Introduction

In dreams begins responsibility.

- William Butler Yeats

You and Your Big Idea

You or your loved one has a brilliant product idea that you’ve rolled over in your mind for months, perhaps years. You might have sketched it out on paper and run the idea by anyone who cared to listen to you about it. Or, it may be such a potent idea that you’ve kept it a dark secret. You often examine a product on a store shelf wondering how it got there and if you could be successful making your own idea a reality.

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It.

- Yogi Berra

Denial ain't just a river

- Mark Twain

The first objective of this book is to stop you making an expensive choice if it simply doesn’t make business sense. That might mean going 30% of the journey but only investing a small amount to find out if, indeed, your product idea never had legs to begin with.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

- Robert A. Heinlein

The second objective is, if it does make sense to build your product, to take you all the way to producing product that a customer can buy at a level that is profitable for you. Commitment Management means not having to invest in a particular stage until you must, keeping your least expensive exit options open for as long as possible. Commitment Management is not a way to discourage you at every turn from following your dream, and I will point out the biggest ingredient of business success is persistence, but rather, it is being sensible about some of the expensive mistakes you can avoid by holding onto your precious resources for as long as possible.

It’s not too late if you start today

- Barbara Sher

We have all heard the phrase “if you could get off a ship in a storm, no ocean would ever have been crossed”. Or you might have heard about some English king or other who scuttled his ships on the coast of France so his soldiers would have to beat the French or die. With their backs to the wall, or so the story went, the English would have to fight for their lives, guaranteeing victory.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

- Ray Bradbury

If you ask me, all that do-or-die stuff is bad advice. It’s easy for Ray Bradbury to recommend jumping off cliffs. I’m guessing he doesn’t worry about a mortgage, and he won’t be there to help you with your wings after you jump off your cliff. The rest of us mortals struggle with mortgages and grocery bills, so we have to be much more careful than rich, famous people.

I prefer the saying: He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day or the Irish proverb that goes never ask a man who’s paid off his house what the value of money is.

Most ideas we humans come up with are not viable. We hear about the big successes, the guy with the big house on the hill, how he got filthy rich, and the fledgling product that got snatched up by a multinational for a cool ten million dollars. We don’t hear about the aging retiree who wore his knuckles to the bone in a business venture that ate his retirement. Nor will anyone talk about the 90% of businesses that fail in their first year. And no one wants to hear about the collateral damage to health and relationships affected by a struggling, failing or failed start-up.

It is a good idea to test your assumptions before you commit money, not to mention your life savings, to your idea. We inventor types often lose sight of that. We follow an idea that has no right to exist because we engage in wishful thinking. Aqualocks is the third company I started and even with everything I have learned, I know there is huge, invisible risk with starting any company. Only people who have had good luck tell you there is no such thing as luck.

In this book, I underscore the denial surrounding your business idea as much as possible, and as early as possible.

Try to complete the questions at the end of each chapter. Write the answers on a piece of paper if you must, but do write them down. If you have the courage of your convictions, show the questions and answers to your significant other or someone else who cares about you. The simple act of completing those answers will help you to be more honest with yourself.

When I began this journey, I did not know all the steps I would have to take to get my PondSecure product manufactured, but I do now. From all the books I read on the subject, I probably learned about 10% of what I needed to know before I started. The experience itself taught me the other 90% and some of my mistakes were expensive. Most of my mistakes centered on not knowing the industry. Looking back at the last 18 months, I could beat myself up by saying the mistakes were stupid, but they weren’t. They were a result of my ignorance of how plastic products are manufactured. When you are green to an industry, you do not know where to look, so you look everywhere and everything looks the same. However, many important issues don’t stand out like they would for an expert in the field, so it takes the novice a lot longer to cover the same ground.

• Despite the burden of ignorance, if your product idea has genuine merit, it is just a matter of persistence and you can learn what you need to learn to make it a success.

What does “if your product idea has genuine merit” mean? As soon as you can, you need to work out how much your product is going to cost to make and how much it is going to cost to sell. If you can sell enough of it for more than that, you have a product with merit. Let us look at some theoretical costs and sales price of your product:

• Cost of making one unit (manufacturing): $5
• Cost of selling one unit (ads, etc.): $10
• Other variable costs [1], broken out per unit: $5
• Revenue you can get from selling one unit: $35
• Estimated net profit: $15

So, if you make a net profit of $10 on every product unit you sell, to pull a salary of let’s say, $40,000 a year, which might need closer to $55,000 when you include payroll tax and medical insurance costs, you would have to sell 5,500 units of your product at that $35 price. You would have to sell 15 units every day. That’s every one of the 365 days that are in a year. Some days people just don’t buy stuff, so other days you have to make up for the shortfall. You might have to sell 20 or more units on many days. That is just to secure a salary of $40,000 a year. It doesn’t cover the cost of growing your business to include, for example, a second product.

• Decide what your minimum salary expectation is and work out how much you have to sell to make that figure.

Many small product businesses have low fixed costs. That is, you can avoid many of the costs that bigger businesses must incur. For example: you don’t need to rent an office, hire an office manager, or maintain laptops and servers like bigger business must. With a small, one-person business you can cut out many of the costs. If you can also cut out the need to pay yourself a salary, you may be able to continue your path to product success for a long, long time, even if it is at a much slower pace. That is why it is a great idea not to give up your day job until you have to.

