. Now on the episode.
Kevin Mako: Hey, Magnus, welcome to the show.
Kevin Mako: Hi, how's it going? Good, good. I appreciate you rushing back from client site today to hop on this podcast as we get it ready for tomorrow's episode,
Kevin Mako: which is pretty exciting to keep it relevant because this is a subject that I'm very excited about and I'm very excited to talk to you about.
Kevin Mako: And it's all about keeping product development simple on your first launch so that you can do a great quality of executing well.
Kevin Mako: We've talked about this in different parts and flavors on past episodes, but given your 20 plus year history in industrial design and engineering these products
Kevin Mako: out to be great product successes, I think it was very important to bring you on the show to talk about this topic
Kevin Mako: right now, given the concept of feature creep and all these things that can really balloon out and expand projects and cause them to be a problem.
Kevin Mako: So first and foremost, before we jump into all that fun stuff, give us a bit of a background on how you landed to where you are today.
Magnus Skold: Originally, I'm from Sweden and I lived there for the first nine years of my life and then lived 14 years in England. That's where I study transportation design.
Magnus Skold: And it was from the transportation degree that I actually ended up landing a design job in Austin, originally for a brief moment, as an internship.
Magnus Skold: And then that's how I end up in Texas, actually, have a lot of family here. So a long story short, kind of went from one company to another, and that's how I ended up
Magnus Skold: back in Austin again and worked, you know, did some freelancing before I joined Mako.
Kevin Mako: And you've worked on some big projects, big clients. Why don't you just run through some of the
Kevin Mako: names that you've worked with and some of the things that you've seen in your long history of
Magnus Skold: industrial design? One of my earlier jobs, actually, that was part of the internship. We worked on a VIP aircraft interiors where we would design these
Magnus Skold: very lavish, luxurious interiors for, for example, the Sultan of Brunei or Prince Avolid bin Talal al-Assad was his name, actually.
Magnus Skold: These things had really crazy interiors, like you wouldn't believe lots of gold, platinum, most expensive materials you can think of.
Magnus Skold: So that was a very interesting introduction into what professional industrial design was going to be like.
Magnus Skold: Then I went on to kind of more into more of the commercial sector working for TXS industrial design, where we worked on a lot of
Magnus Skold: commercial seating, for example, American Airlines' domestic business, and that's actually one of the seats. They're still flying today.
Magnus Skold: After that, it was a lot of, we did a lot of electronic commercial stuff with telecommunications. There's a lot of stuff that happened to do that in the
Magnus Skold: area. But after that, when I moved down to Austin again, I worked a lot with Dell. And their
Magnus Skold: latest, the 14G line when I came out, that was something that was kind of a combination of their merger with EMC as well as also the design that
Magnus Skold: they were trying to incorporate. So that was kind of this fun roller coaster ride of trying to combine what Dell wanted, but also what needed to be influenced by EMC.
Magnus Skold: So that was an interesting thing trying to make those boxes be recognizable, distinctive, and impactful within that enterprise level of business.
Magnus Skold: But then after that, also a lot of some of the medical equipment from Abbott worked on a little bit office electronics and some seating furniture at the same time.
Magnus Skold: But then came to Mako. So and then
Kevin Mako: working with all the different projects that we work with here. It's an incredible history that
Kevin Mako: you've got, amazing experience going from designing some of the most lavish interiors in the world on ultra high class airplanes, you know, trickling down to doing
Kevin Mako: it at the commercial level and then working on all kinds of different products, both in the medical space and work that you did for Dell
Kevin Mako: and servers and all that sort of stuff as well. So blend of consumer product as well as very high end, it's really giving you an incredible light to this whole concept of MVP
Kevin Mako: and the importance of it. So why don't you just talk about first and foremost, what does MVP mean? I know it's something
Kevin Mako: we talk about quite a lot at the design house at Mako Design. What is MVP?
Kevin Mako: And then why is that so important? And then we'll break that down into a number of different sub-segments for anyone
Kevin Mako: who's developing a product right now or thinking about developing a product or even developing their next version of a product.
Magnus Skold: This topic is very important, especially in 2022. of course.
Magnus Skold: Well, MVP is acronym for a minimum viable product.
