From Paper To Plastic - the book online

Introduction

2007-02-27T15:56:00.000-08:00

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.

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

Chapter 1. Know yourself

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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

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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

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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

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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

2007-02-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

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

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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

2007-02-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-27T15:31:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-27T15:29:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

…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

Chapter 11. Make good mold choices

2007-02-27T15:06:00.000-08:00

Skip this chapter at your peril.

Design refinements

s I mentioned earlier, a business-savvy technical manager called Brad Raker working for Cascade Plastics scrubbed my designs for ideal material use and structural fit. I didn’t know at the time that I needed that help, but it would have been a disaster had he not stepped in to bring my designs to a workable condition.

Unless you are an expert in the field, a mold-making expert will need to refine your designs before you try to make molds.

You might not know this, but besides the cost of making the thousands of pieces later on, you the designer have to pay for the necessary molds that make those pieces. This is an up-front, sunk cost. It is an unavoidable part of the investment you will make, long before you secure a customer, to get your product to market.

You might think, “With my wonderful product idea, my manufacturer will be happy to cover the cost of mold creation knowing that they’ll make lots of money downstream” or “My manufacturer will amortize the cost of the molds across many iterations of production”.

Not true on either count.

You must budget for the cost of mold creation. Most mold creators that I have spoken with ask for a 50% down payment before they touch the job and the other 50% on the day the molds are completed. So, let us say your molds cost $120k; you will have to write a check for $60,000 to get them to start the job. Then, when you and the mold builder are both satisfied the sample injection parts they create with the new molds are adequate, you both sign off and you write another check for the remaining $60,000. You still have no salable product, of course.

You must pay up-front for the molds.

Three main aspects of mold creation have an enormous affect on the complexity and cost of the mold:

· Number of undercuts

· Number of cavities

· Greatest thickness of part

There are other factors, such as material, color and additives, but those three are the most significant in almost every case.

Number of undercuts

Undercuts significantly increase the cost of the mold.

An undercut in a plastic part results in a protrusion inside the mold that sticks into the plastic piece when it is in the mold, and would usually make it difficult or impossible to extract the cooled, solid piece of plastic from that mold. Again, think of a piece of solidified jelly which would not come loose from the mold if there were parts of the mold jutting into the side of the jelly to stop it from moving out of the mold. Jelly can squeeze and stretch to allow you to unhook it from within the jelly mold if that were necessary, but plastic is not so forgiving. Most plastic pieces are a lot stiffer than jelly, and will resist efforts to extract them from the metal mold if even a small protrusion in the mold gets in their way.

Take the time to go look at a jelly mold. Look directly into the mold and you will see every centimeter of the inside of the mold from your “bird’s-eye view”. There are no areas inside the mold that are “hidden” from sight. Thus, there are no undercuts in the jelly mold. The best molds, for plastic injection, are those that have no undercuts, and thus, do not need parts that move out of the way for you to extract the plastic from the mold. Molds with no undercuts are less costly to buy, less complicated to operate, last longer, and do not break as often.

To make a mold with no undercuts, you often need to do some clever design work. Experienced CAD designers look for ways to lessen or eliminate the need for undercuts from the beginning of the design process. Plastic products are everywhere, and once you understand the nature of the undercut, you will notice many pieces of plastic that were carefully designed to avoid supporting undercuts in the mold.

Next time you get a chance, take a look at the common construction hat, pictured in Figure 9. The mold for this construction hat was made without the use of moving parts because there are no undercuts designed into the hat itself. Take the straps and other attachments off a standard construction hat, turn it upside-down, and you have an excellent jelly mold.

There are other ways of making plastic products, like blow molding, which is used for products like soda pop bottles, but the undercut issue remains a challenge for those of us who wish to make injection molded parts.

Figure 9 – the common construction hat (without attachments)

The design represented in Figure 5 on page 61 is a mold creation nightmare. It is theoretically possible to make the mold for it, but it would probably be well over $100,000 even for a single-cavity mold to make that one piece.

Dave Mesaros (Cascade Plastics) gave me many tips on how to design without undercuts, so I went away and redesigned that piece without them. It was a challenge, but I had come a long way in CAD proficiency so I felt I was up to the job.

I redesigned the complete half-hexagon from scratch, this time, without any undercuts, represented by the illustration in Figure 10, which also includes the “sculpting out” of unnecessary plastic thickness done by Brad Raker, who also made a bunch of other subtle refinements to the piece. The sculpting, by the way, reduced the material consumption, made the product lighter and quickened the production time, all without compromising the strength or function of the piece.

That sculpting work took Raker a few hours and is another example of why you need expert help at this stage.

Figure 10 – redesigned without undercuts

Critical: Number of cavities

Imagine yourself in the kitchen again. You are using a baking tray containing twelve identical cavities (see Figure 11 on page 76). You heat up the oven, pour your mix into the twelve cavities and bake all twelve muffins at the same time.

Now, imagine how long it would take if your baking tray had only one cavity! It would take twelve times as long to bake and cost twelve times as much to perform that part of the operation. An experienced baker will remind you that setup and cleanup also take time and therefore have a cost.

When you bake twelve muffins at a go, I estimate the cost of the ingredients is about 50% of the total cost of the muffins. Let us guess at a price: Baking twelve muffins in a twelve-cavity baking tray costs $2.40, so each muffin costs 20 cents: 10 cents for the ingredients and 10 cents for its share of the oven time (1/12 of the $1.20 it costs to run your oven for an hour).

With two adults and four kids in the house, that might equate to two muffins each. In my house, muffins disappear so fast, they don’t have time to cool fully.

Imagine once again that your muffin tray had only a single cavity. Your family members would still want two muffins each, but now, you must bake one muffin at a time. The baking part of the operation takes a whopping twelve hours instead of one hour, and the overall cost is now $15.60 ($14.40 for the electricity and $1.20 for the ingredients) for the same twelve muffins. This equates to $1.30 a muffin, or about thirteen times the cost of the ingredients. That’s just for the electricity and materials and doesn’t take your time into account.