• Don’t give up your day job until you have to.

If you cut out salary needs, and remain diligent about not incurring fixed costs, your daily unit sales needs might be just one or two products a day, perhaps even two or three a week. In our theoretical example, your fixed costs might be $50 a week, so you may need to sell five units a week to cover those costs. Getting your business to break even is an incredible achievement, and proves out so much about the viability of your business. Again, if you can reach that point without giving up your day job, you will have taken most of the business risk out of it up that point

And so, the big question you should ask yourself is, Should I make the investment? That is, the investment in time and money to follow this dream of yours. When it comes to this kind investment, you must consider your other commitments in life, like spouse and family, mortgage, health needs and vacations. The answer to this big question is a function of several other questions about the cost of making your product and the cost of selling it. If no one will ever buy your product, then the “cost of selling it” is infinite and you have no business. If the costs to manufacturer it are three times what someone will pay for it, it can never be profitable and you have no business. To answer both of those questions, the former of which is a marketing question and the latter largely a manufacturing question, you need to answer other questions. For example, should I manufacture large quantities or small quantities?

How can I prove my idea will work (or not work) without spending much money?

Will I be able to sell it for a profit?

How long will it take to see the first product?

How much work and what skills do I need?

Do I have to go to Asia to make it?

How do I protect my designs?

It doesn’t take a genius

Everything in the world we want to do or get done, we must do with and through people.

- Earl Nightingale

By the time I had production quality pieces in my hands, I looked around me and saw many elements of my one-person business that were of better quality than I could produce. Although I was capable of producing a website, my website was done by a chap who was much better at website creation than I was. The different parts of my product were so finely finished, anyone who looked at them collectively thought I must have been a genius. I am not.

You will rely on perhaps dozens of other people to help you turn your idea into a success. Always keep your ears open and ask your trusted friends for their opinions and perspectives at every stage. Collect and respect a cadre of people who are interested in what you are doing and keep them abreast of developments as you progress. Get good at listening and don’t get defensive about criticism, even if someone makes you feel like a fool. An effective way of listening is to take notes as you listen. Take what they have said and use it to improve your plan, not to prove them wrong or to prove yourself right. Making your business a success is not about being right. When you have absorbed a year’s worth of contributions from the people around you, your product plan will be better than you alone could ever have made it.

What does success smell like?

Success doesn’t smell like you would think it should. The interesting and rewarding opportunities reveal their rewards “late of an evening” (as my father might put it) and in the first few months, they don’t look promising at all. They look unpromising because big things take time and you are an early stage. Those opportunities that hand over the reward early are usually a flash-in-the-pan. Remember, of course, that not all ugly ducklings turn into swans. You, the inventor must feel the value of your invention deep in your heart. Then it does not matter how ugly the duckling looks to everyone else.

When can I give up my day job?

If your idea has potential, turning it into a product is a long and difficult path, for which you will need staying power. More staying power, in fact, than you ever needed to hold down a regular job. Successful entrepreneurs think positively, recover quickly from defeat and unpleasant surprises, and no matter what challenges they face, they continue to seek a way to achieve their goals. They are not necessarily “book-smart” or have a high GPA from an Ivy League college, and they don’t take injury personally. They may have significant support from their loved ones and friends, but their real driving energy comes from within them. They are stubborn self-starters, independent thinkers who do not recoil from confusion or ambiguity, which they see as a muddy broth of opportunity. Many folks find entrepreneurs irritating because they often show irreverence for authority and the “accepted facts”. When you ask an entrepreneur not to stick his finger into the socket because of the risk of electrocution, the entrepreneur thinks first about sticking his finger into the socket. An entrepreneur’s greatest teacher is his own long history of mistakes that he sees not as reflections on his stupidity, but rather, a foundation of valuable lessons on which he will build future success.

Let the games begin.

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[1] Web hosting, credit card transaction, phone, many other costs of running a business.

Chapter 1. Know yourself

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

- John F. Kennedy

How persistent are you?

Have you ever completed a jigsaw puzzle on your own? I went through a phase a few years back where I liked to do jigsaw puzzles. After helping my daughter with a 500-piece puzzle, I was drawn towards doing a larger, 750-piece one. I then moved on to a 1,000 piece, 1,500, 2,000 and then a 3,000-piece puzzle. I did a few more 3,000-piecers. A certain satisfaction came with snapping that next little piece into place. Some pieces almost fall into place effortlessly, others were so difficult, I was convinced the Jigsaw Puzzle Fairy was dropping pieces that belonged to a different puzzle into the unused pile while I slept. Intellectually I knew of course every piece did indeed belong to the puzzle I was working on, but emotionally there were those little frustrations that made the task all the more interesting. Overall, I found the repetitive, slow progression of assembling an image to be meditative.

A 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle is not twice as difficult as 1,500-piece one. Yes, you have twice as many pieces, but the average number of pieces you examine before you place one is also twice. Mathematically, then, a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle is at least four times more time-consuming than a 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle is. Getting my product to market felt a lot like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle; one with a lot more than 3,000 pieces of course, but the inner sense of journey was familiar.

I recommend you get a good 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and complete it. It is ok if someone helps you a little but do make the job yours. If you complete it, you have the single biggest ingredient necessary to getting your product idea to market: persistence.

