Product Startup Podcast Episode 149: Prototype an Invention Professionally

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Full product innovators, today we learn about prototyping best practices from a product designer as led hardware teams at Dell, Sunbeam, and Hewlett-Packard.

00:00:11 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:20 Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial

00:00:28 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.

00:00:38 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.

00:00:47 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Mike Morton into the show. Mike was an industrial design senior principal at Dell for many years,

00:00:54 Kevin Mako: and before that, similar roles at HP and Sunbeam, along with working with many physical consumer product ventures and startups along the way.

00:01:00 Kevin Mako: He's also been a mentor at Capital Factory and Techstarres in addition to working with macrodesign too.

00:01:05 Kevin Mako: Today, Mike is going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventor startups and small manufacturers can understand

00:01:09 Kevin Mako: the importance and best practices around the different types of prototypes, how important prototyping

00:01:14 Kevin Mako: is to product development and how to use prototypes and ensure a product is successful, both in the market and in manufacturing. Now, on the episode.

00:01:23 Kevin Mako: Hey, Mike, welcome back to the show. How you doing, Kevin? Good to see you again. Yeah, likewise. You know, you've obviously got a long history in the product development space.

00:01:30 Kevin Mako: You spent many years as a major design lead in various divisions, departments, products at Dell. I have worked with startups, Fortune 500 companies in product development.

00:01:38 Kevin Mako: You've lived overseas in China handling many assets of the manufacturing side as well. So what a perfect person today to talk about prototyping and the importance of

00:01:47 Kevin Mako: prototyping and what it means in the product development process. It's largely misunderstood by somebody who's new to the product development space, but obviously

00:01:56 Kevin Mako: well ingrained through industrial designers, mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, etc. in terms of the importance of prototyping.

00:02:02 Kevin Mako: Today, I want to go over why it's important, why it's done at the big levels at Fortune 500, but why it's also done at the startup levels

00:02:08 Kevin Mako: and how you can best optimize prototyping for getting your new invention to the market. So today, Mike, can you give us a sort of a background to your

00:02:18 Mike Morton: career in product development? Sure. Good to hear from you again, Kevin. Good to see you and be here and talk about,

00:02:23 Mike Morton: they said, prototyping such a critical, make a break portion of the development process. That's so important, and everybody learned so much from it.

00:02:30 Mike Morton: Graduate industrial design way back, before we were doing CAD and things like that, we still had drawing machines and all that sort of stuff.

00:02:38 Mike Morton: Right as that started coming in, pretty quickly after I graduated, ended up going over to Asia. I'd grown up out there and established a design firm in Hong Kong and did that

00:02:47 Mike Morton: for six years, and that was a really great experience. Obviously, everything was made out there.

00:02:51 Mike Morton: It was a real transitional time when things were starting to go from places like Hong Kong deep into China and got exposure to not only front end,

00:02:58 Mike Morton: development design concept design development part, but also how things got made in those

00:03:03 Mike Morton: international manufacturing environments and how you would manage to make sure that what you put

00:03:08 Mike Morton: into the factory basically came out of the factory, which especially back then was a challenge.

00:03:12 Mike Morton: Did that for several years, as I mentioned, eventually came back to the states and went over to the other side and went corporate.

00:03:19 Mike Morton: And as you mentioned, I was with Dell. Before that, I was with HP for a few years and Sunbeam Corporation, Sunbeam Oster. So doing lots of appliances,

00:03:26 Mike Morton: home products, grills, all kinds of things like that. So I was able to have a pretty wide range of experience with different products.

00:03:33 Mike Morton: And the whole time working back and forth between the U.S. and Asia, getting understanding the way the different industries do things. So I got real lucky, I think.

00:03:43 Mike Morton: I just kind of fell into a lot of that, but was able to have a pretty wide exposure to sports equipment, home audio, portable phones, computers, appliances,

00:03:53 Mike Morton: coffee makers, toast, just all kinds of things. and see how things are actually designed and built. It takes us back to the prototyping. If you have that kind of understanding,

00:04:02 Mike Morton: if you just have that exposure, you walk through the factories and you're like, what is that? And you find out that they're doing things that you had no idea you can design better.

