Product Startup Podcast Episode 174: Agile Hardware Development

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from one of the world's leading CAD software pioneers on Agile Hardware Development and Additive Manufacturing.

00:00:07 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:15 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups,

00:00:20 Narrator: sponsored by PTC's two best-in-class 3D CAD product software solutions, Onshape, and Creo,

00:00:25 Narrator: and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product

00:00:29 Narrator: development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:34 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm very excited to introduce Jon Hirschtick to the show. John is the co-founder of both SOLIDWORKS and Onshape. In his 42 years of building these

00:00:43 Kevin Mako: platforms, his software has been used to design more physical consumer products than anything else on Earth.

00:00:48 Kevin Mako: Onshape alone has over 3 million designers on the cloud software platform. Today, John is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors' startups and

00:00:54 Kevin Mako: small manufacturers on why agile product development is so important for hardware startups.

00:00:59 Kevin Mako: what additive manufacturing can do to facilitate agile development and how modern tools are making easier than ever to get to market faster at a higher quality and iteratively.

00:01:08 Kevin Mako: Now on to the episode. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Kevin, great to be here. Really excited to have you on today.

00:01:15 Kevin Mako: You are one of the pioneers of CAD software. Millions and millions of users around the world use your

00:01:21 Kevin Mako: software from the early days of SOLIDWORKS to the incredible on-shaped software, which is used by over

00:01:26 Kevin Mako: three million people around the world now to design the next great innovations. You've been doing this for over 40 years.

00:01:34 Kevin Mako: So we're really excited today to talk about, first of all, I want to know the story, how you got from where you are then to the leader that you are today. And then we'll

00:01:41 Kevin Mako: get into what's happening in the industry, especially around additive manufacturing and agile

00:01:45 Jon Hirschtick: design. Yeah, great. So I grew up in Chicago. I went to Chicago public schools. I went to

00:01:52 Jon Hirschtick: high school in Displains, Illinois, at the school where they filmed the movie The Breakfast Club, by the way, small trivia point.

00:02:00 Jon Hirschtick: In that building, I learned both drafting on paper and computer programming. So those turned out to be two relevant skills. I was a magician when I was a kid.

00:02:09 Jon Hirschtick: I sold stamps with my father on the weekend stamps to collectors. It was a side business he had,

00:02:14 Jon Hirschtick: and I learned from him a ton about how to treat customers right, which is something I really

00:02:19 Jon Hirschtick: I believe in. I majored in mechanical engineering and product design, you know, physical product design at MIT.

00:02:25 Jon Hirschtick: And I did a summer internship because I knew how to program computers and I knew about mechanical engineering.

00:02:31 Jon Hirschtick: I ended up at computer vision for an internship in 1981. And I've worked on CAD and PDM systems ever since. I worked in a number of companies. I had a startup

00:02:41 Jon Hirschtick: before SOLIDWORKS. And most notably founded SOLIDWORKS was a long time CEO. They are co-founded with some

00:02:48 Jon Hirschtick: other people stayed 18 years and then left and co-founded Onshape and CEO there for a while. And we sold that to PTC where I am now.

00:02:56 Jon Hirschtick: Well, I also played professional Blackjack on the MIT Blackjack team. That's another little thing. And I learned from that too.

00:03:01 Kevin Mako: Everything contributes, you know. So let's talk about what's happening in the world of product development, specifically around additive manufacturing and agile.

00:03:09 Kevin Mako: And then most importantly, what are the tools that are enabling this to happen? I know we use obviously Onshape and PTC software all the time at the design house.

00:03:18 Kevin Mako: The key there is understanding how that actually trickles back to the technologies that are emerging,

00:03:23 Kevin Mako: simply to make it easier, faster, better, higher quality, more innovative, et cetera,

00:03:29 Jon Hirschtick: for hardware startups to get their new ideas out to the real market. Okay, well, those are great topics, Kevin. Happy to talk about this. Let's start with Agile.

00:03:37 Jon Hirschtick: In summary, we're seeing hardware developers change the process they use. Maybe not you because it sounds like you were ahead of the curve with Agile-type thinking.

