>Designing for mass manufacturing is essentially impossible to learn without actually building several products.
I both agree and disagree. For cutting edge products and extremely large volumes, yes you need experience. For a very complicated product, I again agree. But for the majority of what we're seeing with "Kickstarted, low to mid-volume production"? Disagree. If you have a mechanical or manufacturing background you can absolutely get a new product launched without paying Dragon or PCH exorbitant amounts of money. Will there be hiccups? Yes, but nothing catastrophic if you follow good engineering principles.
Design, validation and simulation can all be carried out in advanced CAD packages (or by not-advanced CAD + lots of labor).
Depending on your timeline, you can prototype locally for higher costs but faster iteration (design, build, test), or you can prototype with suppliers more slowly but save on production verification and testing. The speed benefits are variable too: I've had US proto houses come back with ridiculous lead times and Chinese factories turn around a production verification sub-assembly in less than a week. YMMV.
I love the smile curve; I've never seen it before, but that is exactly how things work. But the situation is changing as more and more Chinese factories of all sizes integrate engineering teams and work to become OEM/ODMs for the local market. The other changes are in the labor rate: as China gets more expensive that curve is going to flatten.
For small scale stuff in the 100's to 10's of thousands I think that you can go it alone for the right product class, which happens to be most of what we see here on HN/Kickstarter. Find factories on Alibaba, spend a minimal amount of money testing them out, place small orders to protect yourself and voila! I think the hardest part is dealing with demand prediction/logistics, but that's inherent to any hardware enterprise that doesn't have its own manufacturing capabilities.
I both agree and disagree. For cutting edge products and extremely large volumes, yes you need experience. For a very complicated product, I again agree. But for the majority of what we're seeing with "Kickstarted, low to mid-volume production"? Disagree. If you have a mechanical or manufacturing background you can absolutely get a new product launched without paying Dragon or PCH exorbitant amounts of money. Will there be hiccups? Yes, but nothing catastrophic if you follow good engineering principles.
Design, validation and simulation can all be carried out in advanced CAD packages (or by not-advanced CAD + lots of labor).
Depending on your timeline, you can prototype locally for higher costs but faster iteration (design, build, test), or you can prototype with suppliers more slowly but save on production verification and testing. The speed benefits are variable too: I've had US proto houses come back with ridiculous lead times and Chinese factories turn around a production verification sub-assembly in less than a week. YMMV.
I love the smile curve; I've never seen it before, but that is exactly how things work. But the situation is changing as more and more Chinese factories of all sizes integrate engineering teams and work to become OEM/ODMs for the local market. The other changes are in the labor rate: as China gets more expensive that curve is going to flatten.
For small scale stuff in the 100's to 10's of thousands I think that you can go it alone for the right product class, which happens to be most of what we see here on HN/Kickstarter. Find factories on Alibaba, spend a minimal amount of money testing them out, place small orders to protect yourself and voila! I think the hardest part is dealing with demand prediction/logistics, but that's inherent to any hardware enterprise that doesn't have its own manufacturing capabilities.