Building and scaling a robotics or hardware company can be a challenging endeavor. It requires careful planning, effective teamwork, and a deep understanding of the various disciplines involved. In this blog post, we will explore the top strategies that can help ensure hardware is not hard when establishing and growing a robotics or hardware company and make your startup attractive to VC investors.
For the founding team its important to have all the skills, including
- Strong engineering background in electronics, mechanical/product design, and/or computer science.
- A clear foresight of who in the founding team will take on the roles of CEO, CTO, and COO when the startup is a little more mature.
It is important for the founding team to then create the right kind of team culture and the following will help you achieve that from the very first intern/employee you hire.
Foster Multidisciplinary Teams
To promote seamless collaboration and avoid silos, it is essential to assemble multidisciplinary teams. Core engineering teams should comprise experts in computer science, electronics, and mechanical engineering who work together from the planning “whiteboard drawing” phase and throughout the rest of the development process. This approach facilitates better integration, testing, and troubleshooting, preventing potential issues down the line.
Maintain Open Communication Channels
Communication is key to success in any organization. In a robotics or hardware company, especially in the early stages, it becomes even more crucial. Establishing open communication channels between teams and management ensures that everyone stays informed about design or development problems as soon as they arise. This enables timely resolution and prevents any major setbacks. The moment there is the smallest problem with the design or development everyone in the team should immediately hear about it so it can be resolved faster than if a single person was left alone to deal with it.
Give your team the freedom to make relevant decisions on their own, provide them an outline of how to make those decisions (for example, “purchase any item you need under $100 without permission from a manager if 3 peers from other teams concur that it is absolutely necessary for the task”), and keep an eye on the outcome of those decisions by making sure you or anyone in a leadership position is approachable by people in your team at any time for any issue, big or small.
Encourage Cross-Training: EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
It is vital for engineers to have a solid understanding of other team members’ roles and responsibilities. Teach each engineer at least one core skill outside their area of expertise, such as coders learning about hardware limitations before writing a single line of code, or mechanical designers understanding electronic components they are using to compensate for design issues like range of motion, torque, proper heat dissipation, wiring, weight distribution, or electronics designers understanding the specs needed to run necessary code and giving their input for decisions into components that would perform best for the necessary motion because of their ability to understand kinematics & inverse-kinematics. This promotes a holistic approach to problem-solving.
This knowledge sharing needs to be done among peers, with limited oversight but determined encouragement from managers. It shows employees HOW other people on their team perform their work, not just what they do, but the step-by-step method they follow. If a coder has to wait for electronics before final testing they should know exactly how long that process can typically last to avoid or minimize major bottlenecks.
Devote Time to Detailed Planning
During the prototype and minimum viable product (MVP) development phases, engineering teams should allocate a significant amount of time to meticulous planning and architecture design. The more time spent on the whiteboard, planning the minutia, the better. Avoid over-engineering a product by identifying only essential features for the hardware design, and adding all other software “bells-and-whistle” features later on.
Management teams during this phase should simultaneously be focused on figuring out customers for the product, distribution channels, all possible logistics that could be involved for distribution, costs, pricing strategy, and manufacturing support needed. These details can be unclear, and require testing, but should still be planned and not hypothetical assumptions on the business plan waiting to be determined after the product is built.
Engage engineers at all levels in these processes, as fresh graduates often bring valuable insights by virtue of keeping up with the latest technological advancements and how they source them. This collaborative approach fosters innovation and sets a solid foundation for successful product development.
By working on the business alongside the product you speed up the process of deployment, stay within budget, and know exactly how to scale it when the time comes.
Many Kickstarter campaigns, that are not scams, which come from first-time founders or a group of makers, have been successfully funded, still fail to deliver the product or face delays because they didn’t take distribution and/or manufacturing costs or time for scale into account.
Include Diverse Decision-Makers
Building a decision-making, managing, or advisory team with diverse backgrounds and extensive knowledge is helpful. Individuals with expertise in design thinking, rapid prototyping, psychology, battery chemistry, wireless communication, and material science can contribute unique perspectives and insights. Their collective wisdom ensures well-informed decision-making throughout the company.