00:04:10 Mike Morton: So getting that understanding of those processes and prototyping is an important one of those processes really made a difference and allowed me to be able to do what I do.

00:04:18 Mike Morton: Now I basically left out a few years ago and I basically mentor startup companies that are trying to develop new products and that's how we got connected years ago

00:04:28 Mike Morton: and just an exciting environment helping people invent stuff and come up new ideas and get them

00:04:34 Kevin Mako: all the way through the process into the market so i really enjoyed doing that much appreciated for that overview mike it's

00:04:40 Kevin Mako: been a pleasure at knowing you over the years working with you on projects and just seeing your

00:04:44 Kevin Mako: expertise come through because it's incredibly valuable given all that breadth that you talk about

00:04:48 Kevin Mako: working both with all these fortune 500 companies and getting great products to market all the way from

00:04:52 Kevin Mako: the idea stage through design engineering, prototyping, and production, but also working with many startups along the way.

00:04:58 Kevin Mako: And I know I've been a mentor at Capital Factory and Techstars. So you really have this incredible experience around helping startups get off the ground with their new inventions

00:05:06 Kevin Mako: and new products. So we're going to talk about prototyping today. I'm going to go over just a quick overview of the usual set of prototypes that we do at Mako.

00:05:14 Kevin Mako: And then, Mike, I want you to weigh in on those types of prototypes and what the value is to the success of a product. First and foremost,

00:05:21 Kevin Mako: So think about when the prototyping process is. And that's usually after industrial design, conceptual mechanical engineering, electronics and component theory.

00:05:28 Kevin Mako: So you basically got your design platform in theory digitized on the computer in CAD. Next step, we go into mock prototyping.

00:05:35 Kevin Mako: We call it the rough prototype, the mock prototype, 3D printed prototype, breadboard of the electronics, if your product has electronics in it, that sort of a thing.

00:05:43 Kevin Mako: From there, you move on to like a mechanical prototypes. This is a product that is quasi working. You can actually test it out, feel for how the thing functions as well as

00:05:51 Kevin Mako: form and all the rest. Then you go into a more refined prototype. That's something that looks good, works well, has been detailed, highly engineered.

00:06:00 Kevin Mako: And then from there, you're going into production sampling or production prototypes, which is really the one unit that you're approving to hopefully

00:06:06 Kevin Mako: replicate in hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands in the future.

00:06:10 Kevin Mako: So, Mike, I want to hear from you about those different types of prototypes, starting from the early rough prototypes and what

00:06:16 Kevin Mako: you find are some of the best practices, but also what's some of the importance of these different

00:06:20 Mike Morton: types of prototypes in getting a new product to market and to production in a successful way. Right. Sure. Yeah. I mean, everything you mentioned is critical.

00:06:28 Mike Morton: There's the old saying that you can't, you just prototype, prototype, you can't do that too much. And the stages you mentioned all that totally makes sense.

00:06:36 Mike Morton: You didn't, I don't think you left any out. One thing I'd add is that sometimes depending on the project, you have to move those around a little bit. Sometimes a product

00:06:45 Mike Morton: may have a lot more aesthetic and usability, interaction, interactive issues around it.

00:06:52 Mike Morton: So you have to start physically prototyping things, making phone models, things like that earlier on before you actually can get to the more refined CAD models,

00:07:02 Mike Morton: because you just got to discover how well it fits in a hand. And that may drive a lot of the other design. Overview, you're totally on target with that's the right sequence.

00:07:10 Mike Morton: You got to be sensitive as to what you're actually designing. And as you know, sometimes one will drive the other.

00:07:15 Mike Morton: Sometimes you need to prove out of technology to understand how big the envelope needs to be. How big are the motors inside?

00:07:21 Mike Morton: Well, they're a lot bigger than you thought or they're a lot smaller than you thought.

00:07:25 Kevin Mako: That's going to drive a big difference to your aesthetic, to your product design. It's a really good point. And I want to bring a little sidebar to that.

