The problems we faced with the design of our product, along with the manufacturer were the most significant obstacles in the way of turning Clipboard+ into a business. Essentially we didn’t have a product we could sell, and it was too expensive for us to earn a healthy margin.

Problem Design: After we received funding we took our prototypes to the manufacturer and asked them to make the design changes we needed, and that we had previously discussed. Those changes were adjusting the bends to be more ergonomic along with making sure it tightly fit the iPad. They ended up charging us a whole lot for engineering and they had to go through way too many iterations. This contributed heavily to our delay, and even worse they couldn’t even get the iPad tightness right!! It was a crushing blow when we received the clipboards and realized that an iPad would slide out if held upside down. There was little recourse we could take with the manufacturer so we took it in stride and realized that we could hand bend the clipboards to the correct tightness ourselves. Once again this added to our delay and made the product un-scalable at the time.

After we received funding we took our prototypes to the manufacturer and asked them to make the design changes we needed, and that we had previously discussed. Those changes were adjusting the bends to be more ergonomic along with making sure it tightly fit the iPad. They ended up charging us a whole lot for engineering and they had to go through way too many iterations. This contributed heavily to our delay, and even worse they couldn’t even get the iPad tightness right!! It was a crushing blow when we received the clipboards and realized that an iPad would slide out if held upside down. There was little recourse we could take with the manufacturer so we took it in stride and realized that we could hand bend the clipboards to the correct tightness ourselves. Once again this added to our delay and made the product un-scalable at the time. Problem Manufacturer: In addition to the design problems we discussed above, the manufacturer used for our Kickstarter run was a specialized job shop that mainly did work on precision parts for research and other high performance projects. Because of this, their labor cost, and ultimately the price we paid for the clipboards was very high and made it impractical to try and scale using this manufacturer.