Why psychology? Because in cases where you are making a hardware product that is intended to be used by people on a large scale, you want to make sure you test how people respond to it. If you are building a social robot that everyone on your team thinks looks cute and performs well functionally, but the results from focus groups tell you that kids or the elderly do not respond to it in the intended manner, you will have wasted time, effort, and money into making something your users may not like and it ends up in the trash. In software, people will simply stop using your product and new users will never know the old product was bad if you iterate quickly to fix it. In hardware, your manufactured pieces can end up in the local dumpster pile where everyone can see them and it ends up as a story in the local newspaper.
Foster Collaboration Among Different Disciplines
Allow engineers from different disciplines to collaborate on non-essential projects in a small 3-6 person team with extremely short deadlines, encouraging a “Hackathon Mode” mentality to build a “fun” project. This approach promotes creativity, agility, and fosters an environment where engineers can develop novel ideas that complement the company’s existing offerings.
Bridge the Gap Between Users and Engineering
As you grow beyond the founding team, appoint a manager who actively interacts with end-users, customers, and possesses a deep understanding of the technical aspects of the product.
This individual should be able to communicate effectively with both customers and engineers using their audience’s jargon, bridging the gap between the two. By understanding users’ needs and conveying them to the engineering team, this manager ensures the product genuinely solves real-world problems.
Roboticists, and most engineers, will run rampant to build cool things with cool features that they find exciting with no potential customers outside of the team, but will happily listen to inputs from someone who understands their POV. Its the job of leadership to channel that energy the right way.
This is why crowdfunding is not always a good measure of potential end customers, merely a reflection of early adopters and tinkerers.
Strategic Hiring and Customer Involvement
For the initial engineering hires, focus on subject matter experts who can develop the technology and possess a deep understanding of the problem being solved.
Additionally, employ sales professionals who are adaptable in responding to bugs and customer success issues, and willing to be closely involved in the development process.
Incorporate frequent customer feedback from the outset, running pilot programs and incorporating suggestions into the product’s design iteration. If possible, engage potential customers early in the design process itself. Your customers (people paying for your product) may be different from your users (people using your product every day), so make sure you listen to both.
Strategize Outsourcing
Focus on building the core competency in-house. Do not outsource anything till someone from your team has first tried solving that problem or learning the necessary skill. By learning what a part of your complete supply chain process looks like BEFORE outsourcing, you can determine if the outsourced team is doing a better job than anything your team could have done and how high priority that process is.
If it takes every single competent member of your team 3 hours to do a task, outsourcing should be done only if the external team can do the task in less than 3 hours and in a similar budget.
If both internal and outsourced teams do the task in the same amount of time, it becomes a decision of cost, whether or not the task is outside the capabilities of the current team, or no one in the team wants to perform it, nor can it be automated by your current team. In this scenario, it should be outsourced or automated by an external team, if it is cheaper to do so than hiring a person, especially if you are a lean team with budget constraints.
When you outsource, do so cautiously. Make sure you align really well in regards to your work ethics and have legal agreements in place with everyone from contract manufacturers to distributors to ensure a quality experience for the customer.
Embrace Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS)
Consider adopting a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, which offers faster deployment and increased customer engagement. Regular evaluations of the service value being delivered typically allow for faster continuous improvements. But this needs to be priced properly for you to stay cash-flow positive, otherwise when scaling the costs will start to accumulate. Look at car leasing to create a similar model that works for you and your customers.
Set Realistic Expectations and Provide Long-Term Support
Avoid overpromising during sales. Focus on underpromising and overdelivering. Provide additional features that are “nice to have” to exceed customer expectations.
Keep delivery timelines realistic and communicate any potential delays in advance rather than on the due date. A lot of startups in their extreme confidence and unbound optimism, set up timelines that cannot be achieved especially if the complete supply chain is not vertically integrated under the company. It may over time get integrated with considerable resources, but the experience for the customer should never change unless it is for the better, which happens once you reach a level of integration where your maximum time gets reduced considerably. So keep customer expectations in check by conveying the maximum time to execute, instead of your typical/average time to execute the process.