00:07:32 Kevin Mako: We always look at design essentially in two lenses. One is routine design. Essentially, that's putting together preexisting technologies.

00:07:40 Kevin Mako: That's actually what most of new products are. 99% or more of new patents that are filed or of combinations or reconfigurations or improvements on

00:07:48 Kevin Mako: existing technology. Very rarely is somebody coming up with a new thing like the light bulb. It's usually some integration of an existing light bulb that makes for a new product.

00:07:58 Kevin Mako: So that's your routine design. I don't mean routine and downplaying at all. Combining new products is amazing. That actually is the essence of so many new things.

00:08:06 Kevin Mako: But that is one type of design, which has a certain type of processes. The other, we call a. experimental design.

00:08:13 Kevin Mako: This is the unknown. This is where you're pushing the boundaries of technology. Maybe you want to make your product smaller than ever. Maybe you want to add some feature that's

00:08:20 Kevin Mako: never been added before. Maybe you want to hinge that's never been developed before. And Mike, I love how you mentioned these kind of like sidebar projects or sometimes reordering

00:08:28 Kevin Mako: your prototyping because if you have something that's experimental in your product, it's critical possibly up front to sort out that experimental thing.

00:08:37 Kevin Mako: So before you even start developing your product. Whether, as you mentioned, it's a clay model to figure out how it fits in your hand and you

00:08:43 Kevin Mako: need to try 10 little rough prototypes or carve prototypes or 3D prints just to figure out that

00:08:47 Kevin Mako: first because it's critical to your product or whether it's figuring out an actual piece of

00:08:51 Kevin Mako: technology, electronics, mechanics, industrial design, whatever it might be, something that is critical to your product functioning.

00:08:58 Kevin Mako: You might as well figure out the foundation of your product first before then going ahead and building this whole envelope around it. So that's when we look at the design process.

00:09:06 Kevin Mako: If we look at those, say, three or four prototype rounds, you always want to think about these little experimental things that may come up, which are almost mini

00:09:13 Mike Morton: side projects in and amongst your overall main product development plan to get into production. You're reflecting and you're on tire.

00:09:21 Mike Morton: You're expanding exactly correctly. A lot of times people, especially if they're starting out with developing products, they haven't had a lot of

00:09:27 Mike Morton: experience, I've run into people who think, okay, well, we got to do all this work and then we do a

00:09:31 Mike Morton: prototype. You actually probably want to do a bunch of, like you said, the little sidebar stuff to get there, and that's totally okay.

00:09:38 Mike Morton: Sometimes you just hack something out just to prove a point, a little point, and that's a prototype, but it can be really important to help you get to that

00:09:46 Mike Morton: more complete prototype a lot faster. It's great to get as much as you can, but you want to try

00:09:51 Mike Morton: to make sure as much of that is the value, and nothing sort of can detract that because you didn't sort of check it out first. And it's about it.

00:09:58 Mike Morton: We both have experience with saying, hey, let's fix this part first. Let's develop this part first and then do the bigger one. It's not

00:10:05 Mike Morton: necessarily a bam cut and dry thing, which is fine. That's actually, to me, it's great because

00:10:10 Mike Morton: it's a little more organic, especially in a later stage when you really want to make it perfect and you're proving out how everything's working together.

00:10:16 Mike Morton: You want to make sure all that's right and then you do a very large prototype, a large effort to make sure it's all right. But don't be

00:10:22 Mike Morton: afraid. I encourage people I work, but don't be afraid to try stuff out and explore it and have done worked right away and do something else.

00:10:29 Mike Morton: Like you said, all those little phone models and stuff,

00:10:31 Kevin Mako: Every one of them is important. Most of my ideas are crap, but that one good one is the one that we want. You've got to not be afraid to get to that good one.

00:10:38 Kevin Mako: Let's talk about when we're starting to put the technology together. So we figured out, let's say, the core experimental side.

00:10:44 Kevin Mako: And I would argue that most products don't actually have much of an experimental thing, especially if a hardware startup is looking at it in a sophisticated way.

00:10:50 Kevin Mako: You don't want to try and break the bank on figuring out all these new great technologies to begin, especially if this is your first product to market.

