[sdiy] Advice for a Startup

[DIY DSP]

I would read this book.  It's about making guitars, but it all applies: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Living-Doing-Something-Crazy/dp/B005D2WBVG"How to Make a Living Doing Something Crazy ... Like Making Guitars."
It's definitely worth $25 if you're going to throw 1-5 years at this project.  One conclusion of the book is to NOT do "vertical," top-to-bottom product delivery.  Find a niche, a slice/layer within it, and get good at that.  

Business is so much less about what you know and like than it is about what others know and like.  It is full of harsh lessons that you won't have time to dwell on; you simply have to move on to the next thing and not be attached.  It's also like an obstacle course.  You may go in thinking you have strong abs, but every stop along the way tests some aspect of you that you may or may not be prepared for.  E.g. when you go in with the ideal of "education," you may quickly find yourself making money in one area, and none in your original area and have to change quickly.  In fact, it's so much more about marketing - getting to know your customers, what their pain points are, and responding to those - than about following your initial ideal trajectory.  Any tendency toward perfection will absolutely ruin you.

This is not to discourage you at all, but to direct you.  We are mostly (at least in the US) raised with a lot of idealized, crazy myths about "inventions," "running my own business," and "helping the world" with something you figure out.  But almost nothing actually happens that way.  Eventually you'll see that those idealized myths are more about declaring one's values than a how-to guide for getting things done.
I have some experience trying this and failing, btw!  I took a year off and worked with the SBA and the CWE.  I found the CWE much more useful but YMMV.  My impression of the SBA was they gave little to no encouragement and were very discouraging, particularly with artisanal ideas.  It appears to be a kind of system or scam in which the government sets up small business to support its own enterprises, such as a small company to perform a piece of a larger defense manufacture company.  It appears to me to be a strategy to create competitive pressure against their larger manufacturers to bring their prices down. They also have a money-lending arm which a mentor of mine got caught up in.  When his business failed he was not able to simply go bankrupt and was stuck paying off loans for a long time.  I also spent some time with their Intellectual Property experts but they weren't as experienced and skilled as they proclaimed.  Also they have no real investment in you succeeding.  Many of them are volunteers who have been successful and are now looking for something to do for fun, but have no skin in the game.  As you can see, this all fits nicely into the dream of "small business," but is really self-serving with entrepreneurs as pawns.  If they have classes though, they may be beneficial.  

The CWE was much more helpful in my experience.  I went through a 12-week class in which we used a great workbook.  Each chapter of the workbook was focused on an aspect of starting and running a business such as operating costs, branding, customers, accounting, competitors, capital, etc.  It was extremely helpful to see that some chapters I had figured out really well and others I was weak in.  And the workbook gave me the chance to focus on those weak areas.  The caveat there was that it was offered with discounts based on income so there were a few utterly broke people who got to take the class for free or nearly free and dominated the discussion with their shiftlessness.  

Again, not to discourage you!  Just try to learn as much as you can from others.  Probably much of the work has to be learned the hard way.  Which means your first few major attempts are likely to fail, but if you fold that into your next, you will eventually succeed.  If I could go back and do it again, I would not design products that were so much different from exists today.  I would work harder on the brand.  I would not make a product designed from scratch from the ground up.  I would also outsource a minimum of 75% of the work.  And I start by building smaller products that I could afford to get out the door.  

So if you have an idea about educating people how synths work, I would recommend not designing a synth and also the directions.  I would focus on explaining the directions of an existing product.  E.g. partner with another company who already does this.  Get good at that, come up with a mix of free and paid information, and build up a reputation/brand.  Remember we're all too busy to actually evaluate things very well, so we buy based on the meaning behind the brand.  


Noah Vawter's futuristic electronic music instrument lab: youtube.com/diydsp 

    On Tuesday, February 21, 2023 at 09:45:20 AM EST, Matthew Skala via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:  
 
 On Tue, 21 Feb 2023, grant musictechnologiesgroup.com wrote:

> If memory serves, there was a short discussion here some years ago about
> what one should try and sell something for versus your BOM. I don't remember
> the whole thing but it seems to me the sell price was about 3x to 4x your
> BOM price. There was more to the discussion, but that was my takeaway. 

This EEVblog video has a good run-down on product pricing:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrkfHadeQQ

-- 
Matthew Skala
North Coast Synthesis Ltd.
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