What a founder learned after running a hardware startup for 2 years

Come Chinese New Year 2016, it would have been 2 years since we started working on my startup Novelsys with 2 other co-founders. Sadly, it is also the conclusion and winding down of an eventful journey. Make no mistake, we were successful in raising a iJAM round ($55,000), winning awards like the 14th Startup@Singapore, GlobalTIC in Taiwan, Japan, and were even featured on Channel News Asia and multiple media outlets.

This culminated in our $87,000 Kickstarter campaign, which we successfully delivered 600 units of Ampere – a wireless charging sleeve for mobile phones (though with many issues).

However, these stood for nothing as we failed to build a scalable business to enter retail in the competitive hardware space, like Razer, Fitbit or Occulus. We failed to find a product-market fit.

This story is not about the backstory to Ampere, nor how its 3 founders plunked $30,000 into the venture to survive through the tough times. This post is dedicated to first or second-time founders who are going down the same path and can relate to this journey. In psychology, we deem this to be cognitive learning, and the learning mindset is critical. “How are you telling your story today?”

This is an honest look at the lessons we learnt along the way, which I hope you find useful in one way or another.

Things I’d do differently

1. Focus on real problems of your users, instead of on perceived problems.

2. Understand the market with extensive market research before jumping in.

3. The above two constitute the product-market fit, which is really all that matters for early-stage startups.

4. Listen, listen and listen to ALL stakeholders objectively.

5. Be less emotional with the business, and understand that it’s a marathon, not a sprint (to prevent painful burnouts and weight gain).

6. Understand the role of every single person in the company to optimise the 12 hours of work each day.

7. Hardware is (expensive) hard work. Therefore, validate your idea before even building the prototype.

8. Be selective about the events that you attend. Don’t waste your time going for conferences with no real reason for your presence.

Things I’d do again