00:03:45 Jon Hirschtick: But everywhere I go, we're seeing people basically, build hardware, the way they build software, a little bit more moving in that direction.

00:03:53 Jon Hirschtick: Using an agile process, what are we mean by agile process? Well, there's no two uses of agile

00:03:57 Jon Hirschtick: that are same. Everyone does agile a little differently, but generally what it means is working in sprints, short periods of time, a series of short sprints

00:04:07 Jon Hirschtick: instead of a long Gant chart for a year or two. You see a sprint plan for a few weeks, and then we readjust the next few weeks plan. Just that alone can be part of agile.

00:04:16 Jon Hirschtick: Then there's an emphasis on producing at the end of each sprint as close as possible to a deliverable product. Then there's

00:04:23 Jon Hirschtick: an attitude of hyper collaboration where it works. It really works. Anyone who's interested can look at the Agile Manifesto Online.

00:04:32 Jon Hirschtick: Atlassian, a maker of Jira, they have fantastic resources about Agile Online.

00:04:37 Jon Hirschtick: And soon, I'm publishing a white paper with Professor Stephen Eppinger of MIT, world expert on product design process that will be coming out.

00:04:47 Jon Hirschtick: Many things, we're going to have a lot of discussion about Agile at our upcoming LiveWorks conference in May 15th through 18th in Boston. So anyway, lots to learn

00:04:54 Jon Hirschtick: about Agile. So what we're seeing, why are we seeing people do this? I think there's four reasons why agile, why now?

00:05:01 Jon Hirschtick: One is everyone who's building hardware is building software. I'm sure you see that. Many of your products would have software. And the software community has gone all agile,

00:05:10 Jon Hirschtick: basically. From none of it, when I got into software, or even 20 years ago, no one ever heard of the word agile. Today, it's the standard. So think about that, huge shift.

00:05:19 Jon Hirschtick: So software is agile. Two,

00:05:21 Jon Hirschtick: the workforce that you have today. Joining the workforce, they're naturally agile thinkers. They're used to real-time collaboration. They're used to working more quickly.

00:05:30 Jon Hirschtick: I'm sure you see that in the emerging people you hire. I know I see it. They're comfortable with the tools. They don't send paper mail.

00:05:38 Jon Hirschtick: they communicate by text, Discord, Slack. It's a different world. Real-time collaboration globally,

00:05:45 Jon Hirschtick: that's daily life for them in their classes and their video games. So software workforce. Third reason

00:05:51 Jon Hirschtick: is change the world of the product design of the world around them, changing constantly at rates we

00:05:57 Jon Hirschtick: never saw. I mean changes in, of course, in supply chain, who's available to make things,

00:06:02 Jon Hirschtick: the availability of components, the availability of raw materials, the costs you're paying for all these things, more volatility than ever.

00:06:09 Jon Hirschtick: The prices that you can charge for products, more volatile than ever, the quantities you need to produce things in, more volatile than ever,

00:06:16 Jon Hirschtick: who's on your team, where they're working. Even the consumer preferences change faster than ever. As I talk to our customers, you would know this better than I would.

00:06:25 Jon Hirschtick: So in this world of volatile change all around the product developer, you need a process that can adapt to that. You know, not, oh, well, we set our plan a year ago.

00:06:34 Jon Hirschtick: Well, who can set a plan for a year these days and stay on it. You have to adjust and replant. And then finally, the fourth reason is the tools

00:06:43 Jon Hirschtick: are there. You can do Agile on paper if you want, but in the software world, new tools came on GitHub,

00:06:49 Jon Hirschtick: Jira. In the hardware world, we use some of those same tools, Jira, but you have Onshape that we've built, Arena, you have, and hardware developers are using things

00:06:59 Jon Hirschtick: like Miro and SmartSheet. All these things are sort of the signature tools. So the four reasons are software, workforce,

00:07:06 Jon Hirschtick: change and tools are all converging to

00:07:11 Kevin Mako: drive agile in hardware development. So effective, especially for hardware startups, because hardware startups have this great advantage over the big corporations.

00:07:19 Kevin Mako: They can move fast. They're nimble. You've got innovative ideas that you're bringing to the table. I mean, that's the invention.

