HARD90 87/90: Our product launch will be happening the week after the July 4 holiday. It’s very hard for me to announce a delay but that’s the reality. It’s taken us a lot more time than expected to get our business set up. After much negotiation, we finally reached a term sheet that worked for everyone and have the lawyers drafting it up now. A few days after that, we’ll be incorporated in Hong Kong. Then it’s the holiday and then it’s time to start our pre-launch marketing and roll into our full product launch! Perhaps each of us was too focused on building out our respective domains to keep paperwork on track. Whatever the cause, it’s a lesson that entrepreneurship is as much about juggling all the proper things as it is about building an amazing product or videos.

HARD90 86/90: My talk in Shenzhen about reimagine design in the age of social media went really well! Filmed it and looking forward to sharing soon.

HARD90 85/90 I’m the featured speaker tomorrow night in Shenzhen! Please join us to hear my thoughts on rapid hardware design in the era of social media :)

HARD90 84/90: Writing a talk about launching hardware in 90 days. Which of these insights is most interesting to you? -The impact of building in public on product design -The fastest way to prototype -Balancing customer insights with production preparation -Working with a huge influencer on a product -Working with vendors while building in public

HARD90 83/90: Agreements finally settled. It’ll be about a week to get everything issued and signed. Running up against the July 4 holiday means we will probably need to launch after that. It’s incredible how delays have a habit of stacking up. Hardware still ready to go.

HARD 82/90: Spent the day working on our incorporation details and operating agreement. While there’s some benefits to just getting started building, it’s very stressful to let this drag on to the last minute. Note to self for the future.

HARD90 81/90: Technically today is day 90 of our challenge Design is locked Factory is ready Launch videos are shot Website is ready Missed a few posts along the way, so figured I’d just keep this series going thru next week when we launch our campaign. Just arranging final details with some new patent filings and finishing incorporation in Hong Kong, then we will launch. Full retro coming very soon!

HARD90 80/90: Selfie screen and stand locked, quoted, and ready for mass production kickoff. Got the quote in a few days ago. Spent yesterday with the vendor running through the parts line by line. I was able to cut 10% cost by eliminating unnecessary items and another 20% by improving tooling plans for other components. We’re now on target for cost profile on stand and screen. However, it’s 25 working days to produce production approval samples so we are still a couple months away from shipping to end consumers. In some ways that’s okay because we have only received reservations for about 100 units so far. Obviously, when we started this challenge I had hoped and planned to be shipping full mass production quantities within 90 days. The only way that happens is if customer development to moves at the same speed as product development so that there’s money to pay for tooling when you’re ready. We have some incredible videos shot and ready to post—stuff that will hold its own with the bangers you’ve seen from @cluely and @AviSchiffmann We just need to arrange some final details, post everything and start running our crowdfunding campaign. Need to sell about 1000 units before this makes sense to cut tooling and ship in mass quantity. I have a LOT of lessons from this challenge and I can’t wait to break them down for you! Stuff I would change on the hardware side, stuff I would change on the sales side, stuff we learned on the content/influencer side. More detailed retro incoming next week!

HARD90 79/90: Today my mom told me she really wants our product. I've launched over a dozen products in my career, won 7 design awards and total combined sales over $100M... And this is the very first time she's told me she genuinely can't wait to get one of my products 😭🥰

HARD90 78/90: Some days are good days and some days are really hard. Updated website looking fantastic. Product design locked and final quoting expected tomorrow. Launch videos shot and in final edits. Just need to wrap up a few last details and we are go for launch. But even a glide path can crash. Gotta keep eyes on the prize and get this product out the door. Tick tock, day 90 approaches fast.

HARD90 77/90: My little office in Shenzhen. Doesn’t look like much, doesn’t need to. The magic of Shenzhen, like any city, is in its people and the ecosystem they build. Today I got my latest (and almost final!) prototype delivered. 5 day lead time, just a few hundred dollars for aluminum CNC parts. In SF, I would have spent a lot more and been waiting much longer. Or worse—just buying the parts from China anyway and waiting for them to get shipped over. I had forgotten to bring the right screws so popped downstairs and grabbed them from the market. Try to do that in SF and I’d burning a couple days waiting for McMaster-Carr delivery. Lowe’s doesn’t carry M2.5x10mm flatheads last I checked. After verifying my latest prototype I walked next door to my screen vendor and worked with their engineer to get our design perfected. An hour later and I signed off on it, expecting a final quote tomorrow and a sample by EOW. I always knew there was a speed and cost advantage to living here. I just never thought it would be this extreme. As I near the end of this 90 day challenge I am dreaming BIG about what to build next.

