What I learned as a hardware founder after shipping our first 10,000 units

Photo credit: Dan Gribbin

I started my company right after graduating from university, with a degree in business and no formal training or work experience. Neither did I have a deep understanding of electronics, mobile apps, manufacturing, the music industry or anything else that was important for what we were planning to do. As someone who plays music and loves technology, I just knew there was an existing market for metronomes, and an unmet need for a more modern solution that technology could solve. Somehow it all turned out quite nicely, but it was certainly a difficult journey.

What originally started out as a concept in Berlin is now Soundbrenner Pulse, a smart wearable device designed for musicians. It comes with companion apps for mobile and desktops, and is now available in over 400 stores worldwide.

Here’s our journey in a nutshell:

• The company was founded at Startup Weekend Berlin in July 2014
• After initial prototyping we got accepted into Brinc, moved around the world from Berlin to Hong Kong in November 2014
• In March 2015, we launched an Indiegogo campaign and raised US$240,000
• In January 2016, we shipped the Soundbrenner Pulse to 2,500 backers in over 70 countries
• In March 2016, we shipped the first units to retailers

Today, we’ve sold over 10,000 units and counting!

Here are the lessons I learned along the way as a hardware founder:

Learn fast

I can’t think of anything else requiring a more diverse set of skills than starting a hardware company. You’re actually building three companies – hardware, software and data in one, and you need to do it all at once.

Here’s a chronological cycle of what it looks like:

Rough prototyping & validation -> product development -> crowdfunding -> app development -> manufacturing -> ecommerce & logistics -> retail & distribution

If you look at the list above, it’s actually quite insane. You need to understand all these things in-depth, or you’re in trouble. Whatever you learned in the previous step will be useless in the next step, and you won’t need the knowledge gleaned from each step until several months, or even more than a year later. Learning any of these things by itself is already quite challenging, but as as a hardware founder, you need to be able to juggle them all.

Learn as much about your customer as you can from the outset

Hardware is not like software, where you can iterate quickly at little cost and stay up late at night re-coding. Things in hardware have a ripple effect; once things have been tooled for DFM, you can’t just go and make changes to them. You’d have to start the R&D process all over again, and go back to square one.

Understand the long-term consequences of certain decisions, and plan ahead for these things.