00:10:58 Kevin Mako: Try and use pre-existing technology as much as possible to build a, the great new custom product, which is going to have its own intellectual property and its own

00:11:05 Kevin Mako: special features, its own benefits and use cases, but you're keeping it simple. We talk a lot about

00:11:10 Kevin Mako: simplicity on the podcast, so I'll save that for now, but we all know simpler is better for your first product in many reasons to get it to market.

00:11:17 Kevin Mako: But if you're focusing on simplicity, that means you're not doing too much on the experimental side. So let's assume we've built this

00:11:22 Kevin Mako: foundation. Now we're moving into the mock prototype. This is really a first critical phase,

00:11:27 Kevin Mako: Mike. And I want to hear from your experience about when you finally put the electronics and put

00:11:31 Mike Morton: the housing together, what are you trying to build in a first rough prototype? And what are you also not trying to do?

00:11:37 Mike Morton: Yeah. You got to do that because if you put all this effort into that all the other

00:11:42 Mike Morton: finishes and you don't get something foundational right in the first place, you may have to change all of that work you did.

00:11:48 Mike Morton: So that first prototype is really so important for, you know, what does it really look like off of a computer screen. In 3D, it looks like one thing in the real life. It may be

00:11:58 Mike Morton: pretty different and you got to change stuff. If you try to do everything in that, you'll have to redo it. Find out how all those systems work together because there's a

00:12:07 Mike Morton: lot of times they're all working great on their own, but when they come together, there's complexities. And you discover

00:12:12 Mike Morton: stuff. I find that a lot of times those rough prototypes where you're just sort of Lego blocking things together to see how they work, that can drive a lot of really great

00:12:22 Mike Morton: design. You discover new things and the way things work and it's like, oh, this didn't need to be that big or oh, this needed more

00:12:28 Mike Morton: structure or we can make a better handhold point at this place that you couldn't know before you started to put it all together like that and saw how it interacted.

00:12:37 Mike Morton: I really like those rough early prototypes. You haven't spent time and budget, which is an important thing for startups,

00:12:43 Mike Morton: on those final finishes and details that you can generally always manage later. Obviously, you plan these things.

00:12:50 Kevin Mako: You can generally always manage those later and not have to redo. I think those early sort of red-boardy kind of prototypes, we bring it together are some of the more critical one.

00:13:00 Kevin Mako: That's amazing things. I love how you mentioned the opportunity there, because that's something especially new hardware startups.

00:13:06 Kevin Mako: They assume that these engineers and industrial designers are some kind of wizards. And you know what they are? They're borderline rocket scientists, these folks, right?

00:13:12 Kevin Mako: Many of them spent 20, 30 years developing these sorts of products, hundreds of different products. But they're not magicians.

00:13:19 Kevin Mako: They can't take all of this technology you're trying to put together, put it together on the computer screen, and then magically hope that it's just going to pop out and perfection

00:13:27 Kevin Mako: ready to go and produce. And that's a major fallacy, right? The big part of prototyping that the engineers love is not the actual prototype itself. That's what the client loves.

00:13:37 Kevin Mako: They see this physical thing and it's working and is their dream coming to life. It's amazing. But what they love about a prototype is the ability to break it.

00:13:44 Kevin Mako: You figure out what's working well and what's working poorly and engineering all those little details in and around the discoveries that they're making physically with the products

00:13:53 Kevin Mako: in their hand in conjunction with the CAD software on the computer. It's a nice relationship between CAD software and the real physical world that actually

00:14:01 Kevin Mako: creates a lot of these design opportunities that you mentioned, a lot of the brilliance,

00:14:06 Mike Morton: a lot of the aha moments, a lot of those technological discoveries actually happen between that relationship between CAD and the physical world prototypes. You're totally right.

00:14:16 Mike Morton: A lot of people might remember that Elon Musk, they made a whole bunch of those rockets with the intention of blowing them up.

00:14:20 Mike Morton: They knew they weren't going to happen the first time. You just have to do that.