Magnus Skold: And what that means for the actual client is that we are trying to ensure that they are getting as much bang for their buck,
Magnus Skold: but in terms of trying to make sure that we can create what they need, but not add so much stuff to it, that it becomes too expensive, too heavy, too burdensome,
Magnus Skold: and takes too long to develop. Because one of the key things when we have our clients come in is to make sure that they are
Magnus Skold: able to turn around this quickly and be able to get it done quickly and deliver
Kevin Mako: what they need to have to the market. MVP is so critical because feature creep can be a killer to new products for a number of reasons.
Kevin Mako: But it's not just in cutting out features.
Kevin Mako: It's an ensuring quality on the other side. And that's something that's so important and really misunderstood a lot of the time in new product
Kevin Mako: developers is the fact that the more features you add, that means the less effort you can afford on each of those individual features, let alone the
Kevin Mako: compounding element of complexity that happens in between those features that can compound and compound on from there.
Kevin Mako: When we think about MVP, it's not just about making the product cheap. And I think the tech world kind of gave MVP a bit of a bad connotation.
Kevin Mako: Originally in tech, the idea of MVP was release whatever crap you could out there and then fix it later.
Kevin Mako: But it's very different now. And in fact, at Mako Design, we have this expression we call brilliantly simple design or smart MVP.
Kevin Mako: And that's a concept, not just shrinking features down, but doing those features. those best, most important features, doing an extremely good job at that. When you then compound
Kevin Mako: that with modern 2022 design, it really paints a picture of why MVP is important. I bring up
Kevin Mako: design because, as you know, with all products out there today, anything that's well designed, it has a simple elegance, that brilliantly simple design to it.
Kevin Mako: That is the elegance that is so critical today in design because it's not just about making it look visually appealing, making it sexy and sleek and modern and simple,
Magnus Skold: but also making sure that you're focusing on just those core features to do a really good job at those well. Yes, I think of it as a Swiss watch,
Magnus Skold: that's an analogy I like to use sometimes. What I mean when I say that is that you have what's called levels of complication.
Magnus Skold: It's a term that's describing how many gears are needed to be able to show just simply the time of the watch. And the more levels of complication you have,
Magnus Skold: the more expensive naturally the watch gets. So what I often have to have a chat with the clients about is that we need to make sure, and
Magnus Skold: for their benefit, of course, that the dozens of things don't get too complicated by adding too much.
Magnus Skold: And so what we try and do is trying to make sure that there aren't that many levels of complication
Kevin Mako: in order to make sure that the product is successful. That's so important with startup mentality especially because when you're releasing
Kevin Mako: a new product to market, you generally have come up with like one, maybe two key
Kevin Mako: innovations, like something that's really changing the game for the market, something that's really of need. or a pain point that you're solving.
Kevin Mako: And what happens is inventors start with that. And they get very excited about that idea, and that's what they bring to the table.
Kevin Mako: But as they start developing it, it's quite common to see them start adding bells and whistles. It needs to have LEDs. It needs to connect with an app.
Kevin Mako: It needs to have multiple sizes. It needs to be forward compatible and backwards compatible.
Kevin Mako: And all these things are ideas that are brought in from other products that are in the market.
Kevin Mako: The difference is other products that are in the market have been around for many years, sometimes tens of years, sometimes hundreds of years.
Kevin Mako: So the difficulty is when you're trying to take something new and new innovation to market,
Kevin Mako: but you're trying to also benchmark of all these different features and bells and whistles that a very mature product line might have.
Kevin Mako: Now, of course, you never want to ruin inspiration. Bring up the ideas and put those into place, but never forget what was the one or the two,
Kevin Mako: maybe on the outside, critical features that were solving the main pain point. Because you could always change those features down the road.
Kevin Mako: You can always build a pro version, your next year's version, an enhanced version, whatever else. Maybe it's a specific branded version with a certain partnership.
Kevin Mako: There's lots of different ways you can scale the brand. But if you never get to market or if the product that you first released to market is too complicated
Kevin Mako: and too glitchy and you're missing really the value that you had on those one or two features, then it's a non-starter.
Kevin Mako: So it's much easier for somebody creating a very new product bringing into the market. It's easier to start with your best foot forward with a very specific focus.
Kevin Mako: niche feature and then start scaling back and not just scaling back from your own ideas,
Kevin Mako: but scaling back from the ideas of the users that are actually using it and telling you maybe what additional features they would want or maybe what features they don't care for.
Magnus Skold: All of that can then weigh in to make better versions of that features as you increase these levels of complication to the product as you were talking about, Magnus.