00:07:25 Kevin Mako: Most of the clients have come to macro design, they've come up with some improvement or reduced to pain point or saw a connection between two objects that would make it better.

00:07:34 Kevin Mako: Whatever the innovation might be, you've come up with some.

00:07:36 Jon Hirschtick: Stroke of genius, let's call it, and you figured out that cornivation. Can I just reflect on that for a moment? You said startups.

00:07:42 Jon Hirschtick: What's interesting to me, Kevin, I don't know if you agree, is today, I would say the cool product developers are startups or people want to work like startups. You get a lot

00:07:51 Jon Hirschtick: of large companies today that come to us and say, John, we're changing the way we work. We're interested in using it, I mean big companies. You would know the names.

00:07:59 Jon Hirschtick: They want to work like Startups, it used to be people would come to us and say, we want to build a product the way the big companies do.

00:08:05 Jon Hirschtick: Now, people are like, we want to work like a startup. Because in the big industries, they're realizing that they've got to change the processes. So I have CTOs of

00:08:14 Jon Hirschtick: multi-billion dollar companies coming in to talk to meet with us in our work at PTC and Unshap and saying, John, we want to work like a startup.

00:08:21 Jon Hirschtick: How do we do it? How do we get our team to be agile, innovative, faster cycle times, more innovation? They get it. And they're watching it happen.

00:08:28 Kevin Mako: And thinking like a startup is very in vogue, even if you're not a startup. I'm glad you brought that up because it's quite interesting.

00:08:34 Kevin Mako: Over the years, I've got a huge influx, especially more recently from big companies that are

00:08:40 Kevin Mako: hiring us, even though we're specifically a design for manufacturing firm for startups. They're calling us, and we've got a whole bunch of corporate clients.

00:08:47 Kevin Mako: You can see some of the names on our website. They say, we want that style of product development in some old dodgy industry or maybe it's

00:08:54 Kevin Mako: like a new hot product that they're trying to really innovate and be fresh and modern and forward thinking or they want to learn how to develop agile like a startup because

00:09:02 Kevin Mako: the reality is, especially from what we see in the startup world, especially from what you talked about regarding

00:09:07 Kevin Mako: those four points is, I think most startups want to be and generally are developing the agile

00:09:11 Kevin Mako: framework. If we look all the way back to product development, one of the core things that

00:09:15 Kevin Mako: most startups want to do is design and engineer something to get to an end state that you mentioned, which is the prototype, break the prototype to learn from it.

00:09:23 Kevin Mako: That's what the engineers want to do. Obviously, the client wants to like see it and play with it and possibly market it.

00:09:28 Kevin Mako: and then tweak and refine based on both the internal engineering feedback. How do we make it better?

00:09:33 Kevin Mako: But also external collaborative feedback with potential stakeholders, primarily customers, especially as you evolve your product from a rough prototype into a refined into maybe

00:09:42 Kevin Mako: a short production run. And that's what we can talk about soon with additive. But how do we actually start getting both

00:09:48 Kevin Mako: internal feedback from engineering and other stakeholders like investors, the inventor, etc., as well as external feedback from the market, the real market?

00:09:56 Kevin Mako: And that allows you to pivot quickly, modify your design and basically have that software agile framework in a hardware environment.

00:10:03 Kevin Mako: Now, the one thing I want to mention about the difference, I would say, between software agile and hardware agile.

00:10:09 Kevin Mako: And this is something that we profess quite heavily, especially from developing a new product as a new startup brand, is unlike software, you do need to focus on quality with

00:10:18 Kevin Mako: your release. Whereas in hardware, you can't patch fix it. And there's no bug fix. So you have to execute

00:10:25 Kevin Mako: with quality and therefore you can't try and be everything to everyone or even focus on MVP

00:10:30 Kevin Mako: or even just pre-released with something that's not quite flushed out because your product will sink

00:10:35 Kevin Mako: right away. So that's why the slight difference is focus on less features, but high quality

00:10:40 Kevin Mako: of those features and iterate in an agile framework, exactly as you're talking about. Excellent point.

