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
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