We are regularly contacted by self-described inventors who believe very hard in their product idea but do NOT want to manage that product’s development, production, and sale. They are often smart people, brilliant even. But they tend not to be business savvy, and that leads many of them to make costly mistakes. This is especially true for electronic products and relatively complex mechanical products. The million-dollar invention fallacy The truth is, the proportion of new … [Read more...]
7 Typical Pitfalls for Hardware Startups Producing in China
A few years ago, I remember reading about the Coolest Cooler, a nice product that raised an amazing amount of money on Kickstarter: over 6,000 people bought it for a total of 13 million USD!! Yet, they went bust leaving a lot of frustrated backers and interested onlookers scratching their heads as to where it all went wrong for one of the most famous hardware startups of recent times and indeed the most funded Kickstarter campaign of 2014. In this post, I'll explore what went wrong for them … [Read more...]