r/hwstartups

We're about to do our first real batch, around 300 units, of a small industrial sensor product. Sensor PCB inside an aluminum enclosure, two M12 connectors, internal cable harness, external power brick that we source separately, plus a box with foam insert and a printed quick-start card. The PCBA side has been smooth so far, we've been working with a small CM for the boards and they've been responsive on DFM feedback.

The mess is everything else. The enclosure machining is with a separate shop we found through a referral. Cable assemblies are from a different vendor entirely and the lead time on those keeps slipping. Power bricks I'm just ordering off Digi-Key. Now I'm trying to figure out who actually puts it all together. Our CM offered to do box build (their term) which means they'd receive all the parts, assemble the units, label them with serial numbers, and ship us finished goods. The line item for box build came in higher than the PCBA quote itself, which surprised me. The alternative is renting a small space and getting a couple of contract assemblers locally to do final assembly here.

The bit I keep getting stuck on is whether the box build number is actually fair for the labor involved or just a markup because they assume hardware startups don't know what assembly costs.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster in this sub and whatnot...

So I've been working with hardware / technical founders in startup accelerators and innovation programs for a long time (and been a co-founder of a hardware / healthtech startup myself). Recently lost my day job and decided to put together an online tool (a hardware-specific version of the Lean Startup / Business Model Canvas) to help folks ask the right questions early... before fully investing time, energy and money into the product.

Since I've been following some conversations here about what people wished they had done early on in their process of validating the business side of things, I'd love any feedback on what resonates / doesn't resonate with either the AI audit tool or upcoming workshop that I'm putting together.

https://hardwarestartupcanvas.com/

https://hardwarestartupcanvas.com/workshop

Thanks in advance for checking it out and wish me luck on this wild journey. 🙏

You're working on a prototype or maybe you're in the middle of a dev cycle.

What are you typically doing while you wait for the next phase of hardware to arrive/complete?

Are you speaking with prospects, building marketing materials, writing test cases?

Something else?

I'd love to get a sense for what hardware teams are doing in between product development cycles to move their company forward.

Olá pessoal,
Nos últimos meses venho desenvolvendo um sistema de gestão da engenharia até a produção, focado em ambientes industriais e de manufatura.
A ideia surgiu das mesmas frustrações que vejo repetidamente:
engenheiros perdendo tempo com tarefas repetitivas
estruturas/BOM sendo criadas e mantidas manualmente
ERP desconectado do CAD
desenhos desatualizados chegando na produção
pouca visibilidade sobre o desempenho da engenharia
arquivos duplicados e confusão de versões
excesso de lançamento manual de dados entre setores
O sistema que estou desenvolvendo tenta melhorar pontos como:
integração com CAD
geração automática de BOM/processos
gestão de projetos e fluxo de engenharia
acompanhamento de desempenho da engenharia
visibilidade para a produção
padronização
controle de revisão/versão
redução de trabalho repetitivo na engenharia
Mas antes de continuar o desenvolvimento, quero feedback honesto de pessoas que realmente trabalham com engenharia e manufatura.
Então gostaria muito de perguntar:
Quais são os maiores gargalos no fluxo de engenharia hoje?
O que os sistemas atuais de ERP/PDM/PLM ainda falham em resolver?
Quais tarefas de engenharia consomem tempo demais sem necessidade?
Quais funcionalidades parecem boas na teoria, mas falham na prática?
O que faria você realmente adotar um novo sistema?
Onde a maioria dos “sistemas de gestão de engenharia” erra?
Não estou promovendo ou vendendo nada ainda — estou tentando validar os problemas reais antes de continuar avançando.
Gostaria muito de ouvir opiniões sinceras de:
Engenheiros mecânicos
Engenheiros de manufatura
Projetistas CAD
Equipes de produção/PCP
Programadores CNC
Gestores de engenharia
Qualquer pessoa que lide com a ligação entre engenharia e produção
Até pequenas frustrações já ajudam bastante.
Obrigado.

Hi everyone,

I’m part of an early-stage team building an AI energy product for California homes with rooftop solar, batteries, and EVs. We’re software-first today, but we’re trying to decide whether it makes sense to add a small in-home device for household electricity monitoring.

Before we go too far down the hardware path, I’m trying to sanity-check the real-world productization side with people who have actually worked on smart meters, submeters, CT-based energy monitors, or similar connected electrical devices.

The questions I’m trying to understand are pretty concrete:

• If this type of product goes through an ODM path, what would a realistic minimum MOQ look like?
• For a simple but reliable home energy monitoring device, what BOM range should we expect at early production volumes?
• For a US launch, which certifications are likely to matter in practice? For example, UL 2808, UL 916, FCC Part 15B/C, or other standards depending on the architecture.
• Are there any common mistakes software-first teams make when they try to add metering hardware too early?

I’m not trying to promote a product here. We’re still at the decision stage and trying to learn from people who have been closer to hardware, manufacturing, or certification than we have.

If you’ve worked on smart metering, energy monitoring, ODM manufacturing, or certification for connected electrical devices, I’d really appreciate your perspective. Also happy to learn what kind of expert we should be looking for if this becomes a deeper workstream.