Thus, a single cavity baking tray means each muffin costs $1.20, and a twelve-cavity baking tray brings the cost down to 20 cents a muffin, or one sixth of the cost of when you bake only one at a time.

You saved some money by buying a single-cavity baking tray, perhaps paying $5 instead of $20, but you must pay a lot more per muffin come baking time.

Figure 11 – a baking tray for 12 muffins

Figure 12 – a baking tray for 1 muffin

With respect to cost, the mathematics of mold creation and plastic injection are very similar to that of baking trays and muffin baking.

When you request a quote for mold making and the corresponding plastic injected pieces, ask for two sets of quotes: one set for a low-cavity count, and the other set for the highest cavity count they can make in their shop. Do not mix them up. The first set of quotes, which are for the low cavity count, will have a low price for the molds and a high price for the plastic injected pieces. The second set of quotes, for the high cavity count, will have a higher price for the molds and a (probably) significantly lower price for the plastic injected pieces.

Remember too, that you may have a product consisting of large quantities of one part and small quantities of another. If you were making plastic knives, forks and spoons, you might plan to make two forks for every knife and ten forks for every spoon. So, each mold you get made might not have the same optimal cavity count.

Low cavity count means cheaper molds but more expensive parts.

High cavity count means more expensive molds but cheaper parts.

When I was ordering my own molds, I had misunderstood the significance of cavity count. Or rather, I did not pay enough attention to the downstream production costs when I was looking at the cost of the initial molds. Perhaps it was because I was a novice, but I was not looking for a huge difference and I did not focus at all on the cavity count. Thus, I ordered molds with low cavity counts without understanding the entire significance. As it turned out, I got lucky because three of the six molds were to need improvements anyway, and they alone accounted for 90% of the production cost of the entire product. So, in the end it did not make a difference, but had it been the cheaper three molds that needed the improvements, the mistake would have cost me about $30k.

A good rule-of-thumb for minimum plastic piece price is about 150% of the material cost.

Greatest thickness of the part

Plastic parts made in plastic injection molds are made by injecting hot resin under pressure into the molds, and then cooled while still in the mold. After cooling, the mold is opened, and “pins” force the piece of plastic to pop out of the mold. The mold is closed again and the process is repeated. Although technology has made it possible to make the process more reliable and efficient over the years, plastic injection molding technology has not changed in decades.

Some parts take a lot longer to cool than others. The thickest part of the plastic piece will decide the minimum amount of time the pieces need to remain in the mold for cooling. How do you measure “maximum thickness”?

In Ireland, where I grew up, nowhere on the entire island is more than 50 miles from the coast, despite the country covering about 30,000 square miles.

Imagine for a moment a piece of plastic where the furthest molecule of plastic might be from the surface of that piece of plastic. For example, consider a plastic gardening trowel. Its solid plastic handle contains its thickest section at 1.5” wide, so the furthest molecule of plastic might be about .75” from the surface. During manufacturing of that part, it might take an entire minute for that piece to cool enough for the mold to be opened. That will double the machine time element of your costs.

Cooling time in the mold is expensive

An irrelevant subtlety to the untrained eye, perhaps, but a simple adjustment in the handle to make it hollow or of a different shape will shorten the cooling time during manufacturing and cause a significant decrease in manufacturing cost. A solid plastic handle might cost several times more to manufacture than a hollow handle, not just because it has more plastic in it, but because it ties up the mold for a lot longer while it is cooling.

Thicker pieces of plastic parts significantly increase the cost of manufacture because they take longer to cool.

Summary – the simpler the better

I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to have parts with no undercuts. Take the time to design your parts so they do not have any. Many products on the market have been designed so individual parts are injected molded separately, perhaps even in the same mold and then snapped or glued together by an assembly line worker or end user after the fact.

Some plastic materials are more amenable to being glued than others. Some plastics bond to other materials reluctantly.

Whatever way you design and build your product, always, always be on the lookout for a simpler way to construct it.

Every little simplification you make to your product today means less product risk tomorrow.

Obvious as this may sound, it is worth repeating: As design complexity increases arithmetically, the risk of failure increases geometrically.

Product risk increases geometrically to the rate as product complexity increases arithmetically.

A low cavity count, undercuts and a thick section of your plastic part each increases part cost dramatically. Here is a rough formula that you can use to see just how much of a difference a slight change in the design can make:

$0.10 + ($100 x M x MC x (1 + (U/5)) * T / CC)

M = Mass (lbs)
MC = Material Cost (per lb)
U = number of undercuts
T = max Thickness
CC = Cavity Count

Let’s look at some hypothetical examples:

You want to manufacture a special plastic handle you have designed for a garden fork. It lessens the risk of RSI[1] and it attaches to any standard garden hand held tool. In the table illustrated in Figure 13 on page 81, each significant variable is changed to see what affect it has on the individual unit price during manufacturing. The variables are changed, and the resulting unit cost is calculated, for each of four different situations, each represented by a single row in the table (Figure 13). Our CAD program told us the spoon we designed should weigh about 0.05 lb.

The results in Figure 13 are what you might expect to pay a manufacturer in the United States (assuming 2006 material prices) for each spoon. I remind you that this formula is rough, reflecting only my own experience, and that you need to look at the specific quotes provided to you by the manufacturer you are working with. This formula provides a general impression of how significant these factors are, not a means to calculate your expected costs for planning purposes.

Do not forget to check your own estimates with people who make molds and injected plastic parts for a living. My formula is just a way of showing how costs can spike because of the tiniest adjustment in your product design.

Mass (lbs)	Material $/lb	# undercuts	Cavity count	Max thick	Cost/part
.05	$1.50	0	16	.2	$0.16
.05	$1.50	0	2	.2	$0.85
.05	$1.50	4	2	.2	$1.45
.05	$1.50	4	2	.4	$2.80

Figure 13 – theoretical costs of manufacturing

Clearly, if you plan to make large numbers of your parts, anything you can do to increase cavity count, decrease maximum thickness and eliminate undercuts will lower your costs significantly. In the theoretical example above, a piece made with four undercuts, two cavities and only 2x the thickness can cost sixteen times as much.

