The team and partners in hardware startups

In startups we always say “team is the key” and here, of course, it’s true.  Many  different profiles are needed, and it’s so difficult to have all of them from the beginning. Really, you’re not going to need everyone at the same time, so you can be creating different teams for different phases of the company.

Usually founders know how to prototype. That’s the main reason they’re in this business, because they found a problem and they think they can create the solution. Prototyping skills are really useful in the beginning of the project, let’s say the first 12-18 months. But probably these people will be lost when manufacturing is needed. Also, concept designers are not industrial ones, and you’ll find this kind of problem in every single position of the company. Also many gaps of knowledge will appear. Certifications, legal issues or patents are usually only known to people with experience in the industry.

Of course, you don’t need founders in each role. You’ll be able to contract people when needed, or to look for different half time/temporal collaborators. But be careful, to find these profiles is not easy, and move them from traditional industry to startups is also complicated. Find freelancers is also an option, but the number of them is so reduced, and there aren’t thousands of them ready for working by hours in global platforms for work an amount of time as you have for coders, graphic designers or translators

Try to build a team that will survive until “serious” manufacturing. The team should also be able to manage the business and the team when money and/or investment are present. Someone with industry-area or manufacturing experience is a point to create a consistent and competence team.

Finding partners or providers is also an important topic to develop the product. As mentioned location is a key decision. But many projects really find problems to discover local providers, or global ones that really fit to their demand. Specially in short series is really difficult to get a deal with companies that are use to work with really big corporations and series.

There are several accelerators in this area that could be so useful for startup. They’re covering different phases since early stage to production. Sometimes they have a location in China to help on the production there.

Also many “normal” accelerators are working with this kind of projects and that’s positive, but the need of specialized mentors and knowledge gives an advantage to the vertical ones, and also to the ones coming from a related industry.

The local communities are growing up,, usually leadered by passionated people that are pioneers in the area, usually doing it mainly pro-bono.

Several places are also creating these communities around them: fablabs, makerspaces, recently coworking dedicating a part of the space to labs. The need of special material, tools and resources make more necessary than in other industries  to have a physical space with more equipment than usual entrepreneurs needs.

Around these communities and spaces things are happening but many times not yet in a really business-oriented way.

Find these collaborators is a really time and energy consuming process that many times involves delays, fails, differences in the expected quality…Having the right providers and a good communication with them is as important as having a good team.