The Hardware Startup

Chapter 5. Prototyping

Now that you know your user, market, and brand, you should probably get to prototyping. In fact, you’ve probably already been prototyping, whether you know it or not!

Many entrepreneurs think of a prototype as something that looks and works like the final product. The reality is that many, many prototypes of varying success and resolution are necessary during any hardware product development cycle. One phrase commonly used to describe this approach of iterative prototyping is “fail early and often.” It is as true on the prototyping side as it is in business.

Reasons for Prototyping

The most important reason to prototype is fundamentally to learn. You should be learning from each prototype in one or many ways: showing it to potential users for feedback, demoing it to VCs to prove your concept, or even just learning about the prototyping process itself.

It’s important to learn from every prototype by defining a hypothesis, or something you expect to learn from each prototype. This can help you decide how much time and money to spend on the prototype. If you’re bringing a prototype to a VC partner meeting, don’t cut costs: get it from a nice model shop. You also wouldn’t want to spend too much time on your first prototype after your napkin sketch, simply to flesh out your idea in a physical form. It’s important to consider these trade-offs in hardware, since prototype cycles can take 2 to 10 weeks from outside vendors, depending on the process you need and ...