10 tips to eliminate the risk of hardware products

How to test and assess the demand for hardware products before starting the factory

Creating real-world tangible objects that can be touched is often much more risky than developing software. Once you’ve made 10,000 thingamajigs, it’s a lot harder to make changes to them than in the software world where you can submit an update if you want to change something.

So in the production world the question is, how can I be sure I’m building the right thing for the right audience?

When I wrote about Prelaunch.com’s $1.5 million fundraiser last week, I asked the company’s founder, Narek Vardanyan, what he thought were the biggest hurdles in hardware development.

Measuring the right users

To really understand what your customers want, Vardanyan recommends studying what your prospects actually do, not what they say they will do.

In an ideal world, that means they have to buy your product, or at least put a down payment on your product. Actual purchase intent is more valuable than someone simply saying, “Yes, I would buy that.”

“You have to make decisions based on people’s actual behaviour. You need to make sure that the data you keep is coming from the right people,” said Vardanyan. “Working with people who spend money works like a filter: you only end up with people who are really willing to risk their money. In other words, your potential customers.