Some evenings I did not want to face the never-ending task of completing my product. Other evenings it seemed like I was making such good progress, I did not want to go to bed. You will have difficulties in your product creation journey too. Some days you will be making such poor progress, you’ll feel like you’re going backwards or you’ll feel like your product will never see the light of day. Other days, you’ll see the horizon for miles in every direction and the universe will conspire to make it all work in your favor. That is the journey that is ahead of you; great speed on some days, nasty traffic jams on others and it is what everyone feels on the journey. We product creators are not divided into those who have an easy time of it and those who have a tough time. No, we are divided into folks who complete the task of creating their product and folks who do not. Difficulty is in the nature of product creation and it is difficult for every product creator I have ever met. In fact, when you reach an impasse, regard it not as a threat to your success, but rather a great way of thinning out any competition that might follow.

• If you do not find it difficult, you have not taken on enough of a challenge for customers to be interested.

Most people will finish a 100-piece jig-saw puzzle, but few have the patience to complete a 3,000 piece one, not to mention a 12,000 or 18,000 piece one. It’s the same with creating a worthwhile product.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
- Jonathan Swift

How do you respond to loss?

Everyone has a preferred way of responding to the pain of loss. If you do decide to pursue your product idea, you may succeed or you may fail, but one thing is certain: you have a lot of pain ahead. So, how do you normally deal with pain? If you have ever lost someone near and dear to you, or have had other significant loss or pain in your life, what did you do to process the pain? How you answer this question is central to how you will cope on your journey to turn this idea of yours into a product. If you are the spouse of the person with the Big Idea, then answer the following question for them. In fact, if you are the guy with the Big Idea, ask your spouse to answer this following question; don’t try to answer it yourself.

Examples of loss:

- Losing a parent

- Losing a bunch of money in the stock market

- Discovering you need to go on serious medication for high cholesterol (loss of youth)

- Getting a performance review that says you have underperformed (loss of idea about yourself)

Question: How do you respond to loss? Which of the following activities do you tend to engage in when you are faced with such loss: (check all that apply)

· Head to the gym

· Head to the liquor cabinet

· Go for long walks

· Talk it out with anyone who cares to listen

· Look for a reason why someone else is to blame

· Get verbally abusive

· Become depressed

· Look for the silver lining

· Smoke cigarettes heavily

· Eat more than usual

· Draw, paint or write

· Engage in another hobby

Building a product from scratch involves, more than anything else, a lot of persistence. Your brilliant idea has never been a product and no one has ever made, sold or purchased one. The universe does not like change so it will throw many obstacles in your way along your path. Many obstacles will involve losing this or that opportunity to make your product a reality, forcing you to come up with perhaps more difficult, time-consuming or costly alternatives.

You might have the right temperament if you (or your spouse on your behalf) circled 1, 3, 4, 8, 11 or 12, because you tend to rely on healthy means of coping with loss. Healthy responses to loss make it more likely that you remain strong and willing to drive your idea forward.

• Successful entrepreneurs look for the opportunity in loss.

How do you respond to an unpleasant surprise?

If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.

- Henry Ford

Consider the following unpleasant surprises:

- Your car runs out of gas

- You discover you’ve put on 10 lbs

- You discover there is no milk left for your cereal

- Your joint credit card bill is twice as high as you expected

- You wake up to discover you have a nasty head cold

- You cut your finger while emptying the dishwasher

- You didn’t get that promotion you expected

- Your favorite white cotton y-fronts just turned pink during a clothes wash

How do you tend to respond when something like that goes wrong? The answer to this question might not be what happens in the very first few seconds, but rather what tends to be your response about 10 minutes after the unpleasant event? Circle either 1 or 2.

a) I am angry with the person who made this happen.

b) I am looking for a way to avoid making this happen again.

If you answered b), you have a key characteristic of successful entrepreneurs: You tend to take responsibility for problems that occur and you tend to look for constructive solutions to them. If you answered a), you might have a habit of blaming others for things that happen to you and you invest your energy in unconstructive emotional relief rather than looking for a path out of your predicament.

If you are considering building your product from scratch, b) is a preferable answer to a).

If you did answer a), all is not lost. There are ways to reshape your thinking so that it is more positive.

Along the road to making your product a reality, you will be faced with countless little unpleasant surprises. The faster you come round to looking for a constructive solution to every one of them, the faster your product will reach the marketplace and the more likely that will happen before you run out of time, money or opportunity.

• Successful entrepreneurs do not see a setback as a failure. They see it as an interesting challenge.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $0

End of chapter exercise

This is the first chapter with questions at the end of it. Write down the answers to the following questions. Better, write them down on a piece of paper and set the piece of paper aside for the moment; we will return to it later. (Avoid writing on the book itself if you plan to sell it or give it away later).

Even if you do not know exactly what the answers are, do take a stab at an answer to each question. The purpose of these questions is not to test your knowledge; it is to get you thinking about the important questions.

