Generally speaking, to take an idea to a shippable product requires a little over a year if nothing goes horribly wrong. Over that year, there are five major steps that we (and any team) have to go through in order to ship a device. For the Nuimo, we are right at the beginning of Step 5: manufacturing, but can already make projections about the final tasks.

1 . Idea and Problem Hypothesis

Every product starts with an idea — and if you can prove people will spend money on that idea, then you've got a product.

The number one reason startups fail is because they build something people don't want. This happens pretty often because really any idea - no matter how great - is just a set of hypotheses with assumptions about your user. It’s your job to prove or disprove these assumptions before you build something expensive and time-consuming,

To form our hypotheses we used a Validation board and then tested them with real people. We streamlined the process by making simple logical connections between our problems and solutions, with simple statements like the following:

I believe that User X has problem Y. I believe that solution Z solves problem Y.

Our users were people a lot like us, digital natives in the age between 20–40, but we spent time going out and finding them. We would find them at co-working spaces and cafes all over Berlin, by simply walking in and asking them to talk with us. Once a few dozen of them gave us feedback on our idea, we were ready to get into real prototyping.

2. Prototyping and User Testing (4 months -always)

Once you have proved a few of your hypotheses, you start with the exciting and nerve wracking cycle of prototyping, user feedback and iterating. In this process you have to go back to your workbench constantly and repeat the process of talking with people and building something new.

In this cycle experimenting is key. You must distill the functions down and iterate on one feature at a time. The prototypes will probably become Frankenstein-like hacked together concepts but steadily get you closer to your solution.

During this phase, it’s useful to only use standard components instead of customized parts. We used development boards like Arduino and Raspberry Pi wherever we could to build fast.

User Testing is equally important as building — this is one of the most important lessons we have learned. It doesn't matter how hard you work (efficiency) if you build the wrong things (effectiveness). Talk to your users constantly and iterate until 70% of them feel a new hole left by the product if you don't produce it.

We went through more than 10 of these cycles of building / users testing over 4 months. In the end, lots of our assumptions were simply wrong, but the feedback ultimately lead to a better product and enthusiastic first users.

3. Crowdfunding & Investment (3–6 months)

You might have been able to pull of the first few months of development by bootstrapping with your savings or side job but in order to take your product from a simple prototype to a mass manufactured product, you'll need some serious cash.

We discuss the overwhelming cost of building hardware later — but it’s more than most people have in their bank account. Thats why you need one of the following things:

Extreme personal wealth The 3Fs: Friends, Family or Fools Angel Investors, VCs Crowdfunding

We launched two crowdfunding campaigns, one on Indiegogo and one with the improved version of the device on Kickstarter. There is a lot to say about crowdfunding and we will discuss this in detail in Part 7 of our series. In general, it takes 3–6 months preparing for the campaign (the only way to insure success) plus the 30 days it takes to run the campaign.

If you decide to raise money additionally from angel investors or VCs, expect to spend another 3–6 months on that - as your full time job.

4. Design for Manufacturing and Testing (4 months)

This is one of the most challenging steps for most hardware startups because they have created an Arduino-based product that is reliable. During this phase, the product must now become producible on real machines, at scale — and be used by thousands of people over a long period of time. It’s kind of like going from the kid’s pool to the high dive.

This is also the phase where all of the tools suddenly change. Arduino becomes a PCB, Rhino Models become CAD and software must undergo a total rewrite. Companies like Dragon Innovation or PCH that do that work for you in China. Otherwise you need to hire people with that expertise (if you don't have them already) and work in close proximity to your manufacturers.

Once you have redesigned the product to manufacture at scale you generally produce a small batch of devices called a “Zero Series” to test if the machine handling works as expected. These first devices than get tested again and go through the certification process. This process is expensive and will take 3–6 months if things go smoothly — more on that in Part 5 of this series.

5. Manufacturing (1 month)

Once the zero series has been completed, final minor changes have been made and the certification has been finalized then it is time to make the first production run. For the Nuimo we decided to manufacture locally in Germany. This decision made sense for us because we have worked for companies with a tradition of electrical and mechanical engineering like Volkswagen and Audi.

In our first production run we will manufacture 5,000 devices. All the components come from different places and are assembled in one city in the southwest of Germany where a few of us grew up. From here, the products then get packaged and shipped to our backers, taking about a month for the entire process.

Total Time (~1 Year)

The total time it takes to manufacture a hardware project varies a lot from product to product. We can only speak from our experience. As a ballpark figure— most small teams can expect ~6 months from idea to prototype and another ~6 months from prototype to manufacturable product.

This estimate of required time is — of course — assuming that you have a dedicated team willing to work about 12 hours a day 6 days a week, only minor things go wrong and you have the right people for the job.

People

In any startup — but particularly with hardware… the distribution of skills among the team members if very important. In the excellent series Hardware by the Numbers by Ben Einstein, he suggests that 8 people is about the right number to ship a product.