However, if you plan to make small numbers of parts over the lifetime of the mold, the same rules do not apply. Because the cost of a mold is independent of how many parts you make with it, if few injected parts are made with it, the per-piece cost is greater. When millions of parts are made with the same mold, the cost of the mold to make them is shared over so many pieces the mold price per injected part may get close to nothing. For example, if a single mold cost $25,000 to make, and it was used it to make five million parts, each part is assigned one half of one cent to cover its share of the cost of building the mold. In fact, when you know you are going to make millions of units with your mold, it is wise to pay to get it done right. Paying an extra $5,000 on top of, say $25,000, to get that extra expert care to refine it will be worth it. It might add a 10^th of a cent to the cost of each part, but might make that part significantly superior in quality.

Figure 14 – expensive night-vision binoculars

On the other hand, consider this low-quantity production example: You paid $25,000 to build a mold to make the casing for night-vision binoculars, pictured in Figure 14, of which you expect to sell 2,000 units. Each casing would take $12.50 as its share of the mold cost. The entire production run could probably be completed in one day, even with a single cavity mold. If you were to make a mold with four cavities, the unit manufacturing cost would increase when you add the mold cost share to each unit. This is because the mold will not make many units over which to spread the increased mold cost.

Small productions numbers suggest lower cavity counts. Large production numbers suggest higher cavity counts.

That may sound obvious, but novices get that wrong all the time. The point here is to get expert help. With all the stupid questions I asked and “free advice” I clearly needed, I’m sure I frustrated several of the manufacturers I was considering. One manufacturer declined to give me a quote in the end. He probably saw a future of having to handhold me through the process while I learned everything at his expense and thought the better of it.

Dave Mesaros and Brad Raker in Cascade Plastics were interested in my product and clearly had the experience of dealing with other entrepreneurs. I felt like they were partners in trying to make own my business successful, so I signed them up to do the design scrubs, molds and final production.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $30,800

End of chapter exercise

Go into your kitchen and find a jelly mold. Take a hard look at it. Notice how it is made such that solidified jelly will slide out of it easily. If you have time, go through the effort of making some jelly. When you remove it from the mold, take note of how easily that happens.

[1] RSI: Repetitive Strain Injury – physical injury that occurs by doing the same physical activity over and over.

Chapter 12. Order molds

2007-02-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

This is where more real money is spent. After I bought the 3D printer, I knew at least that if my original product idea fizzled during the design stage, I had a few choices. I could still use the 3D printer for other product ideas, maybe sell prototyping services using it, or just sell the printer on the open market if I had to.

Molds, on the other hand, can be used only for manufacturing the specific pieces they were built for, so the decisions you make during mold design are critical. Cascade Plastics guaranteed the designs I gave them would all fit together as intended when they were manufactured.

Having a guarantee of product assembly from the mold builder is critical to managing risk during mold creation.

I did price research over the internet and got a few quotes. Mold price quotes came in anywhere between $2,000 and $25,000 a piece. The low prices were generally from overseas and the higher prices generally from companies in the US. Again being the novice that I was, I was not comfortable with the risks associated with creating the molds 5,000 miles away. I felt a strong need to stay in direct person-to-person contact with whoever was going to manage creating my molds, so I stayed with Cascade Plastics who operate some 35 miles from my home. I was able to drive down to them at a moment’s notice as issues came up. I cannot imagine having to work with a mold builder who lived 500 miles away, let alone on another continent. The chances of making serious mistakes would have been a lot greater if I had chosen an overseas partner. Even as it was, any one of several unnoticed subtleties could have destroyed the value of the molds, so in-person attention was important at this early stage.

It is likely that whomever you choose to make your molds will be the same company that uses those molds to manufacture your product. Committing to buy molds from a company is like picking out an engagement ring: You can get out of it, but do not expect her to give you the ring back.

Make sure you are happy with the folks creating your molds; you are going to be dependent on them. Like the engagement, you can take your molds to a different manufacturer, but a different manufacturer will not want to take responsibility for how they perform. That is assuming your molds are even compatible with another manufacturer’s injection equipment.

As mentioned earlier, perhaps the minimum price you could pay for an injection molded piece of plastic might be about 150% of the cost of the material used in the piece itself. Many different kinds of plastic pieces cost a lot more than 150%, but this is an important number to remember for several reasons. First, a manufacturer in China has to pay roughly the same price, for example, for HDPE[1] resin as you do in Wisconsin, USA or Lancashire, UK. A manufacturer might get a slight discount when ordering large quantities of resin, but they can get that discount in any country.

If you’ve done your homework and your designs are ideal, the next biggest cost is the labor that goes into getting your product into a box. If it takes 20 minutes to get your $20 product into its retail container, then the difference in labor prices in Thailand versus Lancashire will be significant. If it takes just one minute to get your $100 product into its retail container, there is little value in manufacturing your product in overseas.

A way to reduce the need to manufacture overseas is to take the labor out producing it. Ikea is a respected and successful Swedish company that ships its products all over the world. It takes much of the manufacturing labor cost out of its products by passing that labor on to the customer. For many labor-intensive products like furniture, Ikea sells the product unassembled; the customer puts the product together. Ikea saves money different ways, from bulk manufacturing and materials optimization to process improvement, just like it says on their website. The real savings come in not having to pay for (1) the labor of assembling your DVD Cabinet, and (2) the cost of shipping a much larger box (had the cabinet been preassembled).

Minimizing the labor that goes into manufacturing your product will enable you to manufacture your product closer to home, at a cost close to what you would pay in a developing country. What’s more, there are tax incentives for keeping your manufacturing within the United States (and probably in other industrial countries), and you do not have the shipping costs, customs clearance charges, delays or risks associated with manufacturing overseas.

