Breeding Successful Hardware Startups

A few takeaways below from the Hardware Pioneers' Breeding Successful Hardware Startups event on June 2nd 2016 in London, UK

Hardware Pioneers community apparently reached over 4,000 members although there were around 100 150 attendees at this June event. 

1. Ben Einstein - Bolt - Ilustratative guide to product development

• Is the problem your startup trying to solve email big enough? 
• Successful Startups Strategy: target a small number of people that would be very very happy to buy your product 
• Write your specs for (hardware) product development. It makes huge difference in terms of time and money
• Bolt - seed Investment of USD 200k - 500k in Startups for 1 to 2 years. They are the 1st institutional money coming in. 
• It's far more valuable to charge for software subscription then build/scale/sell hardware!     

2. Marc Barros - Moment (previously founder of Conduit - ie GoPro competitor)

Lessons learned from Conduit failure:

• Have a clear and simple purpose. Live by it. Let it be large enough to 'fit' future products as well.
• Read 'The hero and the outlaw' - helps paint a picture of who you are and what your brand stands for 
• Tell stories (as a brand)! It captures hearts! Make it personal, bring in emotion, challenge, triumph. (It leads to avoiding comparison on price  with other products)
• You can't be wrong if you believe in your Startup strong enough. And remain consistent about it
• But at the same time brand alone doesn't win 
• Iterate++ until you find the recipe. Only then scale it up (i.e. VC money)
• If you take VC money be sure you've got top chances to be the dominant player in your market
• Make something (i.e. a product) simple. Do it well. Sell it. Do the next one. Iterate and evolve

3. Raph Crouan - Startupbootcamp - MD IoT Programme -Funding your hardware company - myths and reality 

Myths:

• Raising money is easy. In reality it's not and it's getting harder and longer. See failures such as Kickstarter 
•  Kickstarter money is enough. That's not the case. It may be good market validation but not enough to fund a startup. Building is expensive: 12 months runway for software company and 16 months for hardware. Hardware iterations are expensive (ie not to mention shipping costs as well). 

• Regulations: FCC type certification can be a pain. Think about the initial region where you want to sell your product as certification is localised. 

• Seed funding: you need to raise working capital for 1st production set (ie 300 - 500k USD).