00:10:46 Kevin Mako: So let's talk a bit about additive because that's really a major layer of agile, especially in the hardware sphere where we get to kind of mimic some of the benefits of software

00:10:55 Jon Hirschtick: agile, but actually start doing them in the hardware world now. You probably know as much about

00:11:00 Jon Hirschtick: additive as I do, but I'll tell you, first of all, I found additive a long time, Kevin, longer than most people know it existed. I knew Professor L.A.

00:11:07 Jon Hirschtick: Sacks at MIT in the 80s when he was starting to talk about 3D printing, a real pioneer. I watched the first machines come out. I was

00:11:14 Jon Hirschtick: aware of additive, you know, literally, it's been around 30 years. And then I was an advisor to companies like Z-Corp 20 years ago.

00:11:23 Jon Hirschtick: So additive's been around a long time. So when I see a Some people are like, oh, yeah, well, additive, you know, we've been using that for years,

00:11:29 Jon Hirschtick: and, you know, I checked it out a few years ago. Well, it's changing every year, okay? When I hear the word additive or 3D printing, I think about, like, the way computers are,

00:11:37 Jon Hirschtick: you know, like you can say, well, 20 years ago, I looked at what a computer was and I thought I understood it. Well, it all changes.

00:11:42 Jon Hirschtick: If you haven't really looked at it, in fact, I think if you're going to go to any convention, we want you to come to LiveWorks for PTC, but another type of convention, go look

00:11:51 Jon Hirschtick: at 3D printing because it changes every year, what the machines are capable. the materials, the techniques, the way people are using it, the level of support you get with

00:12:00 Jon Hirschtick: software, it's all changing every year. This is my view. So when I go in to see my customers,

00:12:06 Jon Hirschtick: whether there are people in big companies, small companies, even universities, I'm seeing changes in how it's being used.

00:12:13 Jon Hirschtick: So it's being used, I would say, at 100%, it's no longer whether you use it or not, because everyone's using it. The question is, how are you using it?

00:12:22 Jon Hirschtick: Some people I'll call not fixtures or tooling, but ancillary equipment. The things you have to generally build

00:12:29 Jon Hirschtick: besides your product, test rigs, you might call that tooling, I guess, is fair enough. But it's not just

00:12:35 Jon Hirschtick: tooling as in things that, fixtures that hold things while they're machining. I go to my customers and I see it being used in such a variety of way.

00:12:42 Jon Hirschtick: And end user parts, it's no longer just the trade show example or something to show from the lab, you know, look at this weird thing we made. I'm seeing

00:12:50 Jon Hirschtick: incredible parts that are being added manufactured. And so basically staying at the forefront,

00:12:57 Jon Hirschtick: understanding what the machines are capable of the materials is often where the action is,

00:13:01 Kevin Mako: I think. People focus in the machines, but the materials are where you should keep your eyes open, in my opinion.

00:13:07 Kevin Mako: The beauty, especially in the prototyping world, is that there are so many more tools to allow us essentially to closely mimic what the end mass manufactured produced

00:13:17 Kevin Mako: unit is going to work like, feel like, look like. So you can much more quickly de-risk your

00:13:24 Kevin Mako: eventual manufacturing by bringing more and more of that manufacturing technology that used to require very expensive tooling in order just to test.

00:13:33 Kevin Mako: You can now that bring so many of those tools, materials, et cetera, into the prototyping sphere to allow you to execute on the end product quicker, faster, more iterative, etc.

00:13:43 Kevin Mako: There's many, many benefits in every year to become more and more, but we're seeing it now to the point where if we're doing like a final prototype pre-production,

00:13:52 Kevin Mako: it is nearly as good as the final production, sometimes even better in a number of different ways, so that you can really accurately be running a series of tests.

00:14:00 Kevin Mako: So initially, you want to be working on your physical test to ensure that the engineering and the reliability is sound,

00:14:06 Kevin Mako: but again, as mentioned before, thinking about your end market testing, which is what's so

00:14:09 Kevin Mako: powerful about crowdfunding as well, because you can now take a really good pre-production prototype

00:14:14 Kevin Mako: that's staged and ready to go into manufacturing and just present that to the market in a whole

00:14:18 Kevin Mako: variety of ways. Obviously, you have your crowdfunding campaigns, but there's pre-orders and letter of intents and partnership interest and all the rest.