With respect to reaching the significant milestone of having the first salable product in your hand:

• How many months of elapsed time do you expect it will it take to have the first salable product in your hands? _____________________________
• How many hours of work will you personally invest in this before you reach that milestone? _____________________________
• What special skills would someone need to deliver a product like yours? _____________________________
• Do you expect to have to go overseas to manufacture your first batch of product? _____________________________
• How will you prevent your designs from being copied by someone else who might then compete directly with you? _____________________________
• What is today’s date? _____________________

Chapter 2. Put your idea down on paper

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

- Francis Bacon

It doesn’t cost anything to sketch your product idea on a piece of paper. Or sketch out twenty variations of it. Can’t draw? It does not matter. Just scribble your design as best you can. This will progress your thinking beyond your first mental plans. Getting your eyes and hands involved in your idea and looking at your own expressions on paper will help you solve some early design issues.

For about two years before I spent a single penny on first my Aqualocks product idea, I had a notepad full of drawings of it. The notepad stayed in my car for about six months and any time I was stuck in traffic, I would reach over and doodle in it. The sketches were primitive, certainly compared with the final product, but they served a useful purpose: they removed many of the variations I had in my head, allowing me to narrow the focus to one or two general approaches.

Use color pencils to spice up your sketches by adding some rough shadows or crosshatches to them. You might not think much of the result, but it will add some depth to your idea and, most importantly, it will encourage your subconscious to get involved in evolving the product design.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $0

End of chapter exercise:

Write down the answers to the following questions:

· How much do you think someone would pay for one unit your product? _____________________________ (for example $30)

· Name a specific person who said they would buy your product at that price: _____________________________ (for example “Joe Schmidt, my next door neighbor”)

· Write down the name of a product like yours: _____________________________ (for example “a gardening fork made by Troybilt”)

· Name a place where a person can buy that product today: _____________________________ (for example, hardware store, gas station, bazaar, only online).

· How much does that product cost today? _____________________________

· Set aside and label a binder. This is your Product Scrapbook. Add the answers from the end of the last chapter and this chapter to your scrapbook.

Chapter 3. Immerse yourself in the trade

A magazine that I got much value out of was Appliance Design. Visit appliancedesign.com to find out how to get a subscription. It turned up every month or so and every other issue had an article about designing new products that often centered on plastics in particular. Even reading articles of which I scarcely understood 10% gave me a vague sense of the problems designers face. It was in that magazine that I first saw the Stratasys 3D printer, rebadged as a Dimension BST, and sold through various Stratasys’ channel partners, that I talk about later in this book.

There is also a resource for finding components and materials, originally called the Thomas Register. They list hundreds of organizations that make and sell all manner of components, materials, products and services. Browsing companies listed in their directory, together with Appliance Design, was a great way of feeding raw ideas into my mind as my product idea was evolving. It is also a great source of parts that might serve as ingredients to your product.

Another source of inspiration for me was to browsing the hundreds of plastics shapes and objects in Home Depot’s and Lowe’s plumbing and hardware section. I have no idea what product you are considering creating, but you might be able to get some inspiration in such a home supply store.

A quick search of the Internet (try “cad newsletter” on Google) will lead you to various industry newsletters that you can apply for and get delivered to your inbox. Again, most of it you will not have much use for, but now and then, you will receive an article like The Top Ten Tricks of Plastic Injection molding or Five Must-Have Design Tools or Which is the Right CAD Program for You? This is a piece of free education.

End of chapter exercises

Q: Go to the web and apply for a magazine subscription to the catalog on www.appliancedesign.com.

Q: Look for an online newsletter about plastic injection molding or mold making. Print off a handful of articles that look interesting, circle the paragraphs of interest and hamster these little nuggets away in your product scrapbook for future reference. Make a habit of it.

Chapter 4. Search for existing patents

To overcome a fear, here's all you have to do: realize the fear is there, and do the action you fear anyway.

- Peter McWilliams

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has an excellent online patent database containing all the patents that have been granted.

• Patents that have been applied for but not yet granted are not available for public viewing.

The USPTO website: http://www.uspto.gov

Spend some time looking for patents that might match or are close to what you have invented. It might be that someone else has already patented your idea and there is little point in manufacturing your product if that is the case. However, if you have not seen the product in the marketplace, there is a good chance that it has not been patented. Usually, and this might be a huge assumption on my part, if someone has made the significant effort of patenting something, they will have tried to market it. That is not always the case, though. Many business ideas begin well, get patented, then go out of business. An individual may have a strong patent granted to him relating closely to what you thought was your original idea.

You have several choices in that case. You can contact the person and work out what compensation they would expect for you licensing their invention, you can focus on working around their patent (or patents) and filing for your own patent based on that, or you can simply walk away from the whole idea of bringing a product to market.

If you are like me, you are already enchanted with the idea of bringing your product to market and are reluctant to walk away from it, even at this early stage. Just remember, you have not invested a penny in it yet. As you progress through the next 12 months, you will have invested a lot more time in it, and probably money too. If someone else already patented the essence of your product, you might seriously reconsider continuing.

• If you discover at this early stage that someone else already patented your product idea, consider walking away.

There is an art to patent searching. No matter how thoroughly you search the database, there is still the chance that you didn’t find a patent that covered your invention. You can pay money to get a patent search done.

End of chapter exercise:

Write down the answers to the following questions:

· What is the title of an existing patent in the same area as your invention? _____________________________

· What year was the patent granted? _____________________________

· Imagine you discovered that your idea was already patented. Describe in one sentence an alternative design that would not infringe on that existing patent: _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________

Chapter 5. Avoid reinventing the wheel

An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

- Tim O'Reilly

The entire kit for my PondSecure product has ten unique parts. Six of them did not exist before I made them and the remaining four pieces I was able to buy off-the-shelf.