Selling customer-assembled products can cut out much the manufacturing labor cost.

Many large companies already have the infrastructure in place to manufacture, ship, import and distribute from overseas. Much of the challenges may not apply to them. For you, the first-time, locally restricted product manufacturer, it is likely wiser to produce your product close to home; within driving distance of where you live if possible.

Consider making a set of temporary molds. There are molds and there are molds. Some are designed to spit out millions of parts before wearing out; others are good for only a few thousand pieces. The latter are cheaper to make and are often used to perform a less-expensive test of the product using something that is much closer to the expected final product.

Cost of this stage: $18,000. Costs so far: $48,800

[1] HDPE: High Density Polyethylene

Chapter 13. Test the molds thoroughly

2007-02-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

It is ... the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

- Henry A. Kissinger

Testing the real thing

Obvious as this may sound, the only way to test a plastic injected part is to test a plastic injected part. That means using the mold to make enough sample parts with which to conduct a product test, before you order thousands of parts.

My 3D printer took me a long way. Now was the time to move to the next stage. Even with the incredibly accurate parts I had made on my Stratasys 3D printer, I knew the next testing had to be with real plastic injected parts.

Depending on which materials you decide on, injected parts can be different. They may look similar, and they are certainly impressive, but for many reasons, the injected part will behave differently to the 3D printed equivalent part. The good news is that you have almost infinite control over your injected parts because of the wide range of materials available on the market. The raw materials available for plastic injection, called “resins”, are too many to count; you have control over the strength, color, flexibility, weight and texture of the piece you will make with injection molding. You can use plastic that is so rubbery it will bend 90 degrees and bend right back without damage, or you can use plastic that is almost as hard as steel, or anything in between. During the testing phase of my product, the folks at Cascade Plastics presented me with injected pieces in different materials before we considered the mold creation stage complete. The fact that they took considerable interest in the product meant that they were in a good position to advise me about which materials might best suit the requirements. Mesaros did several short runs, each in a different color, so we could be sure which materials were which, and in the end it was obvious which material would be the best one to use in the production run. As stated earlier, I was amazed the 3D prototypes snapped together with the final plastic injected parts. This alone gave me a good feeling my product was going to be close to what I had designed.

Test various material choices before you manufacture a batch of product.

One of the requirements of my PondSecure product was for it to be negatively buoyant. That is, I did not want it to float, but rather, be slightly heavier than the water it displaced so it stayed in place below the surface of the pond. Many flexible plastics can be made stiffer or heavier by adding talc. There are also additives to make certain plastics UV-resistant. Colors vary in price. Black and other cold, dark colors are cheaper. Bright colors are more expensive because you have to use a lot of it to turn your piece of plastic, for example, bright yellow. It might be that only some of your parts have to be a bright color, so consider making batches of the same piece in different colors. In addition, each batch can have a different color, so you can make the same part in different colors if that helps manage costs. Talk to your manufacturer about what color, stiffness, texture and density choices you have and allow plenty of time to pore over the test runs of injected parts, even if you have to pay extra for that stage.

Allow at least two months to process test runs of injected parts, more time if your parts are complicated.

It did not occur to me at the time, but Cascade Plastics had woven the effort to test the injected parts into the cost estimate for the mold creation. They knew the real profit was down the road and not in creating the molds, so it was in their interests that my product worked. The fact that they had something to lose told me they must have understood the value of the product and underscored for me the value of having committed and capable partners.

We made a few minor, but critical adjustments to the molds, involving about 4 iterations, after which I signed off on them, which triggered the remaining 50% of the mold cost, $18,000.

Cost of this stage: $18,000. Costs so far: $66,800

Chapter 14. Order a production run

2007-02-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

As I type this sentence, I have today taken delivery of the first batch of manufactured product, two full pallets of it, sitting in boxes in my garage.

I have no anxiety today around the fit and finish of the parts. Just in case, though, my next objective was to field-test my product with customers. I knew I could install and take advantage of my own product, but what challenge is a busy mother-of-four in Florida going to have installing it? The only way to find out is to try to sell some. I ordered $10,000 worth of the product. It costs more when you do small batches and when your cavity count is low, so I ended up paying probably three or four times more than I hope to pay to manufacture the same amount several years from now. The objective at this early stage is not to maximize profit, but rather, to test the product at the next level: The Customer.

Cost of this stage: $10,000. Costs so far: $76,800

Chapter 15. Write and submit your patent application

2007-02-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

The world of patents has changed over the last ten years. A decade ago, you spent time and money writing your patent, you filed it and shepherded it through the lengthy patent examination process in wherever country you needed it.

By the year 2006, I am hearing it said that “the patent process is broken”, in the United States, at least. Tell that to Microsoft who recently put together a legal team whose sole objective is to pursue as many patent application opportunities that can be found within the work Microsoft employees have already done or are doing. If the patent process is broken, someone ought to tell Bill Gates.

Certainly, it has changed. However, getting a patent granted is today more of a purely defensive maneuver than it used to be.

There is no such thing as an open-and-shut legal case.

- My dear mother

You never know how a legal battle in court is going to go. Companies are reluctant to sue others they feel are infringing on their patents. Even with ostensibly strong patents, a day in court can bring many surprises. If a defendant has what you might consider a much weaker patent, but has good legal representation on the day, the judge may see it their way instead of yours. You may end up with a stalemate or even a loss. Don’t go that far. The trick is to avoid ending up in court with no patent, in which case you have nothing that even can remotely work as a deterrent against your plaintiff.

Consider this: you have under your bed a 100-year-old gun. It’s got a single rusty old bullet in one of its chambers, or perhaps none. But it is a gun. A burglar breaks into your house and he sees you behind a chair at the top of the stairs with the rusty old gun in your hand. He can always take a chance the gun won’t work or that you have no bullets or even that it is not a real gun. Nevertheless, a hundred-year-old rusty bullet will kill you just as dead as a shiny new fancy one. Therefore, there is a real incentive for the burglar, especially if he is unarmed, to leave you alone. If, on the other hand, you are unarmed, and he is the one with the gun, any gun, guess who’s walking out with your wallet.

