Chapter 11. Make good mold choices

Skip this chapter at your peril.

Design refinements

A

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.

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

Chapter 12. Order molds

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

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[1] HDPE: High Density Polyethylene

Chapter 13. Test the molds thoroughly

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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