Build vs. Buy

A paper tiger always beats a real tiger

- Chinese proverb

The difficulty faced by many companies is whether to buy the ingredients, products or even companies they need, or build the ingredients, products or companies they need. There is a division within IBM whose sole purpose is to seek, manage and integrate acquisitions of smaller companies (smaller than IBM, that is) into IBM. They look at what IBM’s strategic needs are, and often, instead of building a computer software or hardware product, they buy an entire company to satisfy that need immediately. Buy acquiring a company and its products, they (a) reduce the risk of failing to build it themselves and (b) buy valuable time-to-market. IBM knows that it is easy to come up with a better theoretical product (a paper tiger) than one that is already on the market (a real tiger).

Even if you cannot find the exact ingredient you had in mind, you might find a piece that, if you were to make an adjustment to your product designs, you could use. Consider using off-the-shelf alternatives to ingredients in your product even if it involves making a compromise to your ideal vision of your product. Remember, your immediate objective is, at minimal cost, to decide if your product can become a reality. You can add improvements and optimizations later if you want to, when the revenue is flooding in to your company, but this is not the time to think about making a perfect product.

For the moment, though, think like IBM. Save time and money, and reduce risk by using off-the-shelf ingredients wherever you can.

It might be that you can make your entire product from existing ingredients. That is not necessarily bad. If your product is easy to make, it might mean your patent has to be strong to protect you, but that might be acceptable. It is not necessary for you to design every element of your product from scratch to patent it. Again, you can improve a basic working product later, perhaps only at that later stage involving plastic injection molding, once you have proven the market for your product.

• Any time you have the choice to substitute an off-the-shelf element in your product for one you were considering making, use the off-the-shelf element.

Figure 1 – a fancy way of tying a cord to a wall

Case in point: I needed a way to fasten the honeycomb part of product to the pond wall. Still infatuated with my newfound competence of CAD, and yet ignorant of what it will cost to make plastic parts, I came up with a design for a piece of hard plastic that could be fastened to the pond wall and to which a cord could be attached, pictured in Figure 1. To make the mold for it might cost $5k in the United States, and each piece might cost 50 cents to make.

Contrast that to the illustration in Figure 2, an off-the-shelf solution in the form of anchors and screw-plus-hook combinations, which can are available in a hardware store for less than ten cents a set, reducing the need to make a mold.

Figure 2 – a simple off-the-shelf alternative

End of chapter exercise

· Build a rough prototype of your product with parts that are available in a home improvement store or cardboard of various thicknesses for the parts you cannot buy off-the-shelf. Tape everything together with duct tape or regular sticky tape if you need to. It’s not going to be functional of course, but what you learn from this exercise will likely help you discover some design problems you missed and may help you solve them.

· When you have completed the task, revisit every single part of your rough prototype to see if parts of it are available off-the-shelf. For example, if you had designed a new steam iron, can you break open a two-dollar toy water pistol and use the water nozzle from it as the water sprayer for your steam iron? The purpose of this is to give you some exercise in prototype improvement.

Chapter 6. Select and learn a CAD program

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

- William Butler Yeats

i confess, CAD (Computer Aided Design) scared me for a long time. I thought you had to be a genius to master it and it presented me with yet another opportunity to prove to the world that I was as thick as that math teacher told me I was when I was twelve. Still, I was determined to see if it was within my grasp, so I looked at a few PC-based CAD packages on the market. This was going to be the first expense to come out of my own finances, so I favored lower-priced CAD software programs. I looked at six different CAD programs and finally settled on a program called Alibre Design. I spent $800 on a single user license in 2004 and again, without giving up my day job, I spent enough time every evening to teach myself enough CAD to enable me to come up with a rudimentary product design. Just how rudimentary my design was, I would learn later.

Even though Alibre had the lowest licensing cost, it was because I could get up and running on it so fast that made me buy it. Before the 30 days trial period was up, I had a good idea about how it worked and how likely it was to solve my problems. For a CAD novice, I was relieved to see that I could master basic design quickly. It always feels good to learn something new.

I attended all the free online and desktop CAD tutorials that came with the purchase of the product. Their online support was responsive and someone usually answered within a few minutes of my posting a question.

I recommend you read at this stage A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. The book was written in the early 1960s, takes about 20 minutes to read, and is still as intensely useful today as it was when it was written. As well as the value of the book content itself, it is comforting validation for us misunderstood entrepreneur types.

• Going through every free online and desktop CAD tutorial that came with the program taught me enough to produce a rudimentary product design.

Cost of this stage: $800. Costs so far: $800

Chapter 7. Complete a basic CAD design for your product

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams

The Alibre Design CAD program allowed me to experiment with my product design in many ways. It had terrific 3D visual representation, so I could make countless theoretical improvements to the product before committing to spending any more money.

A feature of the CAD system that was useful was one that showed me the mass of each part of my product relative to specific materials I could use. Using the mass of a given designed piece, and factoring in the material cost of that material, I was able to do a rough material cost estimate of my product.

Important to mention at this point is how much, and how little, the material cost has to do with the final product manufacturing cost. I will go into it in a lot greater detail in Chapter 11, but decisions about how you make your mold can have a marked effect on the price of your final production pieces.