HARD90 76/90: We felt it was important to update our second screen to have buttons in the top right and a USB port in the lower middle, mimicking the iPhone and therefore being much more intuitive. HOWEVER, I'm getting some pushback from the factory engineer on this update--it requires some somewhat non-obvious board updates to implement cost-effectively. I'll create a proposed board and battery guideline to bring this across the finish line. I'm super proud of the factory team working over the weekend to get me this feedback :) It's so awesome to see that startup level work ethic in a factory partner.

HARD90 75/90: Updated the factory design with our own industrial design. Reviewed with them and have another revision complete. Hoping to release for sample soon.

HARD90 74/90: Popped over to Shenzhen and spent the day with our screen vendor and all is well again! So much engineering communication can only really be done in person between Americans and Chinese. Pointing at computer screens, drawing on paper, demonstrating with 3d prints—these techniques can do what countless hours of Zoom calls never can. If you’re struggling with hardware in China, hop on a plane. You’d be amazed at how much drastically easier things can be in person.

HARD90 73/90: YesAnd.tech website update to feature our weekly hardware vlogs! Thanks @pepperonick for shipping this. Hopefully this makes it much easier to keep up with our brutally honest reports of shipping hardware stupid fast!!

HARD90 72/90: Hardware isn't hard but it does require discipline. It requires planning out each step from prototype to production and correctly estimating how long you should spend on each one, given customer and quality needs. Then you need to do the plan. The most common failure mode? Making big design changes late in the process. It takes a ton of discipline not to cram in one last shiny new feature when you need to be releasing for tooling. And at the same time, you need the discipline to admit to yourself when your design isn't cutting it and you have to push back the schedule to get it right. Re-reading this post, I wonder if perhaps the hard part is being disciplined? But at least it makes hardware more predictable.

HARD90 71/90: My first hard failure in managing a vendor. I had many in-person conversations with our airplay screen vendor about our needs. We all sat in the room and nodded that we understood the requirements. I sent the files I promised and had some WeChat discussion about them. And then after 4 days of design work, I get back THIS which is built entirely around our OLD stand design. You'd think I'd know better by this point in my career--always start with an abundantly clear and well-specified SOW (statement of work) before sitting back and letting an external team cook for days. But we had done so much discussion and the relationship was so strong, I had ASSUMED we were fine. In the immortal words of Steven Seagal @sseagalofficial "Assumptions are the mother of all f*ckups". Time to draft what I should have drafted in the beginning and make a little Shenzhen trip ASAP. Fortunately this vendor is genuinely AWESOME and I have no doubt we will get where we need to get to. But I HATE burning a few days designing the wrong thing. Not when we are down to the wire like this.

HARD 70/90: Not every update is going to be a banger. If you’re starting your own “I’m doing X in Y days and posting about it” challenge, keep that in mind. Magic comes from showing the boring times as much as from the highlights and lowlights.

HARD90 69/90: I'm delivering 2 products in this 90 day sprint: Both a MagSafe stand and a pocketable Airplay screen. I've personally engineered the stand, stressing over every detail, function and feel as I built dozens of prototypes. For the screen, I'm doing more delegating: 1. I visited a half-dozen vendors, 2. identified the best fit for us, 3. built a relationship, 4. clearly define the requirements 5. and now I'm sitting back to let them cook. It's pretty nerve wracking to have to watch progress from a distance when we're down to our last couple of weeks. But this kind of identify-define-empower relationship has the potential to become a foundational strategy by which I can 10x my hardware engineering output without 10x my burn rate. Let's hope it works 🤞

HARD90 68/90: Entering the final sprint preparing for our crowdfunding launch! Re-writing our landing page to be top-to-bottom complete. Have an EPIC Youtube video in the can, just waiting for the right day to post it.