Magnus Skold: I think the core features, they're trying to nail down and focus and help the client focus on what the core features of their idea is, is so important.
Magnus Skold: And if we don't do that, as you say, it's very easy as they are so excited about it. And one of the things I definitely try to do is
Magnus Skold: make sure that we stay down an elegant path, you know, to make sure that there's a line for it. And I say there's nothing more, nothing less.
Magnus Skold: And by keeping it that way, there's that purity of purpose. So that when a customer or a user sees the product, they're like, okay, we
Kevin Mako: get it. We know how to use this, this makes sense.
Kevin Mako: It's totally intuitive. Purity of purpose. Nothing more, nothing less. That's powerful stuff, Magnus. And it really is a big deal because there is that
Kevin Mako: elegance that you mentioned in the simplicity of design. So if you focus on that, you can really design a beautiful product around that.
Kevin Mako: As you add features and complexities, as the listeners out there, think about it from a designer's perspective, if you start adding all these bells and
Kevin Mako: whistles. And then also are asking the designer to make it clean, simple, elegant. That's a very
Kevin Mako: difficult challenge because now you have many interacting variables on an engineering level that have
Kevin Mako: to be put together, work well, but also look and feel aesthetically pleasing. And I love how you take it one step further, Magnus.
Kevin Mako: You talk about the end user, the customer, and their ease of understanding the product. When they get that package, you pull it out of the box, how simple is it
Magnus Skold: to understand what it does and how to use it, or do you have to go through a 28-step process in order to use this thing through a detailed instruction manual?
Magnus Skold: All this weighs into that simplicity that we talk about. Right. There's an author called Don Norman, you know, has written many books on, you know, the user
Magnus Skold: and how the ideal way to interact with the product is. And one of the things it says that the perfect product has no instruction manual.
Kevin Mako: So ideally, the product that we design should be have no instruction manual. And it should be perfectly clear how you use it.
Magnus Skold: That comes through to something you talk about, Magnus, a lot about thinking things through and really thoroughly and detailing those core features that you have.
Magnus Skold: Talk a bit about that. It's funny. You should use that phrase, thinking it through. It was actually one of my old boss, Tim Treleski used to tell me that when I was young
Magnus Skold: designers, like, you got to remember, have you thought it through? Have you thought it through? And it really resonated with me.
Magnus Skold: And one of the things I still use that, I always think that when I'm sitting and drawing and working within CAD is like, okay, does the location of this, this
Magnus Skold: component or just this part line, does it make sense down the line? Does it actually, is it moldable? Simply put, is it moldable?
Kevin Mako: Is it can be produced effectively economically and beneficially to the client, but then also to the, you know, ultimately the user so that they have a wonderful interaction
Kevin Mako: with the actual product? Thinking it through is so powerful, especially when it comes to those elements we talked about.
Kevin Mako: And of course, when you've got too many things to think through, again,
Kevin Mako: you're just probably starting to see a simpler theme here. Too many things, too much to think about less quality product.
Magnus Skold: Talk a bit further down that line versus, you know, free versus costly choices that you can make when you're figuring out different design features
Magnus Skold: or design elements you want on a new product. Well, I think free is ones that are just are simple and intuitive.
Magnus Skold: And they are, you know, fall in line what the product does. And it, it's sometimes these are things that when we talk with clients, They have an idea.
Magnus Skold: And sometimes they, you know, they have the clients that come with this wonderful prototype that they made out of bottles and tape and hot glue. And they're wonderful.
Magnus Skold: And they have a good idea of how it's supposed to work. And they have clients that come and say, well, I have this idea. I'm not sure how it looks or how it's supposed to work.
Magnus Skold: But I just, I want this is what I want it roughly to do. And so what we can do then is we can sort of help them align things so that, well,
Magnus Skold: I know you said you wanted it to be like this. But if we do it like, you know, another way, then potentially we could do it in a more straightforward, more intuitive way.
Magnus Skold: And so instead of having to try and force something, because that's also kind of harking back again to thinking through, when you're trying
Magnus Skold: to force something is when it becomes too much or you're trying to make something do the thing
Magnus Skold: that you want to do and you're spending too much time trying to figure out, then you really have to step back and think, wait, is this the right answer?
Magnus Skold: Is this the way we're supposed to go? Is there a simpler path to this? It's almost a, and I can attribute this to more nowadays, it's kind of like a gut feeling now, you know.
Magnus Skold: And maybe that's because I've had 20 years of experience doing this. It's a gut feeling.