Patents are like that. Even a weak patent is more valuable than no patent at all. So, how can you put the minimum amount of work and money into getting a patent that will afford you this deterrent protection but allow you to refocus your efforts on building your product and business?

Nearly ten years ago, a colleague and I put together three patent applications without the help of an attorney. We worked out that it took on average 160 hours of labor per patent application, just to get the application into the mail. Hard work, I might add.

Those applications were for software, which is inherently more complex a task to patent than hardware is usually and that was nearly a decade ago.

Today (2006), there are several desktop products on the market that will guide you through creating a patent application. I used a product called PatentEase, but there are others out there you could look at. Because I had already worked on three other patent applications in the past, I did know better what to look for, but probably any of these new software tools will help you get your patent application completed. With this productivity tool, the one patent application I mail off to the PTO took about 50 intense hours to complete. Like I said, hardware patents are easier than software patents, and the process I am sure takes less time if you have written a patent before.

Allow yourself about 80 intensive hours of work to complete a patent application using a patent creation package such as PatentEase or PatentPro.

Before you start, search the online database for a granted patent that is in your field. Find one as close as possible to your own product idea and print it off in its entirety. Take it home and read it from cover to cover. Completing that task will be another real test of your perseverance. You won’t understand everything of course, because patents are written in what I would call patent dialect. It looks like English, but there are some startling uses of English that have a specific purpose in the context of a patent application.

Pay particular attention to the Claims section towards the end of the patent you printed off. In fact, you might start reading the patent right there.

I hope you will find a couple of patents that frighten you a little. You will see patents that closely resemble what you are trying to achieve, but solve the problem in a different way.

The existence of granted patents addressing the area your product idea addresses suggests that a market exists for your product.

Remember that a problem cannot be patented, but a means to solve it can. You can’t patent repetitive strain injury, but you might be able to patent a novel, corrugated plastic strap that one can wrap around their wrist to ease the problem. That means, even if there are 150 patents that address the problem of “wrist strain while using garden trowels”, a new way of solving the problem that you have come up might be patentable. As long as your product is a novel and unobvious means of solving the problem, you have a chance of getting your patent. Of course, if you find a granted patent that specifically solves the problem the way you do, you have a different problem. If that is the case, you may have to return to the drawing board to adjust your designs so they do not infringe on that existing patent. On the other hand, it might be enough to narrow the focus of your patent application so it covers a narrower interpretation of the problem.

In my Aqualocks experience, there were plenty of granted patents addressing the problem my product addressed and there were other patents using honeycomb structures as I did, but to address non-pond problems. No patent used a honeycomb in relation to pond problems.

To have a chance of getting your patent granted, your product must be novel and non-obvious.

I’d have to say the two toughest technical challenges in the first eighteen months were (1) mastering CAD and (2) writing the patent. If you feel a bit discouraged during the patent creation stage, you might be making it bigger than it needs to be. A patent application with fewer claims is easier to get through the patent office than one with many claims. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the patent application creation process, simplify it to cover at least some of your product. The more comprehensive the patent application the better, obviously, but at a certain point, you need to get back to your business. Having a strong patent application but running out of time will bring to you a different kind of disaster.

At this point, my own lawyer, if I had one, would probably advise me to advise you to seek legal counsel before you embark on the potentially critical task of filing a patent. So, go do that. My lawyer said so.

For my part, I did the whole application without as much as a phone call with a patent attorney. My plan is, if my product somehow opens the floodgates of success, I will return to the issue of patents and get some big expensive help to strengthen my legal position then. For now, though, I have to focus on the business of creating a product, getting it into customers’ hands and being paid for it. After mailing the patent application off to the US PTO, I headed straight back to product issues.

Between the software and the patent application fee: $1,000.

Cost of this stage: $1,000. Costs so far: $77,800

Chapter 16. Test product. Address issues

2007-02-27T14:55:00.000-08:00

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

- William Shakespeare

By this time, you may have taken delivery of your first batch of product. In my case, I was surprised at just how many boxes of plastic you get for about $10k. It was two full pallets of boxes and took me two trips in my minivan, with all the rear seats removed, to get the product from the factory to my garage.

Earlier testing of prototypes gave me enough confidence that I had addressed any product issues needing an adjustment to the molds. Based on prototype testing, I had signed off on the molds. Getting the first batch of product was a big milestone.

A quick examination of how the newly minted pieces snapped together confirmed that this product was in good shape. Having gotten it this far was no small feat. Having workable product sitting in your garage has brought me a long way on my journey. Many problems have been solved and questions have been answered, and I have a growing list of product improvements I will want to make to the product in the future. Some of the improvements reduce the cost of manufacturing; others relate to making it a simpler product that is more effective and easier to install. My plan is to make these improvements in stages, in product “versions” 2 and 3, but for the moment, I have product to sell.

So now I have moved my car out to the front driveway for the winter. Where my car usually sat in the garage is taken up by two pallets of boxes filled with mysterious pieces of plastic: my product.

The next task was to re-sort and repack all this plastic into the product boxes I can sell the product in. This little job turned out to take a bit longer than I thought it would—about 30 minutes per box—just like every other step along the way. Still, I was determined to do as many of the small chores as I could in an effort to become intimately familiar with every aspect of my business. Doing all the little bits of drudgery myself was going to teach me a lot about where my product was strong, where it was weak, and where I could improve the product and process along the way. I did bump into a few non-critical issues that I addressed by improving the installation instructions. Thankfully, no critical product issues surfaced.

Installing production run product

My original plan had me installing the first production-run product in the spring of 2006. With all the delays that occurred, my first production-run product installation was only possible on October 28 of that year. By this season, most folks in the northwest United States had turned their attentions to indoor activities, so the opportunities were narrowing to get people lined up to put my product into their pond. Still, I had a few pond owners lined up and my first installation was into a 12’ x 6’ pond – a good example of a medium-to-large pond that would test the limits of my product.