00:14:25 Kevin Mako: Lots of different ways to sell before you've even started producing product. But with a product, especially in a hardware space, that you are comfortable

00:14:32 Jon Hirschtick: enough that is 99.9% ready for and prepared and designed for manufacturing.

00:14:39 Jon Hirschtick: And by the way, when I said the tools, going back to Agile, tying these together, and you already did in a big way, but additive is one of the tools that enable Agile.

00:14:48 Jon Hirschtick: You can come a lot closer with additive. Additive is a big tool in the box to enable some of that. So additive is on that list

00:14:56 Jon Hirschtick: of when I said the fourth reason for Agile is tools. Additive is one of those tools. It's not just software tools like OnShap.

00:15:02 Jon Hirschtick: I've been getting out and visiting customers and in the first three months of 2003, I visited 13 user sites on site.

00:15:10 Kevin Mako: So I love doing that. I'm seeing so many interesting things there. Let's talk a bit about the software tools that are enabling all this to happen.

00:15:18 Kevin Mako: Onshape has obviously a major leaps and bounds in terms of connecting the concept design through to

00:15:24 Kevin Mako: and including not only the prototyping and the additive manufacturing, but all the way through to actual full production as well.

00:15:30 Kevin Mako: Talk a bit about the advantages of the tool sets, especially around

00:15:34 Jon Hirschtick: software, to enable companies like ours at Backo Design to be able to execute these products well for new hardware products. Well, we built Onshape to solve the problem.

00:15:43 Jon Hirschtick: problems that we saw. What I saw were the problems people had, especially as they try to enter

00:15:48 Jon Hirschtick: the modern world of product development, with getting access to software, configuring a computer, installing software.

00:15:54 Jon Hirschtick: First of all, what people want to be is innovative and fast these days and maybe save staff hours and money. Those are big things on people's minds. So with solvers,

00:16:03 Jon Hirschtick: you set up a special computer, you know, you know what it's like you're getting your team comes to, oh, we need graphics card and configuration.

00:16:10 Jon Hirschtick: I need special person to set it all up. And we device driver and all this stuff who has time for that anymore i mean you're working with teams all over

00:16:17 Jon Hirschtick: the world you're adding new people so that's the first issue then there's a software oh my gosh you know downloads install service packs license codes crazy click-throughs you know

00:16:27 Jon Hirschtick: entering these long codes and license code servers and then by the way the big problem is who's on what version of the system

00:16:34 Jon Hirschtick: you know this come and you deal with it all the time you're just so used to it's what my partner

00:16:38 Jon Hirschtick: john mackling calls a ski boot problem it's uncomfortable we get so used to it you just part of life. And then you got the issue of files, data stored in files.

00:16:47 Jon Hirschtick: Essentially, when we built SOLIDWORKS, like all the systems of its era, the database we used was C colon backslash. That's the

00:16:56 Jon Hirschtick: database. It's files. You know, it's just stuck on your disk and files. What does that mean? Well, it means that in order for you to work, you need a copy of files.

00:17:04 Jon Hirschtick: And now as soon as there's copies, there's problem. Well, we'll install a PDM server. Oh, that's a great idea. Now we're making more copies of files and we're locking them.

00:17:14 Jon Hirschtick: Like, those things are pain in the ass. They slow you out. And people were afraid to make changes. We looked at those problems and we saw what cloud web and mobile were about.

00:17:22 Jon Hirschtick: What was happening was Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, Zendesk, Google Docs. Basically, everything was being built with cloud native.

00:17:31 Jon Hirschtick: Now with cloud native, that's not like hosting the app in the cloud. That's not what it's about. It's about rethinking the app to use a different architecture.

00:17:39 Jon Hirschtick: So all those systems I just mentioned, there are no files. There's nothing installed, or there's no issue with versions of the system.

