I’m very happy to announce today that the first session of the MakingSociety podcast is now online!

It’s about 40 minutes packed with advice, tips and resources to help you launch your open hardware business. The unique goal of the monthly MakingSociety podcast is to help you go from maker to entrepreneur. We cover topics such as prototyping, manufacturing, distribution, raising money, product launching, licences and more.

In this first session, I interview Ben Einstein, co-founder of Bolt, the hardware incubator based in Boston. Passionate about creating great products and helping ambitious hardware companies, he talks about prototyping, design for manufacturing and products fitted for crowdfunding and open source.

We recorded this first session at Techshop in San Francisco. Thanks ProtoTank for welcoming us in your office! I’ll let you try to guess which machines are responsible for some of the noises in the background.

In this episode, we cover some of the key steps of the hardware process: prototyping, manufacturing, crowdfunding.

What you will hear about in details in this first episode:

Going from maker to hardware entrepreneur: which mindset you need before to get started.

Big challenges to build a hardware company.

Learn about the one big mistake that many makers-entrepreneurs do when prototyping!

Design for Manufacturing

Great products and should you work with a team.

Manufacturing tips & tricks: how big should be your first batch, …

Why is hardware hard? Understand what it means concretely

“Don’t go to Shenzen”

Personal advisor vs. professional manufacturing firm (Dragon Innovation)

Crowdfunding is a “double-edge sword”. What type of products are the best fitted for crowdfunding.

Open Source Hardware: when should you go open

Protomold real-time quote for molding injection parts

Dragon Innovation

Bolt

Resources mentioned in this podcast include:

Subscribe to the MakingSociety Podcast on Stitcher, iTunes or RSS feed

You can share and use freely the MakingSociety podcast as it is a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

Hope you’ll enjoy it! If you’re interested in following MakingSociety, be sure to join us on Facebook or Google and follow the RSS feed. More content to come!

Talk to you soon,

Image credit: Headphones thumbnail by Ivan Coyier