There is nothing like a real world test of a new product and I felt like luck was on my side that day. Installing PondSecure went like a charm, taking about three hours to complete without the use of tools. It was stronger than I expected it to be and the honeycomb structure was somehow strengthened because it was large. The owners of the pond were pleased and impressed. They were pleasantly surprised with the ability to place potted plants and other objects directly on the honeycomb. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had a product.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $77,800

Chapter 17. Test and sell product

2007-02-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

Product management is neither R&D nor sales, but the intersection of making it and selling it

Sam Knox

In any well-managed for-profit organization, you can slot any one contributor into the “making it” or the “selling it” category, and occasionally, both categories. In larger organizations, there are roles outside the making and selling functions, for example, a financial controller might be involved only in managing money, but mostly, a contributor can be tied to one function or the other.

Why am I pointing this out? Well, I have spoken mostly about making a product. That is, only the first half of the equation.

Selling your product is easily as big a job as making it. It might cost a lot more to sell it than to make it. In fact, the easier the product is to make, the more it will cost to sell it compared with how much it will cost to make it. For example, if you are selling those waxed paper cups to Starbucks and other café retailers, the cost of manufacturing it might be a fraction of your cost of sales. Anyone can get into the business of making and selling waxed coffee cups, which pushes the challenge into the selling of it. Conversely, a drug that reduces the metastasizing of cancer is enormously complex, and thus, the challenge is more in the making of it. Sure, millions of dollars will be spent on marketing and selling the drug, but that pales in comparison to how much was spent developing the drug in the first place.

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $77,800

Chapter 18. Adjust your marketing and sales plan

2007-02-27T14:45:00.000-08:00

It's always summer on the Internet

By this stage, I had a much better idea what it costs to manufacture my product. It had taken a lot longer and had cost more than I expected. I thought it would take me about eight or nine months to get my first customer. I am already fifteen months in and I do not yet have my first real customer.

If you have gotten to this stage without having given up your day job, you are in a good position indeed. You have completed the task of creating a salable product and are close (I hope) to getting your first customer. Assuming you have a cost structure that makes a sale profitable, you have many choices open to you.

When I got to this stage, my first product run cost about three times more than I had hoped, which put enormous pressure on me to raise the price I would sell my product for. I did at least know that in the future I could bring that manufacturing cost down by remaking two of the molds with a far higher cavity count. Right now, though, the immediate objective is to get some sales and to learn about product issues that need to be addressed, so I decided to keep the product price to a level that made sense for the long term, rather than just try to recoup the costs of an expensive, early production run.

From my practical tests, I knew the product could be installed, and that it worked better than I expected it would. That is a good start, but in the hands of customers, issues pop up like mushrooms in a monsoon, so I am bracing for a small wave of new product requirements.

Most of the addressable market for my new product lives in the northern hemisphere, which means my product will not sell fast as most people do not work on their pond in the winter. However, we live in a time where, for an increasing number of products, the world is your market. So, from the beginning, I have made it possible to buy my product no matter where in the world you live.

Walking on dry ground again

At the earliest stages, being in your own startup is like living in a cardboard box under a bridge. It’s rough for much the time. No one is paying the rent and you alone must solve every problem that arises. When your project fails, it is not enough to shrug your shoulders and move on to the next project your employer offers to you. You simply have to make it work. On top of that, you don’t have any supporting infrastructure like you do when you are working in a large organization. Sometimes you need a little of that comfort.

I decided to go back to regular employment. As I pushed my resume onto the job market, I worked feverishly on getting everything in place for my product to sell online when I did eventually have to take on that full-time job. Once I take up a full-time job, development of my business will slow down a lot. Still, working full-time at this stage will ease the financial pressure, most particularly in reducing the need to make a profit within a few months.

End of chapter exercise:

· How long can you afford to pursue your product plan without being paid? _____________________________

· How much of your cash savings are you prepared to invest in your product idea? _____________________________

· How much money are you prepared to borrow to invest in your product idea? _____________________________

· How many separate pieces of plastic do you expect to see in your product? _____________________________

· Assuming none of your parts has an undercut, multiply the last answer by $7,500 _____________________________. (This will give you a rough estimate at how much your molds might cost).

· How much will it cost to manufacture one complete unit of your product? (not including mold creation costs) _____________________________

· Multiply the last answer by 2 to get the rough cost of selling it and cost of manufacturing it combined: _____________________________

· How much do you expect a customer will pay for one unit of your product? _____________________________

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $77,800

Chapter 19. Make design changes

2007-02-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.

- Lord Chesterfield

By now you will have hopefully taken your product from early idea all the way to satisfying your first customer. You’ve learned a lot about the whole process, and probably, like I did, you’ve made a few mistakes along the way. I hope, none of them was serious. You have learned of a few defects relating to your product.

There is no time like the present to look at how those product defects might be addressed by making design changes to your product.

Although the first batches of your product satisfied your Version One objectives, it is possible some or all of the molds will have to be remade to address the product design problems you have discovered. Even if your first shot at design produced a good enough product, the next stage will be to lower the unit product costs by increasing the number of cavities.

You can look at this in one of two ways.

(a) Your product is good enough and making changes to the design might break it, or

(b) Since you are recreating the molds anyway, you should squeeze in a few needed improvements.

Only you can know which path to take, but I would err on the side of leaving the product alone and go off looking at your next product. But, if there are significant design issues with your product, then you may have no choice but to redesign the product. Just remember that, by fixing one problem, you may create another

Cost of this stage: $0. Costs so far: $77,800

Chapter 20. Remake key molds

2007-02-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

By the time you have a few dozen customers, perhaps sooner, you will know what changes to your product you want to make. Some are improvements and some are optimizations from a manufacturing standpoint.

Here is a warning, though. Consider all the effort you put into making your first batch of product work. You also came up with a few workarounds to minor product issues that surfaced. Every time you make a product design change, no matter how minor, you risk breaking the product.