00:14:24 Mike Morton: You can't approach, especially those early prototypes from the standpoint of this has to be perfect. It's really, how do I break this?

00:14:30 Mike Morton: What am I going to find out from this that's going to lead me to a better product? And I like how you brought that up.

00:14:36 Mike Morton: You don't want to be married to it and think that's the best thing because you discover so much. So even when we were at Dell, we made so many prototypes.

00:14:43 Mike Morton: I ended up having basically a whole office next to mine just full of prototypes on every project,

00:14:48 Mike Morton: whether they were starting out with basic rough foam things where we would make five, six, 10 different ideas, even all the way through to early production or

00:14:57 Mike Morton: pre-production stuff where we were still dialing it in. We would do a lot of that work. You could make stuff and look at it and spend a bunch of money on it.

00:15:05 Mike Morton: It didn't work, but it was great for us because we could dial in faster to where we needed to be.

00:15:09 Mike Morton: you don't have to do that all the time at all, but you can learn a lot by making good decisions

00:15:14 Kevin Mako: about those, but making those prototypes, those variations really helps to solve the problems and save money later.

00:15:21 Kevin Mako: You're spending it now versus much more on something more finished. Well, and I think that becomes very apparent when we get into the technical detailing,

00:15:29 Kevin Mako: the engineering, the mechanical engineering, the physical engineering of the product as we move,

00:15:33 Kevin Mako: let's say from a first rough breadboard mock prototype, let's call it, and then we move into

00:15:38 Kevin Mako: real tight tolerance mechanical prototypes, things that actually work and function, possibly even feel the way that a real prototype should.

00:15:45 Kevin Mako: That's where a lot of that detailed engineering work and that problem solving happens. One of the things that's really important to note as a

00:15:52 Kevin Mako: hardware startup is it seems like it's an expensive phase, but know that those problems only balloon and cost the further you go into production.

00:16:02 Kevin Mako: So you're actually saving a tremendous amount of money, the more engineering work, the more testing, tweaking refinement that you put

00:16:09 Kevin Mako: into that prototyping, especially now whether we're talking moving from mock prototype to

00:16:13 Mike Morton: mechanical prototype, at that mechanical phase, that detailed work, that money you're spending

00:16:18 Mike Morton: is saving you tremendous headaches down the road or even finding, as you mentioned, I really like that you brought that up, finding great opportunities. Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:16:27 Mike Morton: No, you're totally right. It's hard to say, hey, spending this money now is going to save a problem later. when you don't know what the problem later is necessarily going to be.

00:16:35 Mike Morton: But we've done this, we both have done this enough that it just every single time it's a good investment. The times that you don't do it, you learn from them.

00:16:43 Mike Morton: We've learned a lot of those lessons. One of the lessons I've learned is prototype early and often and test that stuff out.

00:16:48 Mike Morton: Even at the latest stage, you've got to be prepared that, hey, it may not work perfectly,

00:16:52 Kevin Mako: it may not be right, and we may have to do another one. That's totally okay. Just be ready for it because your objective is to get that final product that you can make,

00:17:01 Kevin Mako: 10, 20, 100,000 a month of and build a business out. If you look at it from that standpoint, it's a great investment.

00:17:07 Kevin Mako: I really appreciate you mentioning that because the thing that you really have to keep in mind as well is if you're doing another round of a prototype, or let's say

00:17:15 Kevin Mako: even just a certain part of it, you don't like the way it's working and now you're tweaking that. It's not just money down the drain.

00:17:21 Kevin Mako: You're actually coming up with tremendous amounts of equity value there, intellectual property value or future value of your product business, which is really

00:17:30 Kevin Mako: the end goal for any hardware startup. The whole point of making a product is to get the product to market to help people make money.

00:17:36 Kevin Mako: That's the reality of all hardware startups are pretty

00:17:39 Mike Morton: much, let's say, 99% plus of hardware startups out there around that premise. So the early stage

00:17:45 Mike Morton: investments into making your product great is one of the least expensive investments you'll

00:17:52 Mike Morton: ever have in a hardware startup over the life course of that startup. That's every time. That is pretty much every time. So it's a good principle.