Magnus Skold: And it's something that I actually find myself trusting more and more as I get older, funnily enough.
Kevin Mako: It's like, okay, is this right? Does this work? And when, you know, if you're being really honest with yourself, you find out very quickly that, okay, that's not as
Kevin Mako: streamlined as it should be. And that's when it gets costly. I like how you mentioned bringing it back to the initial ideation. Some people have ideas.
Kevin Mako: Some people have the prototypes. One of the things that anyone can do right now, like after listening to this podcast is look at the product
Kevin Mako: that you're making and make those honest choices to yourself between what are the must have features,
Kevin Mako: what are your core features, and on the other side, what are the nice to have features?
Kevin Mako: And you can very quickly even work with just that simple AB column scenario to look in detail
Kevin Mako: at your product and say, what is the MVP that I need for this to solve the pain point that I
Kevin Mako: I originally came up with the original idea, the core concept, that can help frame that
Kevin Mako: simplicity that Magnus is talking about, keeping things clean, tidy, elegant, keeping the choices
Kevin Mako: between relatively free and easy choices that we can do, like design aesthetics and making stuff robust and putting in simple choices in terms of basic features and
Kevin Mako: functionality as opposed to complicated add-ons and feature creep. And that's a very simple exercise if you're kind of new to
Kevin Mako: the product development space and you haven't yet gone down the path of really professionally designing and engineering a product from the ground up.
Kevin Mako: I highly recommend you just run through that exercise, even do that brief hand sketches. You don't have to be a designer. You don't have to be a
Kevin Mako: builder. Both of those things you can do in your garage. You could do on a notepad. You can do on
Kevin Mako: the computer if you're more comfortable with that, whatever it is that you want, just start getting
Kevin Mako: something on paper and all the while be thinking about how do I keep that down to my, you know, let's call it smart minimum viable product, just the core features that I want.
Kevin Mako: want and how I want to do an extremely good job at those features so that my product,
Kevin Mako: at least in those core categories for those core pain points, my product is really going to be top-notch.
Kevin Mako: Then you can figure out how to scale and add those levels of complication down the road. So Magnus, talk a bit about your combination of aesthetics and
Magnus Skold: the environment. You're a big proponent of designing both with your core features, but also understanding the use case and the environment it's going to be used in.
Magnus Skold: And talk a little bit about that in the early phases of designing a product that's thought of as an MVP or smart minimum viable product.
Magnus Skold: Well, I try to first understand that where the client's coming from, I do sort of my own personal research, where I try and understand where the client's coming from, what his
Magnus Skold: background is, but then also where he wants to take the product. And then by analyzing the two,
Magnus Skold: I can kind of have an idea, at least to start with, where they want to go and where that environment is going to go in. You can create a design.
Magnus Skold: There's these very kind of pure designs out there. There are beautiful, beautiful to look at. But sometimes, they become so beautiful that you're afraid to touch them.
Magnus Skold: For example, I could use the iPhone as an example. I have an iPhone. They're beautiful things, but look at how many of us actually put cases on it because we're
Magnus Skold: so afraid to break them. What I'm getting at is that we have a understanding of the environment goes in and to make
Magnus Skold: sure that if it is in a rugged environment, that it has rugged features to it, they can be nice looking. They can be simple. They don't have to be over the top.
Magnus Skold: They just have to have this just right, nothing more, nothing less, that point
Kevin Mako: of where, okay, this fits in, but it's a modern take on something. It's not just reinventing what's already there. It's not just utilizing.
Kevin Mako: It's taking it one step further, very clean and simple and beautiful, but just fitting in the right environment. It comes back to your free versus costly choices as well.
Kevin Mako: If you're designing something, I love your example of rugged. If you're designing something that's rugged and you've stripped it down to your core features and you've done
Kevin Mako: a really good job of building them, then it's very easy for your designer to take those features and build a rugged design around it.
Kevin Mako: Again, as you add complexity, it makes it more. and more difficult to land perfectly in the environment that you're looking for.
Kevin Mako: So it's another reason why you're trying to match your end user's desire, the environment
Kevin Mako: that the product's actually going to land in with those original core features that you come up with.
Kevin Mako: When you have a really good blend of those two, it can create a phenomenal product. And what I like to think of obviously down the road is how does that product sell?
Kevin Mako: We talked about it earlier on the show about how products that are designed well, designed clean, simple to a modern standard, they almost explain themselves when you unbox them.