If the product works, if you know you can make a profit on it as it is designed currently, faults an’ all, consider remaking your higher cavity molds with no change to the product design. The cost of making the mold will be lower if you can say to your mold makers “make it exactly like the last one, except make it with 16 cavities”. The mold-maker knows exactly what the new pieces must be and there is no time wasted second-guessing changes to the design. And you know your product works; why mess with it.

You will save time and money, and probably reduce risk, if you redo the molds for higher cavity counts without making any product design changes.

But, if you do need to make product design changes as well as remaking one or more of your molds, make sure you won’t have to do it a second time.

Make a list of improvements

Make a list of everything you would like to change and improve about your product. Group them by mold. Let us say your product had 10 molds in total. It may be that only one or two of them will need changes. In my case, of the six molds I got made, I will remake two of them with high cavity counts simply to reduce manufacturing costs. I might remake a third one, and the remaining three molds I will leave as is.

According to my good friend Gary Selke, to replace a low-cavity mold (2 cavities) with a high-cavity mold (12 or 16) roughly doubles the cost of the mold. (At least, that is a reasonable rule-of-thumb, but you need to verify cost estimates for the specifics of your mold needs.)

A rule-of-thumb: A twelve-cavity mold will cost twice as much as a two-cavity mold of the same piece.

If you also add product design changes to the replacement mold, the cost increases.

Each one of your molds will either:

(a) need to be redone to fix product design issues,

(b) need to be redone to increase cavity count and reduce cost, or

I expect I will spend upwards of $50,000 on replacing several of my molds to reach the point of getting my first profitable product to market. Your mold costs might be a lot more or a lot less than mine, so your upfront costs might be significantly different.

End of chapter exercise

Q: How many molds have you created for your first iteration of your product? _______________

Q: How many of these molds must be redone because of product design problems you need to fix? __________

Q: How many molds would you remake because you need to increase the cavity count to reduce production costs? _________

Cost of this stage: $50,000. Costs so far: $127,000

Chapter 21. Step-by-step summary

2007-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

If you’re not feeding your dreams, you’re feeding someone else’s

A fear of the unknown keeps a lot of people from leaving bad situations.

- Kathie Lee Gifford

Some time around forty years old, I woke up to the fact that I had put all of my own dreams on hold. There would always be time later to pursue them, a soft little voice inside me would say, as I pursued the objectives of making money in a profitable career that was supposed to someday release me from its clutches. Then I could pursue my dreams.

Real dreams do not take money. The very pursuit of money, and the eventual acquisition of gobs of it, is what will suffocate your dreams. And that’s assuming you make the Big Money you were trying to. You’re dead a long time, as my friend Randy keeps telling me, and time is short. That does not mean dropping everything and moving to a temple in Tibet, or abandoning your mortgage payments and letting your family starve. No, it means investing some of your precious lifetime every day into your dream.

If at first an idea does not appear absurd, there is no hope for it.

- Albert Einstein

Likely, you do not have One Big Bold Dream either. Your life might be sprinkled with a dozen small dreams, supported by the effort of working in a day job. Or, you might have a dream that takes you through five or ten years of your life. Don’t let anyone tell you that your dream is unworthy—that’s not for them to decide—that’s for you to decide. In fact, it is probably a good sign that others throw cold water on your idea. Any good idea I know of that came to fruition always began by being scoffed at.

Sticking with it

Bringing a product to market has many challenges. The first big challenge is finding the courage to take the first steps towards your dream. Then there is the challenge of sticking with it when you cannot see immediate results. And then there is the wisdom and strength needed to walk away from the whole thing if continuing it doesn’t make any sense.

“That product. That was my idea!” How many times have you heard someone say that?

When you have an idea, understand that many other people have had the same idea.

An idea by itself is not worth much.

A tiny fraction of people pursue their ideas or their dreams. Most of us go to our graves clutching our dreams tightly to our chest, never having given life to them. Maybe we are afraid we or our dreams will turn out to be worthless, and by avoiding our dreams, we never have to look defeat in the eye.

We distinguish ourselves not by coming up with ideas, but by pursuing them.

Trust in God, but keep your powder dry

- Oliver Cromwell

At the same time, there is no need to be foolhardy about it. There are ways to step towards your goal without committing your life savings to it at the first opportunity. Cash alone will not make your dream a reality. Cash allows you to avoid having to be as creative as you need to be when you do not have cash.

Keep your day job. Design at home

Search the web for a CAD program that is fun to use and will satisfy your needs. I used Alibre partly because it was below $1,000 but mostly, because I was able to make some design progress within a couple of hours of it. Spend the time to go over every free tutorial available. There is no need to spend money on extra classes.

Get a rough prototype made

Many manufacturers of 3D printers will do one or two sample pieces of your designed part. If you can’t get it for free, you might be able to get it done through a 3D printing service for a couple of hundred dollars. They charge by weight, so you could save some money by producing a miniature of your design. The 3D service you selected should be able to offer you a scaled down version of your design. When it arrives, show it and explain it to everyone who cares to listen. Keep a notepad handy and take notes at every opportunity.

Use the feedback to improve your design. Try everything, even though it might not seem like a good idea at first. The beauty of modern CAD is that you can try every little interesting design change for free. Iterate back and forth with your “team” until they are sick of you and your stupid idea.

Get more prototypes

Use the service again to get several more pieces made so you can see how well they fit together, how they feel in your hand and how they work in practice.

Bring the pieces with you everywhere you go. Sleep with them. Leave them on the kitchen table while you are eating. If you are having guests over, leave them in a prominent position so your guests ask what they are for. Continue with the statutory inventor’s conversation maker: “Funny you should ask…”

Decide on a mold maker

Who you pick and what your contract looks like is critical. Get this wrong and your product will be rubbish, no matter how good the original idea was. This is the biggest commitment you will have made so far because it defines how your product will be made, how you will relate to your manufacturers and whether the product will even work in the end.

