Most important choice of a hardware startup - contract manufacturer | Hacker News Reader

Most important choice of a hardware startup - contract manufacturer

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7 pointskrschultz7 comments

I worked for a contract manufacturing/engineering company for a while.

Here is what I would recommend based on my experiences:

1. Interview employees at the CM. Talk to the people that will be building your product. Talk to the bosses and their bosses. Talk to the people in the warehouse. Talk to the accountants. Talk to their suppliers. You need to find out how things are run. Try to see if you can shadow people in key departments at the CM.

2. Talk to their customers. Get a current and past customer list. Talk to the customers that walked away and find out why. Lots of good info here.

3. Find out when building starts. Show up unannounced and see how things are going. I recommend this throughout the relationship till you are confident that things are how you want them to be. This keeps the CM honest.

And since nobody ever names names, your startup gets to make these same mistakes over again!

Can't name names, but I would say - take a hard look at the amount of square feet the CM has. The larger the manufacturer, the more they can scale. The smaller the manufacturer, the more they care about your business. It would seem like the 2nd is the one you want, but it is not, go with the large one. Look for a CM with "new product introduction" expertise, and their experience and size will pay great dividends.

I agree with your statements of going with the large CM and one with extensive "new product introduction" (called NPI in the biz) experience.

I will re-iterate the points from my previous post. Extensive due diligence is a must. You need to make sure their goals are exactly in line with yours. It is very difficult to move a CM in a direction they aren't already going.

Cool.. a hardware post! I feel your pain.. We had such bad experiences we decided to do our own end assembly, and strictly source everything in the US. It's more expensive, but then again, we were a small company, and making things happen overseas is really difficult.

Are you manufacturing in the US or China/Taiwan?

US at the moment

For more interesting information about a hardware startup and their experiences building a product, check out the following:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=7

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