Kevin Mako: that also helps with your marketing, your sales, business partners, fundraising, you name it.
Kevin Mako: If you have a simple, clean product that has a very clear value proposition, what is the pain point that it solves or what is the opportunity that it creates?
Kevin Mako: And the product is very core and focused to that. And then built for the environment that it's intended for, those users should be able to
Kevin Mako: pick it up in a snap or the investor should be able to understand it quickly and want to invest in you because people generally want to invest in things that they understand.
Kevin Mako: Or maybe it's a potential retailer, a distribution partner that's going to build on it and expand upon it.
Kevin Mako: Or maybe it's a brand partner or a licensing deal that you're looking at where you're trying to get somebody
Kevin Mako: else to tap into their brand to help you expand your product sales or distribution. All of these come down to environment and a clean product and understanding those core features.
Kevin Mako: And of course, at the end of the day, the most important thing. And so the last thing I want to touch on this episode is when you have simplicity, it
Kevin Mako: allows you to focus so much on quality. And that bakes down, of course, you, Magnus, even in the early concept design work,
Magnus Skold: as you then carry it through to engineering and prototyping, refined prototyping, and into production, production sampling, and then into actual production itself,
Magnus Skold: explain how much smoother that process can be when you have a well-designed,
Magnus Skold: well-thought-out initial MVP product from the get-go. The hurdle that we always have to overcome is that we have this wonderful concept that we start
Magnus Skold: with, and then we have a prototype that works. And a prototype level works very well. But then it finally comes to production.
Magnus Skold: You have to deal with vendors that have their own methods of making things. And this is where this becomes so important that we are trying to make and keep things simple
Magnus Skold: because if we try and add too many features, try to add too many details to the products,
Magnus Skold: it is more conversations and more explanation that we have to give to our vendors in order
Kevin Mako: to make sure that they should produce it the way that we want to help our clients produce it. These things take longer and money is time.
Kevin Mako: And so we have to, we have to, if we can reduce that time, you know, in terms of conversation, and they can just see this files and they can understand, oh, we get it.
Kevin Mako: We know how to make this as a simple, we can do this. Then we already streamlined the process, you know, tenfold.
Kevin Mako: The beauty of that, too, is it's not just in prototyping and carrying it through to production,
Kevin Mako: but you're going to have less defects. You're going to have less warranty issues. You're going to have less confusion about your end customer.
Kevin Mako: You're going to have less costs or problems through production or even in, after sales support that happens. All of that stuff adds up to less headaches and more time for an
Kevin Mako: inventor or a startup or a small product brand to focus on growing the brand as opposed to dealing with some of the small complicated issues.
Kevin Mako: And I really feel that the most important thing is after all that said and done, the best thing that happens with this is feedback. Because when you have
Kevin Mako: that clarity of direction, when you have that clarity of intent with the product, you're going to naturally attract people who are interested in that one pain point that you're
Kevin Mako: solving. Those people become brand champions. They also become some of the people who give you the best feedback. So if you can listen to that early feedback from your first few
Kevin Mako: customers, then start to plan out your roadmap for how you're going to enhance or improve the product down the road, that double-edged sword of your own internal ideation
Kevin Mako: in combination with the market's ideation leads to progressively better and better products down the road
Kevin Mako: or even an entire line of products, different divisions of products, different products for
Kevin Mako: different markets, that's how you can go from being a one skew product to an entire product brand line that has multiple different categories.
Kevin Mako: You'll look at most products out there, whether it's from automobiles to cell phones. They have their premium, their middle, and even a low price version.
Kevin Mako: If you start with a high quality version to begin with, it's a lot easier to either scale down, if necessary, to a lower cost or add features to that
Kevin Mako: than trying to be everything to everyone out of the gate and dealing with a lot of headaches that come along with that and not being able to perfectly execute on that one or two
Kevin Mako: core features to your buyer audience. Because the more complicated you make it, again, the more,
Kevin Mako: the more diverse your market's going to be as well, therefore you're going to have to deal
Magnus Skold: with a lot of different opinions and a lot of different circumstances. And all these things come back around to that concept of smart, minimum viable product right from the early
Magnus Skold: onset, right from your first sketches, your first ideation, your first version of the product,
Magnus Skold: and then carrying forward all the way through engineering, prototyping it into production. Absolutely.
Magnus Skold: Magnus, is there any other tips and tricks along the way that you want to give the listeners to the show as they're working to develop out or ideate on their product?