00:17:45 Jon Hirschtick: Everyone uses the same master instance because it's in one place in the cloud. Your tools and your data are in one place in the cloud, a database that contains design iterations

00:17:54 Jon Hirschtick: and changes to your models. Incredibly powerful. The result is anyone can use it anywhere. You don't have to buy special computers anymore.

00:18:02 Jon Hirschtick: Sorry, if you've got a person whose job it is is to configure special computers, they're going to have to go to work building more innovative products for your company instead.

00:18:10 Jon Hirschtick: We run on phones and tablets. Younger people expect that. And a lot of people are like, well, John, we run our CAD workstations in the office.

00:18:18 Jon Hirschtick: Well, good luck competing with people who are working around the clock, around the globe. You add a new person, no problem. You just go to the console, share data with that, boom.

00:18:27 Jon Hirschtick: So the result is teams work faster. They're more innovative. They save a ton of people's money and time. And it's built for the modern era.

00:18:35 Kevin Mako: That's what we're doing with Anshay. People told me it was a crazy idea, but people told me SOLIDWORKS. was a crazy idea. A big part of the value of OnShap is what you mentioned.

00:18:44 Kevin Mako: Because you have OnShap on the cloud, you can now be collaborative. And that's a huge deal. Not only can you check it anywhere from any device at any time.

00:18:51 Kevin Mako: And even you mentioned the phone and tablet. Yes, most CAD designers still want to work at a desk or a workstation. However, how often are you caught in a situation

00:18:59 Kevin Mako: either on site or you're on the train or whatever else? You need to just quickly even check something or rotate or send an image or maybe make a light adjustment, whatever else.

00:19:08 Kevin Mako: Well, the phones and tablets are becoming more and more powerful where you can at least do small, simple tweaks in real

00:19:14 Kevin Mako: time. The fact that you've got this all built on the cloud allows you that massive layer that you kind of alluded to there, which is collaboration.

00:19:21 Kevin Mako: Now we can have people all over the world working on the same file at the same time, saving version history and edit history as opposed to saving files to some core drive.

00:19:30 Kevin Mako: It's all done automatically and simply. So that really becomes very powerful. And I want you to go into it a bit. Now that we kind of an understanding of how CAD software

00:19:38 Kevin Mako: should and is built now in the cloud for modern design, how does that apply to the coordination

00:19:44 Jon Hirschtick: between prototyping into short run manufacturing and then into full scale manufacturing?

00:19:50 Jon Hirschtick: Great question, Kevin. I'm going to start by reflecting that Onshape. We say it's a CAD system that has PDM.

00:19:56 Jon Hirschtick: It's really, Onshape really is built as a PDM system at its core with CAD built around it.

00:20:02 Jon Hirschtick: So what it means is we had this design goal, like I listen to your podcast and you talk about, what are the key features?

00:20:07 Jon Hirschtick: One of our key philosophies was have one system that would allow this breakthrough idea that you could have both speed and freedom and rigor. So as your process

00:20:17 Jon Hirschtick: goes along, Unshap's perfect because when you're just creative firing away, you can design

00:20:22 Jon Hirschtick: fearlessly, as my colleague Greg Brown says, he says, you can design fearlessly in OnShape. When it comes time to have the rigor later in your process of, you know, release to

00:20:31 Jon Hirschtick: manufacturing,

00:20:33 Jon Hirschtick: approvals, notifications, design reviews, clear, traceable release management. We have that too, but we don't sacrifice one for the other.

00:20:41 Jon Hirschtick: The rigor doesn't mean you give up speed and freedom, and the speed and freedom doesn't mean you give up rigor. You can choose those. You can get started

00:20:47 Jon Hirschtick: with Onshape without realizing there's PDM at all. You can just go, that was our intent. Many users might be listening to this insane. Onshape has PDM.

00:20:54 Jon Hirschtick: I didn't even know that. You probably just did something simple. You don't need it. It doesn't get in the way. But when you need it, it's right there And it's extremely powerful.

00:21:02 Jon Hirschtick: Customized workflows, all these cool things, checking at release, that it meets certain conditions and so forth. We do all those things. So the idea of speed and

00:21:10 Kevin Mako: rigor fitting together in one system was very much a design goal of ours, that it could evolve as your design grows through those phases you talk about.