00:17:59 Mike Morton: Like I said, it's kind of hard to visualize the undone for it. It's a totally good principle. Even into early production stuff, it's easy to think everything's done.

00:18:06 Mike Morton: You've even got some stuff, you know, the initial parts. You've assembled them in the lab and those are all working good. But production lines can influence how things are.

00:18:15 Mike Morton: So doing those early pilot run productions may not be technically considered a prototype, but to me it kind of is that you're prototyping also your production process.

00:18:24 Mike Morton: And I've seen people who try to rush through that, they put 20 them together in the lab, they think we're good, they're running

00:18:31 Mike Morton: through the production process because they're trying to get to market faster, and something happened, and they get a container load of stuff, it's not right.

00:18:38 Mike Morton: There was that last phase of the process of making a product, whatever you call it, that something got introduced or got

00:18:45 Mike Morton: done a little differently just because of that different environment. Even that should, I think,

00:18:50 Mike Morton: should kind of be considered a prototyping phase of well, where make those 150 of them on a line, and they go test them, you know, before you actually are shipping product and

00:19:00 Mike Morton: are pulling that trigger.

00:19:01 Kevin Mako: Even at that, I think we used to make hundreds and send them out all over the world for people of these systems as they'd come off the line before we actually turned on the

00:19:10 Kevin Mako: real millions a month type of production line because you just couldn't afford to have some variable in that last mile to get it in the way.

00:19:19 Kevin Mako: I like that you mentioned the short production run. I'm a huge fan of short run production, especially for a hardware startup.

00:19:25 Kevin Mako: The interesting thing about a hardware startup versus Dell is that as a startup, when you get your first, let's say even 100 or 200 units out to market, you're a real business with

00:19:34 Kevin Mako: real products in the market, real users that bought them. First of all, that changes the equity valuation of your business astronomically.

00:19:42 Kevin Mako: You're probably worth 10 times or more what you were worth in the prototyping space, which is 10 times more than you were worth in the idea phase.

00:19:49 Kevin Mako: So right out of the gate, you've all of a sudden hit some massive milestone that even if money is the main issue, you've now.

00:19:55 Kevin Mako: substantially increase the value of your organization, the ability to raise capital. But second, I love the way you look at that first production and as your, let's call it

00:20:04 Kevin Mako: your final, final prototype, because that is where you're getting those few units out there, getting real world feedback from real customers, then making those last tiny tweaks and

00:20:14 Kevin Mako: adjustments to do your big run of a thousand or 10,000 or whatever it might be. Imagine the confidence you have as a hardware startup, having 100 units out there, getting

00:20:22 Kevin Mako: feedback, making a few adjustments based on that feedback, then doing a big run. Let alone the sales value.

00:20:28 Kevin Mako: As you're going to sell to that person who's potentially going to buy 10,000 units or whatnot, a distributor, a wholesale or retailer, you can now look back at the 100 units that

00:20:37 Kevin Mako: you've sold and say, this is what we sold to these people and here's how they like it. So again, there's many, many reasons to look at that.

00:20:43 Kevin Mako: But Mike, I want to just go one step back before I let you go here between, let's say your first mechanical prototype and you're more refined or pre-production

00:20:52 Kevin Mako: prototypes addressing that gap and increasing the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting to production at a lower cost.

00:21:01 Kevin Mako: One of the things that's very important to us because most of the work we do are designing products to produce. And at macro design, we have to manage the whole process

00:21:08 Kevin Mako: because most of our clients are small business. They're either inventors, startups, or small

00:21:12 Kevin Mako: producers themselves, they don't have their own in-house design and engineering team for production

00:21:16 Kevin Mako: management. So what we like to do is start bringing the producer in, especially after that first

00:21:21 Kevin Mako: mechanical prototype, possibly even before then as an advisory role, but more and more into the later stage prototypes to get actual manufacturing way in on the precise

00:21:30 Mike Morton: methods, design, structures, materials, components, etc., that they will need to use to actually produce your product. Right.