A disadvantage of being a novice is that complex designs are more challenging, which is obvious of course. An advantage of being a novice is that you have to design everything in a simple way. You see, a clever chap might have designed lots of cool complexity into the product, but my design ended up being so darn simple, it would reduce the entire design to a level that a child could understand.

• The design simplicity resulting from my complete ignorance of CAD had its advantages.

To postpone making any further investment, I used my wife’s laptop to do this early design work. It took about eight weeks of evening and weekend work to come up with a reasonable design. It was still primitive and far from anything that would work if it were manufactured. It was neither detailed nor practicable enough to begin writing a patent application against, but it was believable enough to convince someone the product idea might have a future.

From the beginning, I was keen on a honeycomb for several reasons. (a) It promised an ideal materials-to-function ratio for a net-type structure, (b) it was aesthetically pleasing with its natural form and (c) no one in the market space had anything like it, making it more likely that it could be patented and I could protect my investment.

Figure 3 – the first design (theoretical)

Figure 4 – the first try at honeycomb assembly (theoretical)

Having a clear idea in my mind of the problem I wanted to solve helped me stay focused as I struggled with the concepts of CAD. The first vaguely believable results looked simple indeed, but it was clear to me later there were significant weaknesses that would have doomed the product if it was not developed a lot further. There were also significant mold creation challenges that had to be addressed. I didn’t know it at the time of course, but that’s what happens when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. That was not too big a problem at this stage, because I still didn’t have to commit to making molds or making any other large investment.

I still had not spent much money. I had a clear, believable concept and the beginnings of a design direction that so far did not rule out the possibility of making my product a reality.

Before you spend a penny more, your own designs should be convincing enough for your spouse and other people to get excited about it. If they find it easy to pick holes in it, then stick to Chapter 7 until such support is forthcoming. Getting your spouse, in particular, on board is critical to managing your stress and energy levels through to the, dare I say it, bitter end. For me, I considered my wife a one-person board of directors. I had to show progress at each stage before moving to the next and her cold, numerate eye would keep my feet on the ground.

So here you are. You have spent probably less than a thousand dollars so far. You can still back out easily having invested so little hard cash and not yet having given up your day job. (I hope you did not give up your day job yet). There is no point in rushing into making a big decision before you need to.

We humans do the strangest things. We decide prematurely because we often prefer certainty to uncertainty, even if that certainty unnecessarily forecloses opportunities.

Do not commit to the next step until it makes sense to do so.

• Do not spend any more money and do not move to the next stage until your design is convincing.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $800

Chapter 8. Get a design prototype made

From the beginning, I was intrigued by these new 3D printers that had come on the market. By 2005, they ranged in price from about $20k to somewhere in the millions. My needs were still rather simple, and it was clear that my designs could easily be produced on a printer in the lower end of that price range.

The local Stratasys representative was kind enough to run off a single piece of my prototype, in the hope of selling me a unit of the 3D printer that made it. The piece they made for me, pictured in Figure 3 on page 49, was quite the experience to see for the first time. I was impressed with just how much this piece of plastic resembled both the picture of it I had in my head and the visual representation of the piece in the Alibre CAD program.

Still, I was far from ready to put more money into the idea. Holding this small piece of plastic in my hand, however, gave me a few more opportunities to scrub the design. Feeling the edges, notches and holes gave me more hints about where the weaknesses were, certainly compared with the sense I was able to get from looking ad the CAD designs on a computer screen. I made a few more design adjustments and reconsidered the journey ahead, before making any more investments. I was looking for clues that this might be a stupid idea. I did not find any yet. For months, I chewed on the design in my head and in CAD. I revisited the CAD program several times a week, continued to read up on CAD to improve my grasp of the subject, and after several more months, I had stopped learning anything significant on the subject.

Ideas do not stay fresh forever, and I felt it was time to either set the whole idea aside or commit to the next stage.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $800

Chapter 9. Iterate through many design prototypes

This is where the cost moves into the thousands of dollars. You have two choices: (a) Make more prototypes yourself or (b) pay someone to make more prototypes for you.

Again, at this stage, if I had been an industry expert, I could have saved time and money. I was not, so I did not.

The depth of my ignorance

My limited knowledge of the following stage of ideal mold design led me to create CAD designs the equivalent molds of which would have been absurdly difficult to manufacture. I iterated through many design changes that didn’t make much sense from a manufacturing point of view, but I had to see and feel the prototypes in my hand before I began to understand the depth of my ignorance.

The material used by the 3D printer that met my needs cost about $5 an ounce. Paying a third-party to print a part for me would have cost an order of magnitude more judging from what I could see of prices on the Internet. I tried as best I could to estimate how many pieces I was planning to produce, and in terms of buying a 3D printer or paying someone to make the prototypes, it was a wash as far as costs were concerned, so I took the plunge and decided to buy a 3D printer. There were two more advantages to having my own 3D printer at home: confidentiality and speed of turnaround. There was also the excitement and the education of having exclusive access to this technology.