00:21:18 Kevin Mako: Amazing. John, before I let you go,

00:21:19 Jon Hirschtick: where can people go to download a copy of Onshape? I think you guys are offering it for free for people to test out as well. Well, we do.

00:21:26 Jon Hirschtick: First of all, there's nothing to download. You can go to OnShape.com to learn more at OnShape.com, yes, we have a free plan that's aimed at open source projects,

00:21:35 Jon Hirschtick: maker community, things like that. If you really are professional, which I know your podcast is aimed at, then you really want to use our pro version.

00:21:42 Jon Hirschtick: Go to our website and click on some things and we can set you up in a free trial of our pro version, which is what I recommend for professionals

00:21:48 Jon Hirschtick: out there. You don't just go to the free plan and play with it. You won't really understand what's about getting into our professional trial, get some training.

00:21:55 Jon Hirschtick: It has features in pro that you won't find in the free plan, particularly our company level, PDM features, things like that.

00:22:02 Jon Hirschtick: And then we even have an enterprise plan for our larger customers. We have customers that have a thousand active users a month.

00:22:08 Jon Hirschtick: And they're using our enterprise plan, probably not for the startups out there. But our pro plan is where it's at, free trial Onshape.com. One more important

00:22:17 Jon Hirschtick: thing, we have a startup program for startups now. We just started. It gives you a ton of benefits.

00:22:23 Jon Hirschtick: If you're a qualified startup, you can go and apply onshap.com. Look for the startup program, okay? Or you could probably just Google OnShap startup program and you'll find it.

00:22:33 Jon Hirschtick: It's a really great program.

00:22:34 Kevin Mako: Again, you have to apply to it. And if you're accepted, you get a lot of benefits. Just Google search Onshape startup program.

00:22:41 Kevin Mako: John, I always really appreciate when the big companies are really helping and promoting startups. So thanks so much for you guys.

00:22:48 Kevin Mako: Not only creating great software, that's extremely helpful for all steps, all the way from concept through to manufacturing,

00:22:54 Kevin Mako: but also having programs in place really to help and accelerate the startup world because reality is, and you and I talked about it before the show,

00:23:00 Kevin Mako: startups every year are becoming more and more powerful in terms of how products are developed. We talked about it on this show about how big corporates trying to be like startups.

00:23:09 Kevin Mako: Big corporate is acquiring startups as well. So big corporate is spending less money on developing their own products,

00:23:15 Kevin Mako: more money on acquiring the next hot product that you, the inventors, the innovators that are listening here are bringing forward to,

00:23:21 Kevin Mako: the market. So big picture startup is incredibly important and it's

00:23:26 Jon Hirschtick: amazing to see such help and collaboration from PTC and OnShap and growing the startup community around the hardware space. Well, thank you so much, Kevin.

00:23:34 Jon Hirschtick: And right back at you, thank you for what you're doing with your podcast because I think it's a fantastic set of content for hardware startups. And as you say,

00:23:43 Jon Hirschtick: you're the leader in it.

00:23:44 Kevin Mako: It's really a great resource and I really appreciate you doing it on behalf of the hardware startup community of the world.

00:23:50 Narrator: Well, thanks, John. And we hope to have you back on the show again sooner than later. And of course, for anyone, I'll put all the links below. Check out LiveWorks.

00:23:58 Narrator: Of course, it's an amazing conference that you guys are putting on. The Startup Program, free trial of Anche Pro, all these sorts of things.

00:24:04 Narrator: I'll put the links below for anyone to check out. And John, thanks again for all your words of wisdom today. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks and take care.

00:24:11 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the product startup podcast. If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a quick five-star review.

00:24:18 Narrator: If you have any questions, guest suggestions, or any of you. else feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email podcast at MakoDesign.com. That's podcast at MakoDesign.com.

00:24:28 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. North America's leading expert on product development for physical product startups. Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC, and their two

00:24:36 Narrator: best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo. Mako Design and

00:24:41 Narrator: invent. The original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:24:49 Narrator: Thanks for joining and see you next. time.