Thanks in advance.

When you start building hardware, the early stage feels pretty straightforward you focus on getting something working, testing it quickly, and iterating based on what you learn. Progress feels fast and very tangible.

But the transition after that stage is where things start to feel very different.

Once you move beyond just a single working version, everything around the product starts to matter more than expected manufacturing methods, supplier communication, material choices, consistency between units, and how easily something can be assembled all start influencing decisions earlier than you would think.

I’ve been through situations where early prototypes worked fine, but once I started thinking about scaling the same design, it became obvious that some parts of it weren’t really designed with repetition in mind.

Not in a way that broke anything but in a way that would have made production slower or more inconsistent than necessary.

What stands out most is how the definition of done changes. In the beginning done means it works. Later done means it works the same way every time without extra effort or constant adjustment.

That shift is not obvious when you’re just starting out, but it becomes one of the biggest differences between prototyping and actually building a product that can scale.

Hey guys. I've spent the last month building a modular, NFC-integrated signage and redirection platform called SparkStation. It lets you link physical hardware assets to dynamic web routing. I just got the web app live on Supabase, the Stripe checkout armed, and my print times down to under 10 minutes per token on a single 3D printer in my workshop.

I'm putting out a $48 physical starter bundle to test the fulfillment pipeline. Full disclosure, my partner just sent me screenshots of the mobile site and the CSS is a total wreck right now, but the desktop view is solid. Would love to know what you guys think of the concept!

Full disclosure on the build stack: I'm a solo maker, so I used AI tools heavily to help me generate some of the site graphics and speed-write the core code logic over the last couple of weeks. But the physical manufacturing, flashing the NFC tags, and packaging are all done by hand right here in my workshop.

I am pursuing an ambitious robotics project currently with a team and I am in charge of hardware procurement. I spend way to many hours tracking packages, making sloppy excel spreadsheets, chasing components from different vendors, finding suitable replacements etc... and was wondering if anyone has struggled with this same issue and what methods/tools they used to manage all of this more efficiently.

Please feel free to respond to this post or message me directly.

This is some helpful advice for anybody who hasn’t taken their electronic product from prototype to market before.

It will consume 5000 hours of actual progress (including learning what you don’t know) and $10,000. This does not include the time and money used to make a prototype that proves the product’s value.

Unfortunately these are minimum figures. It comes as a huge shock to software engineers. Be prepared, and make sure your product solves a real problem people care about.

i'm an engineer. the tech side of a project, the late nights debugging a board, the satisfaction of getting a custom animation engine to run smoothly... that's what i understand. but i'm learning the hard way that it's only half the battle, and i'm failing miserably at the other half. after 14 months of work, our small team of 4 finally has a fully working prototype of a desktop AI companion. The picture is one of the bare boards that powers it. its not just a looping GIF on a screen; we built this from the ground up on a custom board using an ESP32-S3 + ESP32-P4 combo, driving a 410x502 Retina display. we even developed our own algorithm for real-time lip-sync and an animation state machine so its expressions feel natural and reactive. It's the cyberpunk-style digital pet i dreamed of as a kid. The problem is, building it was the only thing i was qualified to do. i've poured most of my savings into tooling and prototypes. Got scammed by a fake outsourcing company early on which set us back financially and emotionally. My own attempts at marketing have been a joke. i watched a bunch of tutorials and burned through about $4,500 on Meta ads with a conversion rate that might as well have been zero. Honestly, my marketing instincts are so bad that a good friend recently quit his job to join and help me manage the operational side before i completly broke down. We're trying to launch on Kickstarter, mostly because I tried talking to VCs and didn't want to take money that would force us to turn this into another boring productivity tool. we want it to be a companion, driven by community feedback, not by an investor's ROI. but i'm staring at our draft page and I have no idea if we're on the right track. I'm hoping this community can give me some blunt, even brutal, advice.

• Kickstarter Page: I can share a preview link in the comments. Is the story clear? Is it too technical? What crucial thing are we missing thats obvious to everyone but me?
• Pricing: We have a BOM and a target price, but how do you validate that for a device that sits somewhere between an AI assistant and a digital pet?
• Initial Users: How do you get the first 200+ supporters needed to get the Kickstarter algorithm to even notice you? Especially with no existing audience and ads that don't convert. i'm not looking for 'great job.' i'm looking for the feedback that hurts, the stuff that's broken so we can try to fix it before we run out of runway completely. Any hard-earned wisdom would be a huge help

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of building a demonstrator for a different architecture for the usage of power in transportation and I am having troubles finding a manufacturer to build a custom stator coil array; it combines coil winding, ferrite backing, resin encapsulation, thermistor integration and mechanical mounting element for precise spacing. As I understand no single components are exotic, but the combination in a single module at prototype scale keeps getting me rejected. I am trying to reach out to university labs as a next step.

I am wondering if anyone knows someone that could help or have some inputs to reach that goal.

I have specs and technical drawings available and it is of course a paid commission.

Thank you in advance for all input/help.