Get commitments from your mold maker the product will work as specified. Pick a mold maker who can also do the plastic injection molding part and everything else needed to get your product in a box. This might mean ordering and adding off-the-shelf ingredients to the product.

Test the injected parts before signing off on molds

The first injected parts in your hands will be your last chance to make corrections to the product that might have slipped through. Make sure it all works exactly as you wanted. Once you sign off on the molds, it will cost you real money to makes further changes to those molds.

Place order for first production run

If you’ve done your homework so far, there will be no surprises when a pallet load of product arrives at your door, or better, you have to go pick up.

Do everything yourself

Anything you yourself can do, rather than outsourcing it, do it. This saves money but more importantly, you learn the nature of your business from first principles. If your product and company take off, the more you understand of the underlying nuts and bolts of it, the better decisions you will make.

Test, test, test.

Remember the original reason you thought your idea was brilliant? Now is your chance to put it into action. Even if you are so tired of looking at your own creation you can’t stand it, put it to practical use now. You will learn a lot from all the little mistakes you made in the design. Use what you learn to form the basis of the improvements you will make to the next version of the product, but also, to document for your customers what issues they may face when using your product.

Your dream product is in your hand

You have gotten this far. That was not so hard, was it!

The next stage, selling it, is a much bigger task and will be the subject of the next little book in this series.

The strength of a fuse is in its weakness

- Anonymous

A note about teamwork

My son plays soccer. Out of the last four weeks’ matches, his team won the first three. On his team, they have three star soccer players, and goal after goal the three stars knocked the ball into the enemy’s net repeatedly. This last Saturday, however, my son’s team lost by a landslide. They lost against a team that did not have a single exceptional individual player. They lost because it rained all through the game and the pitch had turned to mud. Why did that cause my son’s team to lose the match? Well, when you play soccer on a drenched pitch, you can’t dribble the ball; you must pass it to your teammates. But strong players don’t like to pass the ball, no matter what the coach says. The opposing team was at a distinct advantage because they were good at passing the ball to other; that was the only way they could win any match, rain or shine. The opposing team, without a single exceptional player, was strong because of their very weakness. It was an education for me to watch the other team pass the ball back and forth to each other while my son’s team ran back and forth over an unforgiving pitch, looking for openings that never came.

As a novice to plastic injection molding, I simply had to pass the ball to other players at every stage.

It made all the difference in the world.

Organizations mentioned in this book

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Aqualocks Corporation – www.aqualocks.com

Stratasys Inc. – www.stratasys.com

Cimtech, Fife, WA – www.multiaxis.com

Cascade Plastics, Fife, WA - www.cascadeplastics.com

Appliance Design – www.appliancedesign.com

Thomas Register - http://www.thomasnet.com

Alibre – www.alibre.com

Recommended books

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Recommended books

A Technique for Producing Ideas – James Webb Young

Universal Principles of Design – William Lidwell

Creating your second life after forty – Barbara Sher

About the Author

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About the Author

Liam Sean Scanlan was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1960. At seventeen, he started his career as a computer programmer in a local subsidiary of the German firm Nixdorf Computer AG. This gave Scanlan the lifetime opportunity to live and breathe in a half dozen countries around the world before settling in Seattle, USA. Initially working for Microsoft, he got a taste for product creation in 1992, started three companies from scratch, including Bocada Inc, and shipped eight different software products over more than a decade.

The latest of those startups, Aqualocks Corporation, is a departure from the unbroken series of software products Scanlan had previously brought to market. It was a journey of turning a clever but theoretical idea for a unique product into the product itself. It involved learning about a whole now set of technologies, tools, people and processes.

This book is about that journey.

Scanlan lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Geraldine and three children.

Acknowledgements

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

- H. L. Mencken

Writing this book was easy enough, but the journey I talk about was a three-year adventure of faith and persistence.

For that I’d like to give thanks.

To my wife and best friend Geraldine who patiently suffered through this and two other start-ups on my behalf, and whose financial management skills made Aqualocks and two other start-ups possible over the past fifteen years.

To my friends Aidan Waine, Aidan Rowsome, Randall Broad, David and Roisín O’Farrel, Jennifer Mount, Dermot and Jackie FitzGibbon, Ken Wade and Gary Selke, who all sat through countless, dreamy product evangelisms before something concrete emerged, and who listened, encouraged me and gave good advice at every stage.

To my life coach brother Seamus and to my business minded brother David who helped me with the Yin and Yang of it.

To Cecilia, Patrick, Ross, Cory and the long list of friends at home and abroad who added to the emotional support at every turn.

To Brad Raker and Dave Mesaros, who patiently worked with me for months before I became a customer, and who turned my rough plans into professional product designs, and then turned those into salable product. Without that critical help, my product would never have seen the light of day.

To David Arena, who patiently brought me up to speed on the bleeding edge of 3D printing long before I ever became his customer.

From Paper To Plastic - the book online

Introduction

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.

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.

Chapter 3. Immerse yourself in the trade

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.

Chapter 5. Avoid reinventing the wheel

Chapter 6. Select and learn a CAD program

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

Chapter 7. Complete a basic CAD design for your product

Chapter 8. Get a design prototype made

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.

Chapter 10. Refine your design and iterate

Wasting time on silicone jelly molds

Chapter 11. Make good mold choices

Critical: Number of cavities

Chapter 12. Order molds

Chapter 13. Test the molds thoroughly

Chapter 14. Order a production run

Chapter 15. Write and submit your patent application

The world of patents has changed over the last ten years. A decade ago, you spent time and money writing your patent, you filed it and shepherded it through the lengthy patent examination process in wherever country you needed it.

Chapter 16. Test product. Address issues

Chapter 17. Test and sell product

Product management is neither R&D nor sales, but the intersection of making it and selling it

Chapter 18. Adjust your marketing and sales plan

Chapter 19. Make design changes

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.

- Lord Chesterfield

Chapter 20. Remake key molds

Chapter 21. Step-by-step summary

Top 10 Questions

Organizations mentioned in this book

Recommended books

About the Author