{"id":16809,"date":"2018-12-05T10:44:27","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T18:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foundersnetwork.com\/?p=16809"},"modified":"2018-12-10T14:37:55","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T22:37:55","slug":"how-hardware-startups-should-adress-early-stage-momentum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foundersnetwork.com\/how-hardware-startups-should-adress-early-stage-momentum\/","title":{"rendered":"How Hardware Startups Should Address Early Stage Momentum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Rabin has been a member of\u00a0Founders Network<\/span><\/a>\u00a0since January 2018. He\u2019s also been a prominent FN member in our\u00a0Vancouver\u00a0Chapter<\/span><\/a>. To receive peer mentorship from Mark and over 600 fellow Tech Founders, please\u00a0request an invite<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and join our global network.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

One of my major learnings (among many) in business always circles back to get customers, get traction, get revenue, get feedback, iterate\/modify, repeat. This seems obvious on so many levels, right? However, it\u2019s one of the toughest cycles to engage in at the early stages, especially if you\u2019re doing hardware or clean tech. It\u2019s so much easier to claim that the market is huge and your idea is the best, and if you had $2M, you could make a few prototypes, and apply for a hundred patents, and then you could move to a full-scale demonstration project, and then you would get customer feedback, and generate $100M in revenue and so on\u2014 the stories are endless. However, this is an outdated way to address early stage momentum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Business always circles back to get customers, get traction, get revenue, get feedback, iterate, modify, repeat.”\u00a0@portablelectric<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With Portable Electric<\/a>, we built 11 prototypes with our own cash and started renting them and getting them into customers\u2019 hands the very day they were finished. We started generating cash flow, product awareness, and valuable customer and market feedback. This wasn\u2019t an easy feat by any stretch, however it allowed us to begin to understand what our true challenges were, and where the real opportunities lay. NOTE: before spending your hard-earned cash making prototypes, or anything for that matter, you have to have identified a customer\/market need and scoped out the competition\u2026but of course you all know that!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Before spending your hard-earned cash making prototypes, you have to have identified a customer\/market need and scoped out the competition.”\u00a0@portablelectric<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These \u201cobvious” lessons were hard learned while doing my first energy technology start up, doing small portable pay-as-you-go energy systems for the developing world (at the time I was at the forefront of the pay-as-you-go energy movement\u2014 which is now big business). We were caught in the fallacy that we needed millions of dollars to refine the product and tech development; and that we needed to do a large demonstration project with hundreds of homes, and many employees in challenging regions, etc. Everyone we met or pitched loved the idea, liked us as people, and thought our 1 semi-functional prototype was cool, however the conversation fell apart EVERY time when we were asked how many customers we had, who\u2019s tried our units, what data could we show, how many units do we have out in the field, revenue, etc. \u00a0We even spent tens of thousands of dollars on patents that amounted to no traction, and ultimately, we dropped them because we couldn\u2019t afford to keep the process going.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, I took these very fundamental learnings and internalized them into the fabric of Portable Electric<\/a>, and essentially created a \u201cliving lab\u201d where our prototypes became working, cash generating, marketing tools which allowed us to refine our commercial products over a 2-year period. How did this happen you ask?<\/strong><\/p>\n