A Faster Boat

The "bigger boat" quote was referring to the need to get more people involved to do the things that we can't do at all, can't do well, or don't want to do. The need to build a bigger team. I'll come back to that some other time though, as while I still think it is a fairly immediate requirement, there is something else that I wanted to jump to.

We started off by designing a working prototype made from 3D printed parts, a dismantled laptop mouse, and the limits of my soldering skills. It worked well and we knew we were onto something. It would however never have been good enough to convince anyone who doesn't like rough looking plastic thing with too many wires coming out of them that we were, well, onto something. Then came the mistake.

It has taken me far to long to realise this but it is probably one of the most important new product development things I've learnt so far.

Ship. Fast.

Right from the beginning, our focus should have been on getting something on the market as fast as possible.

Instead of designing and making something we could ship to customers quickly, we decided to go straight for a mass-produced, injection moulded design. This meant adding a whole new level of difficulty to the engineering. We already had enough trouble with the ergonomics, the internal mechanism, the sensors and electronics, the strength of all the parts, tolerances and all sorts of other things that hurt too much to talk about. Injection moulding meant draft angles, wall thickness, undercuts, shrinkage and even more things that hurt to much too talk about. We kept joking that we should just give up and machine it from aluminium. (It was a laugh a minute in the Worthington Sharpe office)

After a long time it ended up looking a like this:

Injection Moulded Design

We got a prototype machined from transparent plastic so we could see the how everything fitted and could check the internal mechanism. We got costing for the tooling that came in at about the same price as a small house and started to think about raising capital...

Machined ABS plastic shell

...then we thought we should get a the parts machined from aluminium so we could have a shiny silvery version. It didn't turn out too bad, in fact I will go as far as saying it turned out pretty good. 

This totally changed things. Rather then having to make and sell tens of thousands of units to justify the cost of the tooling, we could make one, ten, or maybe twenty. They wouldn't be cheap, but we were now talking a totally different class of product. This wasn't just a mouse with 3D functions, it was what you might even describe as a beautiful piece of precision engineering.

What it meant was that we could get a product to market without the massive risk associated with high-volume production.

From the start we should have identified the market segment with the lowest hanging fruit that would get us sales. Then we should have set the design requirements and everything else to get there as fast as we could. Maybe we should have simplified the functions a bit to make the engineering easier.

We doing all that now (apart from simplifying the functions) but just maybe things would have unfolded a little differently if we started out that way.