00:21:37 Mike Morton: Bringing that actually into your prototype so that when you get to production, you're not spending a whole bunch more time and money reconfiguring the wheel at that point.

00:21:45 Mike Morton: I think that's a very critical part of the process. The manufacturer, if you come and you just drop it. even a finished product, fully engineered all the specs,

00:21:54 Mike Morton: is drop it on, they're still likely going to go build their own prototype because they want to make sure that they know it, they've got it right,

00:22:01 Mike Morton: so the sooner you can get them into the process, like you're saying, even early as an advisory role,

00:22:06 Mike Morton: but especially in that stage in between, here's how we think it's going to work, and then here's the final, their input will change how you do it.

00:22:13 Mike Morton: If they're involved in those more in those intermediate stages,

00:22:18 Kevin Mako: those prototypes you come up with, again, going back to the, invention involved in the refinement of the actual design is much more accurate and much more

00:22:27 Kevin Mako: targeted. And you don't end up repeating those cycles. So I think I'm really in agreement that getting them involved is super important.

00:22:34 Kevin Mako: That's great advice, Mike, and especially powerful to new startups that maybe don't have the manufacturing relationship to be able to have the producer

00:22:42 Kevin Mako: spend a whole bunch of time and effort doing their own final stage prototyping or whatnot. Because a lot of the time, you're not going to be producing a run that's big enough for,

00:22:51 Kevin Mako: them to jump head over heels, trying to fix all your problems for you. So you need to come to them with a very well vetted solution.

00:22:58 Kevin Mako: What easier way to well vet the solution than bringing them in on some of those earlier prototypes. So you're not cutting corners by trying to jump over all

00:23:05 Kevin Mako: the prototyping steps and somehow dump it on a manufacturer, which we've already talked about never works.

00:23:10 Kevin Mako: Doesn't exist a big business, doesn't exist at startup world. You can't skip prototyping. But more important, you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. If you create a hybrid

00:23:18 Kevin Mako: approach of bringing them in a little bit throughout the design process, especially as you're getting

00:23:22 Kevin Mako: into prototyping, more as you're getting into more advanced prototypes, a pre-production prototypes.

00:23:27 Kevin Mako: So by the time you actually get to production, you've already ironed out 80 or 90 percent of the

00:23:31 Kevin Mako: details that it would be sorting out, the product's designed in a way that they like, that you as the

00:23:34 Kevin Mako: client likes, and that the design firm from an aesthetic and a design and a usability perspective like. So all partners are on board.

00:23:41 Kevin Mako: This simply leads to a better quality product, higher success rate, lower defect rate, and certainly cheaper.

00:23:48 Kevin Mako: Overall, by the time you go from design engineering, prototyping into production, if you do it the right way, it's going to be exponentially cheaper than making those

00:23:56 Kevin Mako: mistakes later and later on. The biggest mistake you'll ever make is having tooling run and having it completely messed up at that point in time and having to redo that again.

00:24:04 Mike Morton: That's really expensive, even more expensive than that is if it's already out in user's hands, we can't fix that remotely.

00:24:10 Mike Morton: So now you've got a brand cost, which is exponentially bigger than even your tooling.

00:24:14 Kevin Mako: cost. So again, bring those costs back earlier in the process as we talked about and then smooth that out as you go into production. It's always an advantage that way.

00:24:23 Mike Morton: And they like to do that because usually manufacture, if you got one, they want you to be successful. They want you to sell products so they can make more.

00:24:31 Mike Morton: That's how they make money too. Mike, much appreciated for all your words of wisdom today. I know we're running over here on time. So I will let you go. But it's always a

00:24:38 Mike Morton: pleasure having you on the show. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks again. Same here. Great to see you again, Kevin. And I'm happy to be here. Just call me anytime.

00:24:44 Mike Morton: Thanks, Mike. Take care.

00:24:46 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast,

00:24:50 Narrator: the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success.

00:24:56 Narrator: This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber

00:25:05 Narrator: in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your,

00:25:14 Narrator: invention, head over to MakoDesign.com. That's M-A-K-O Design dot com for a free consultation from one of

00:25:23 Narrator: Mako-designs for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.