If you're developing your own product, odds are you're the type of person who likes to figure things out on their own.
I know I am, because my natural instinct is to get as far as I possibly can on my own before I ever ask for help.
That instinct will carry you a long way in hardware, but it comes with one expensive side effect.
The decisions that shape your entire product happen at the very beginning: your wireless approach, your power architecture, your microcontroller, your rough form factor.
They lock in early, and by the time you feel like you've earned the right to ask for help, they're set in concrete.
So my answer on timing is that you almost can't be too early.
If you can describe your product, an experienced engineer can already steer you away from a wrong turn that would cost you months.
One member joined my Hardware Academy with exactly that, a description.
He had nothing built yet, just an ambitious plan for an assistive device for blind users.
The experts dug straight into his concept and pushed him to weigh the complexity and failure rates he hadn't accounted for yet.
The biggest catch was mine, though. Half his plan was a custom wireless charger he loved, which meant he was really developing two products at once.
Bundled or not, each product needs its own PCB design, its own enclosure, its own molds, and its own certifications.
Getting rid of the charger cut his complexity and his development costs roughly in half.
He said just two of those replies paid for several months of membership, because they surfaced gaps in his plan before he'd sunk time and money into building the wrong thing.
So his design got reshaped at the exact moment when changing course was still cheap.
And timing cuts the other way too, because it's almost never too late.
Even with a finished prototype in hand, unless your product is already on the market and selling successfully, the expensive stages are still ahead of you, from tooling and certification to your first production run.
So the right time to get expert eyes on your product is before the next decision you can't cheaply undo, and no matter where you are right now, one of those is coming sooner than you think.
Inside the Hardware Academy, our engineers and product experts meet you at whatever stage you're at, from a product you can only describe to a design headed for production.
Talk soon,
John Teel
Predictable Designs
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