10 tips to reduce the risks of hardware products

How to test and evaluate the demand for hardware products before upgrading the factory

It’s often more risky to make real, tangible things that you can touch than to develop software. Once you’ve created 10,000 things, it’s much harder to make changes to them than it is in the software world, where you can push update if you want to tweak something.

In the manufacturing world then, the question is: How can I make sure I’m building the right thing for the right audience?

last week, When I wrote about the $1.5 million Prelaunch.com donationI asked company founder Narik Vardanian what he thinks are the biggest risks in hardware development.

Measure the right users

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

In a perfect world, that would mean getting them to buy or at least put down a deposit for your product. A true purchase intent is more valuable than someone just saying, “Yeah, I’ll buy that thing.”

“You need to make decisions based on people’s actual behavior. You need to make sure that the data you’re tracking is coming from the right kinds of people,” Vardanian said. “Working with people who exclude money acts like a filter: you only keep the people who really want to risk their money. In other words, your potential clients.”