I looked at five different 3D printer manufacturers. Each of them provided me with prototypes of my design produced by their 3D printer. Each one was different and one in particular stood out far above the other three in terms of meeting my needs. One of them used a powder to build the prototypes, which crumbled in my hand like weak chalk. Another produced prototypes by layering thousands of sheets of plastic together and cutting around the edges to produce something unlike what I thought the final injected parts should be. In the end, I decided on the Stratasys Dimension BST, purchasing one through Stratasys’ partner in Fife, Washington, Cimtech. Even though it was not the cheapest machine and did not consume the cheapest material, it produced parts that closely represented, as far as I could see, the final injected part I wanted to manufacture in the future. The pieces were accurate, uniform and strong. In fact, as I was to discover later, the prototypes that came out of the Stratasys 3D printer snapped together perfectly with the final injection molded parts that were based on them - an incredible vindication of the path I had chosen.

I also looked at what Stratasys called their Red Eye service which sent overnight to a customer a piece the customer had designed, but that Stratasys would print a physical unit of. You upload your CAD file to their website; they would make the piece for you and ship it to your door. You might consider that service if you are only planning on a few iterations. For me, I wanted the ability to print prototypes not just of my first product, but also of other products that would follow.

Thus, I got my education in CAD, the option to print an endless supply of prototypes, and instant production for the price of about $25k. Had I only needed a few parts, I probably would have settled for the Red Eye service, but I wanted he whole cow. Even with the ship-to-your-door service of Red Eye, the sheer number of parts I needed would have delayed me well over the price of the $25k. Instead of waiting 8 hours for a part to be printed, I would have had to wait perhaps two days. Three months of prototype printing would have stretched out to over a year.

• If you have experience in CAD and only need a handful of prototypes printed, use a service to get the prototypes you need.

The education this 3D printer gave put me in a far better position to design my next product in a fraction of the time and cost, when that time comes.

This 3D technology is dropping in price quickly, and before a year had passed after I had bought the 3D printer, prices dropped by 25%..

No sooner did I get the first printed pieces out of the 3D printer did I start making big changes to my design. Being able to snap multiple pieces together gave me the opportunity to test my product design in many new ways. It took anything from 6 hours to 2 days to complete a print run of one or more pieces and I would start such a production job to run while I made adjustments based on what I had learned the previous night. I was learning a lot about this new 3D printing technology and I was also able to experiment with significant departures from the main design in ways that would have been outrageously expensive had I not got the 3D printer sitting in my garage. Between learning more about CAD and how to exploit the 3D printer, I was learning a lot.

Still, I was a long, long way from product readiness. I felt like a modern day Professor Caractacus Potts from the movie Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. I would disappear into my garage with the latest design on CD, and I would return with strangely shaped pieces of plastic of different colors that had been printed by the 3D printer. I always had great talking points to show visitors and friends, as I slapped these unusual snap-together pieces on the kitchen table for all to examine, but my ever-patient wife was beginning to think she was married to the good Professor Potts. Spending $25,000 of our life savings was a tough pill to swallow for both of us and it took me a good 10 months of hand-wringing before I took the plunge and bought the machine.

In the end, I believed the arrival of the 3D printer was a significant expansion of product creation opportunity for the novice, and I wanted to take advantage of it before everyone and his mother had one in their garage. The 3D printer was my doorway from software products to hardware products. As the Australian Bob Hudson put it in the Newcastle Song, “don’t you ever let a chance go by, oh Lord. Don’t you ever let a chance go by”.

Cost of this stage: $25,000. Costs so far: $25,800

Chapter 10. Refine your design and iterate

…when we design something that can be used by those with disabilities, we often make it better for everyone.

- Donald Norman

About four months passed while I fed cartridge after cartridge of plastic into the 3D printer. I ended up with suitcases full of prototypes of different designs I tried, and I am happy I labeled every one of them and filed them away for posterity. Strangely I kept coming back to a close variation of my original design: the “half-hexagon”, as I got into the habit of calling it. With the limited design knowledge I had started out with, I came close to the final design with the first iterations. Did I just get fixated on my original designs, or did I hit s bull’s-eye early? I do not know.

I looked at this $5,000 of 3D printer materials as another investment in my education. Trying out hundreds of different shapes and sizes in such a quick turnaround fashion helped me learn a lot about CAD, 3D printers and how probable my design might be.

Wasting time on silicone jelly molds

After a couple of months—the general product design was beginning to settle—the changes I was making were becoming increasingly subtle. The next challenge was to do some testing. For that, I needed enough parts to complete an entire installation of my product in a pond.

From a local store, I bought plastics supplies that enabled me to build a silicone mold from which I then was able to make many similar parts quickly. How this works is, you mix two liquids and pour them into a container, covering your original piece of plastic. Mixing the liquids causes them to set to a firm, jelly like substance within about a half hour.

With the jelly firmed up, I carefully cut the original piece of plastic out of it and what remained was a jelly mold from which I hoped to produce many pieces quickly. At least, quicker and cheaper, than it would be if I tried to make many pieces with the 3D printer.

I tried making pieces out of different materials. Some were transparent; others looked a little more like plastic injected parts. Overall, though, the whole jelly mold method of making many pieces was a waste of time and money.

Between the significant loss of accuracy, the difficulty in extracting usable parts from the jelly mold and the fragile copies that emerged, I abandoned this method of producing many test parts after a month of experimentation. It was one of only two times in this journey that I got so frustrated, I thought my journey would end right there. I remember one day in particular. Hunkered down on my garage floor with some of the resulting pieces in my hands, yet another duplicate piece fell apart in my hands under pressure, I got that hot feeling of impending disaster at the back of my neck. From the mostly useless plastic pieces I extrapolated, falsely I might add, the eventual plastic injected pieces would also be poor.