For example, at RoboRium we always made sure customers knew that an out-of-stock product could take up to 3 weeks to deliver and it was mentioned on the product page and the cart at the time of checkout on the website. 3 weeks meant 3 weeks including weekends, not 21 business days. It was not hidden that the product was out of stock or how long it would take to deliver if it was out of stock. When in stock it was clearly mentioned how many pieces were available, not just the fact that it was “In stock”. In the Shipping & Returns it was mentioned clearly WHY it can take 3 weeks, and what the possible delays could be should someone wish to know more. Instead of the typical In or Out “Stock Status” we displayed “Availability”.
Many times it took less than 1 week, on average 10 days, but bank transfers could be delayed, national holidays could disrupt multiple services, transportation could be experiencing strikes, some services could only be available on business days (M-F), and shipment clearances or switching from one hub to another can take longer, all of which may mean delivery to customer happening in longer than the average 10 days but we never got a screaming complaint about it because of how expectations were conveyed at the time of the order being placed. If they reached out before placing an order we would convey the exact time needed for that product because we tracked all major potential delays in the chain.
In the best or average cases, we essentially delivered in half the time that the customer expected the delivery, so that meant for them it was a happy surprise ( = positive reviews and repeat customers).
In cases where it took longer than the 3 weeks due to some delays being unexpectedly extended, we made sure customers knew EXACTLY where it was held up and why, what was being done to make sure to deliver it in time, asked if it was required urgently, and told what the new delivery date was BEFORE the customer even reached out to us. If we had to upgrade the shipping priority from normal to overnight, which would have cost customer extra had they paid for it at the time of placing the order, we let them know that it was coming out of our pocket.
This conveyed that they were valuable to us as a customer, even if the cost of the priority shipping was more than the order itself and it affected the margins for that one order. This whole process was handled in many other ways, with many moving parts that we had figured out down to a science, with very rare surprises, and written in the standard operating procedure. This was one of the many reasons behind the success of RoboRium among the sea of 40+ competitors in a red ocean market and its ZERO order returns in almost 9 years of operation.
Providing long-term support (at least 1 year) to customers demonstrates your commitment to their success and helps build trust and loyalty.
If a manufacturer did not provide long term support on their product, for example only a 3 month warranty was offered by them, we at RoboRium being the distributor of that product made sure that the extra warranty up to 1 year was on us at no extra cost to the customer. No one needed to guess how long it would take to fix, how they would ship it out internationally, would they have to pay extra to get it fixed, would it be repaired or replaced. All of this was either outlined by us in our terms and conditions, mentioned in our operating procedures from DAY 1, or conveyed very clearly and factually when the customer needed to know (typically before they asked, as soon as we had the information available).
If you have strict quality testing measures, thought of all major scenarios for your standard operating procedures, and have detailed user instructions for the product in place (not just in a manual booklet but on your website), before the product goes out to customers, you will have far fewer returns, and waste much less time and resources in dealing with things going wrong.
Plan for Design and Supply Chain Lead Times
To ensure smooth operations, determine design and supply chain lead times early on. Identify backup suppliers and understand their lead times as well. By having alternatives in place for every supplier and service provider, you can mitigate the risk of delays and maintain efficient production processes and a consistent customer experience.
Analyze Sales Patterns and Adapt Strategies
Closely monitor monthly and yearly sales numbers from both B2C and B2B customers. Analyze the sales cycle to identify patterns and trends. This information will help you determine when to intensify sales efforts and in which direction to focus your marketing strategies, enabling you to maximize sales opportunities. Knowing the psychology of how users/customers perceive the trustworthiness of your company, also helps determine the best strategy here.
Be a Company, NOT a Product
If you have an idea for a single product that does 1 thing for a particular sector, it’s typically not enough to become a big VC-backed company. Even if that’s all you have right now, it is important to have a long-term vision of what the future of the company will look like in 10-15 years!
Can the same product be used for different kinds of customers in various markets? Or will you create a suite of different products to improve the lives of people in that same market you are in right now? Or will you do both – a collection of products for different markets? Either way be sure to outline this vision for the company to make your company more attractive for investors.