The Hardware Startup

Preface

This is a book about how to build a hardware business.

The goal of this book is to provide a roadmap for makers and hardware entrepreneurs who are looking to turn their product ideas into full-fledged businesses. Building a software startup has been largely templatized over the last five years. Free tools enable entrepreneurs to rapidly build, collaborate, deploy, and pivot. There is an extensive network of mentors and thought-leader bloggers sharing advice rooted in their own experience. There are bestselling books devoted to best practices, such as Do More Faster, The Lean Startup, and From Concept to Consumer. There are innumerable incubators and investors rounding out the ecosystem. It is now comparatively easy and inexpensive to launch a software startup.

Hardware is just starting to develop this type of ecosystem. Makers have been around for decades, but hardware startups have only recently begun to enjoy the type of attention and funding common among their software counterparts. Significant changes have taken place in the last two years. The decreasing cost of prototyping is lowering the barriers to entry and making it more feasible to develop a physical product within economic constraints. Kickstarter and Indiegogo have created platforms that enable fundraising for small-batch manufacturing and facilitate a community of early adopters. The number of hardware startups is on the rise. Venture capitalists who were previously uninterested in non-software investment ...