Magnus Skold: I think I need to reiterate the need to stay focused on what your core competencies are. I think that is the real key to success.
Magnus Skold: We sometimes say there's always Gen 2, which incorporates not just what
Kevin Mako: the feedback from the initial design, but also what the users might say from it. And your channels have opened up at that point when if you're product is successful
Kevin Mako: and then your users have, you know, your users have, you know, responded back because then
Kevin Mako: then you not only have a product out there that is successful, generating hopefully some good income for you, but you're also able to take that income and then rechannel
Kevin Mako: it, refunneled into the new ad version of it. That's a really good point. I mean, talking about the money, you can use some of the money down the road to reinvest
Kevin Mako: in those features as opposed to using your startup funding to get your first product to market. That's a big one. It's a really good point you made there.
Kevin Mako: Another one I think is important, looking at the product and thinking about those. cost, but understanding the difference as well between what is good for a startup in a
Kevin Mako: hardware world and what is good for a Fortune 500 product development agency. Because one of the
Kevin Mako: biggest things that when you think about product development from a big corporate perspective,
Kevin Mako: is that product has to hit say $10 or $100 million plus for it to be considered a successful
Kevin Mako: product. So the way you develop a product for a big Fortune 500 product company is going to be very different than what a startup needs.
Kevin Mako: So a lot of the education out there, a lot of the readings that you see of how to design a product was not guided for the startup or even a small brand.
Kevin Mako: And when I say small brand, I'm talking about a company under 100 employees that has a brand or a product or is a manufacturer or distributor or whatever else. Right.
Kevin Mako: So we're thinking small cap stocks here all the way down to startups. These individuals, when you're designing a product is going to be very different because
Kevin Mako: a Fortune 500 essentially has huge budget to try a whole bunch of different things, to try and
Kevin Mako: add a whole bunch of different features so that they can capture as much of a market with that
Kevin Mako: product is possible out of the gate because they can afford to do so and because they're bringing
Kevin Mako: years of history and experience and customer feedback into that decision-making process. A startup should be looking to hit a small piece of the market and
Kevin Mako: do a really good job of that and then branching out from there, simply for a matter of budget, but also for a number of the
Kevin Mako: things that we talked about earlier on the show in terms of the headaches and simplicity and even just benefits like having clean, modern design with simplicity.
Kevin Mako: So it's really important when you're considering these different angles and these different
Magnus Skold: opinions on design to understand like where do you fit into the world in terms of design? Are you on the smaller side or on the bigger side?
Magnus Skold: Because those are two very different models with very different education streams in terms of how you get a product to market.
Magnus Skold: And it's most of the information, most of the textbooks, most of the stuff that you see out there is geared to big corporate design.
Magnus Skold: So you really have to think about it as a startup. It's a totally different approach, totally different. methodology to get a new product out to market.
Magnus Skold: The key thing to note here is that there's all these different production processes out there.
Magnus Skold: And as you mentioned, you know, larger corporate entities, bigger businesses, you know, over 100
Magnus Skold: employees that are trying to develop products, they will be able to have the funds to be able to create the multi-injection point molds, you know, with
Magnus Skold: multiple different sliders and features on it. And that's all good and well. but I know that we personally have clients that we're well we
Magnus Skold: don't have the budget to do that and so we have to adjust the design and it's for the better because for a lower economically reachable
Magnus Skold: production method and by doing so down the road actually increasing their chance to actually get
Magnus Skold: a return of investment they can do that if we can bring it you know sort of like okay hey we can just
Kevin Mako: adjust this design by and then therefore we can take advantage of this product process which can be
Magnus Skold: cheaper, especially at lower volumes, which I know some of our clients have to start a lower volumes before they can get to the big volumes.
Magnus Skold: And so we can adjust to those, then we also can help them down the road as well. And that, again, brings back to the return of investment, their ability
Magnus Skold: to funnel money and to further R&D in order to get to the next gen, third gen, fourth gen product. Magnus, much appreciated for you taking the time to be on the show today.
Magnus Skold: Thanks again, and we'll talk soon. My pleasure.
Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. The show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product
Narrator: to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent,
Narrator: the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in -to-end physical consumer product development
Narrator: to startups, inventors, and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako -design.com.
Narrator: That's M-A-K-O Design dot com for a free consultation from one of Mako Designs for Design Studios from coast to coast.
Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.
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