Bootstrapping a hardware product: Ideation

Last week a friend of mine called. He said he wants to develop a VR headset for educational purposes.

We talked about possible roadmaps to develop a hardware product from scratch. It was a long discussion and we ended up with these steps:

1. Ideation
2. Industrial Design
3. Prototyping
4. Preorder Campaign
5. Manufacturing
6. Sales
7. After-sales

In this post, we’re gonna cover ideation.

Obsession

How to find an idea? They don’t appear in your mind while you’re trying to find them consciously. Instead, they usually come when you’re busy with different things.

I would say it requires a certain level of obsession in a certain field. If you’re trying to solve the same problem for a long time probably you will get some ideas, noting them down is a good idea to check and rinse again later.

Market trends

When you have an initial idea, it would be great to check also trends in the market. You need some wind to get along with. They are trends. Checking market sizes and CAGR values (compound annual growth rate) on the internet may give an idea but it’s not enough for sure.

Checking competitor products and finding their annual sales numbers will be helpful to understand what is the size of the market and whether is it worth an investment.

Checking Google Search trends, and looking up some keywords with tools like SemRush, ahref can give an idea about demand. Since you’re making a hardware product, buying trends for similar products/competitors in e-commerce websites and marketplaces like Amazon will help in decision-making as well.

Manufacturing costs

If all looks ok, then the last two points are development and cost-efficient manufacturing. Since you’ve already looked at other products in the market you should have already a vague price estimate in your product category.

Preparing a bill-of-materials list and asking prices from component suppliers is necessary to understand how much the device gonna cost. Hence you can have a look at the cost and decide if it’s feasible to develop and manufacture such a product.

Evaluation equation

So the equation looks like below.

How obsessed are you to solve that problem (or to serve that Persona) x Trends in the market x Development capabilities (Team) x Marketing skills (Distribution) x The Profitability

You can give points for each item and see what are the strong parts and weak parts in your equation. If things look promising then no need to look around too much. No idea check all marks. Even some of the items in the equation may not seem too shiny, that’s ok!

Is the product gonna be successful? The market will decide on that. But there are ways to collect some signals before delivering the product. We will cover those in the upcoming posts.

I run a weekly newsletter about hardware product development. Find the Mountain Labs Newsletter on Substack if you're interested.

Regards