Technical problems fight hardest right before they are about to surrender, so I did not give up—and thank goodness, too—my short-lived negative conclusions on that day would turn out to be flat wrong.

Figure 5 – a more complex, “improved” design

Figure 6 – the half-hexagons attached to the leg assembly

Figure 7 – metal pins would hold the structure together

Back to the 3D printer

After a lot of experimentation, I came up with a design that I thought would allow me to construct a strong honeycomb from individual pieces. This new design is illustrated in Figure 5 on page 49. I liked this new design for a couple of reasons. In theory at least, it had a lot of “pokeoke” — Japanese for making a product foolproof which I will go into in more detail later — forcing it to be assembled the correct way only. With this new design, it wouldn’t matter whether the customer installed the piece upside-down or not, because it was symmetrical along a horizontal plane. Secondly, the “plugs” at the end of the piece would fit into another half-hexagon one way only: the right way, and only into the right holes. The idea was, when the customer ultimately assembled the pieces, they would insert metal pins (see Figure 7 on page 62) into the holes like the bar you see in a door hinge on which the two metal flaps hang. The design promised to be a lot stronger than the original design, so I was vigorously patting myself on the back until I learned about a serious design flaw: It was a plastic injection molding nightmare.

As designed, the mold for that part alone would have to have many moving parts that would slide out of the way after the injected plastic cooled, including at least seven thin metal rods that would serve to sit where the holes would be.

The design had far too many complexities to be cost effective, which I was about to discover.

Making your product only work one way – the right way

Recap: The Japanese have a term for it: Pokeoke. It is a way of designing something so that it can only be used the right way. In my first iteration of my product, user testing uncovered two significant but not critical ways of assembling the product incorrectly. This presents to the customer the opportunity to install the product incorrectly, thereby increasing the possibility of dissatisfaction.

Take the time to design into your product features that make it possible to assemble, install and use the right way only. At the very least, make it obvious that the product is not being used properly if and when a customer assembles, installs or uses it incorrectly.

For example: imagine you have designed a plastic, belt-attachable mobile phone carrier. It attaches to the belt that holds your customer’s pants up. After the first few hundred units came off the production line, you discovered that 20% of your customers mistakenly install the unit upside-down, thereby increasing the likelihood that a customer’s mobile phone will accidentally fall out of the carrier. To solve the problem in the second iteration of your product, you add a swivel to the top part of the unit such that gravity will pull the bottom of the unit towards the ground. A completely fictional example of course, but one that illustrates how a product can be designed to limit, correct or prevent incorrect use of a product.

Take a look at a book titled Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell. It is expensive, but it is worth it. It explains 100 different such design issues that will help you make a better product. Unfortunately, I only got hold of the book after I had committed to a particular design for the first run of my product. I recommend you read the book from cover to cover before you commit your own designs to manufacturing.

One little piggy goes to the market

Fortuitously timed, there was a two-day molding and injection equipment and services conference close to my home in Seattle. I loaded up my favorite prototypes and headed down to the conference. I showed my wares to about ten or twelve locally based plastic injection vendors, and three of those vendors in particular held my attention. One had good international contacts and a proven record of accomplishment of quality and cost-effective outsourcing to China; they also seemed small enough to focus on a tiny, one-person start-up like mine. The second company seemed less equipped to work with small companies, and although they clearly had the expertise, it was often hard to get their attention. The third company, Cascade Plastics in Fife, Washington, had the expertise I was looking for and from the type of questions they asked, they appeared to have had experience dealing with entrepreneurs. I was looking for a company that could essentially “catch the ball” when, due to my own ignorance of molds and plastic injection, I would make mistakes. Probably the most compelling aspect of Cascade Plastics was their guarantee contractually that the whole product would snap together in the way I needed it to. Two of their sales engineers went over my designs and gave me some very good advice on where I could reduce the complexity and cost of any subsequent mold making. They then took what I had produced and made dozens of further improvements to the CAD models I had created before beginning the mold creation process itself.

One key characteristic of any mold is whether it has undercuts or not. I go into this in detail in the next chapter, but worth touching on here because it has a huge impact on every aspect of production. Imagine you are in your kitchen making a jelly mold. You pour the warm liquid into your mold, place it in the fridge and some time later, you remove it from the fridge and extract the wobbly jelly from the mold. You will notice that such jelly molds are made so that the jelly pops out of the mold easily. That is, there are no features or extrusions within the mold itself that might block the jelly from sliding out, whether it’s one of those old-fashioned jelly molds (Figure 8) or it’s one of Scooby-Doo.

Figure 8 – a typical jelly mold

In every relevant sense, basic molds made for plastic injection molding must obey the same rules as jelly molds. You can add such undercuts to a plastic injection mold but it will make a significant difference in the complexity and price of the mold; “sliders” of many types will be added to the mold that move out of the way once the plastic hardens, allowing the piece of plastic to pop out without obstruction.

• Molds without undercuts are much simpler and cheaper to make than molds with undercuts.

Cost of this stage: $5,000. Costs so far: $30,800