Pre-Production Prototype

After working on something for so long it can become a little bit difficult to let it go. My main purpose for a long time now has been getting the engineering design finished. Sure, there was a lot of other things to do, but it was all about the product.

We (well, it was me really) made a mistake with the electronics and ordered the prototype PCBs twice as thick as they should have been so we've lost about a month while we get a new set made. Nevertheless, when we put all the mechanical components together, it all works just as it should. Maybe there are a few things that could be tweaked a little, but that is it really; the design is finished.

Pre-production prototype. Other colours available.

Statements like that do of course tempt Murphy's law to do it's worst. The electronics worked on the previous prototype so should be fine now but we're still preparing for some unanticipated disaster.

The immediate difficulty for me though is not opening up the design software and looking for something that needs changing.

Blue

After the extensive research we decided to go with a blue finish for the prototype. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback. We will however still get the trial batch made in a few different colours as the vote was hardly unanimous.

You can see from the image below that the shade is a bit different to the blue sample disk but is still a lovely colour. The actual colour that results from a particular dye depends on the grade of aluminium and the amount of time the part is left in the coating bath. Once we are happy with a colour we can get consistent results but a bit of experimentation will be required to start with.

I'll post more images from the completed prototype and also the other colours as I get them.

More on Colours

We did some renderings in different colours to try and get a better idea other than just the coloured samples. These were done in-house so are less than perfect representations.

The white is also a bit of an unknown. It is apparently not normally possible to anodise in white, so we will have to see if the Diamondyze process that we are using gives this as an option.

The "silver" samples we've got are really more of a grey colour so we need to see if it can be brightened up a bit.

Colour Options

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Worthington Sharpe

Colour Options

We've been spending a lot of time sorting out the finish for the machined aluminium parts.

We got the first of the aluminium prototypes polished, and while the finish was initially really good, it scratched too easily. We thought brushing the aluminium would help, but there was the same problem.

Anodising was a possibility and give some nice colour options, like on a drinks bottle or climbing carabiner. Once again however, it is not really robust enough. Hard anodising is tougher but you loose the colour options. - It just tends to be a drab grey / brown or black.

Then we found about a process called Diamondyze, offered in the UK by Camcoat's Poyton facility. There are some more details of the process in this Techline brouchure.

Here is a photograph of some samples Camcoat sent us.

Now all we have to do is decide on the colour.

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Worthington Sharpe

Growing a Team

We're still on the boat theme. I was talking about the need for a bigger boat (or rather a bigger team) at the end of my post a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd explain.

Apparently, successful products are launched by teams. It makes sense, no big revelations there. While we've got a team of sorts it is distinctly lacking in some areas.

You see I've realised so far that businesses like ours are about two things:

1. Making stuff
2. Selling stuff

Everything else is peripheral. Some people might tell me that they should be the other way around but I think I don't want to get into the argument about which comes first. I am however pretty sure that you can't have one without the other and keep going for too long.

There are of course a lot of things that feed into each of these too areas but I think they are all in support of these principle activities.

We've got a pretty good handle on the making stuff part. It's far from easy but we've got that working prototype you can see in the photos and, at risk of sounding more clichéd than a 1980s motivational speaker, I've no doubt we can overcome the remaining challenges.

As for selling stuff? That's another ball game. A totally different animal. A whole new kettle of fish. We need some help. That much is clear but not a lot else is. As far as I can see, the options look like this:

1. Get marketing and Public Relations company to sort it all out
2. Employ a marketing person to sort it all out
3. Bring a marketing director on board to sort it all out
4. Hire a contractor to sort it all out
5. Try and do it ourselves and screw it all up

Option 5 is clearly a bad idea. Option 1 would cost loads and probably wouldn't give us what we want anyway. We;re not trying to re-brand an international airline. Option 2 gives all the headaches of employing people and would be a massive continual drain on cash. 

Option 3 sounds appealing. - We need someone front the sales and marketing long-term and maybe it would be a good idea to bring them on now. It would mean giving equity away which in itself is not a problem but it becomes a big problem if we get the wrong person. We would have to work out the arrangement, the shares and all the legal side of things. If it all goes wrong then the best case is an amicable split but complicated share-arrangements or buying back shares, company evaluations, more legal stuff and lots of pain.

The other problem is that we don't know who that person would be. Even if we could find somebody we would then be entering into a involved business relationship having never worked with each other before.

That leaves option 4. - We know a few people with relevant industry experience and who either do freelance work anyway, or who might do a bit of freelance moonlighting. We get them to a small bit of work, a little bit a time to build contacts, network, sort out PR and all that sort of stuff and see how the relationship develops. If things go well we then have some working history to develop things further and maybe look at turning them into one of the other options.

This seems like a reasonable approach for a lot of what we need. It minimises commitment and long-term financial risk and builds up working relationships. We need to ensure we've got the cash to support their work and try to foster a relationship that means we can rely on them. Then maybe the good ship Worthington Sharpe will start to look a bit like this.

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Worthington Sharpe

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.

Pre-Launch Publicity

I could keep going for quite a while on the background in order to fill you in on the history of the project, but instead, I'm going to get straight in there with one of the problems we've got now.

So, to keep it live, the problem we've got at the moment is publicity. You see, we are planning a a Kickstarter campaign to launch a developer version of the product and want to hit the ground running.

We need a decent audience to start with. But how do we get an audience without a product? Yes, we've got a prototype, but only one. The feedback we got from people at gamescom and elsewhere has been good and next we need to go beyond a quick demo now and let game developers and journalists to have a bit of time to play and experiment. A promise of a great product from an unknown company hardly sets the pulse racing.

All the focus is now on getting the developer version ready for a bit of pre-Kickstarter-ing. We've got to get a few small engineering changes to the prototype, then we can make a small batch. How small depends on how much cost outlay we can stomach. After that we will send 'em out to a select few people who we think will shout about it. Or people who will just shout at it. And give us feedback. We'll call this version the Post-Prototype Pre-Developer Product. Probably.

We're also  We're trying to think of it from their angle.

The trouble, as always, is trying to find the time between our engineering design project that are bringing in the money. Nobody has a job that isn't urgent and we have no intention of letting customers down. And we're still trying to find a way of getting some publicity right away. Trying to think of a way that a journalist will find what we've got right now interesting enough to write about

So, finish the engineering and get some press. That creates one of the other big problems we've got:

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

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Worthington Sharpe