How To Start A Product Manufacturing Business

How to Start small scale business without the risk of a big financial investment and at the same time ready to scale up big. The opportunity presents itself to scale your business beyond what you can produce in your own shop.

The first thing that we're going talk about new startup type company.

If you want to start a business you fell into one of two categories. You were a big company making big products and that requires a lot of money or on the smaller side you were making handmade things, you’ll stay a little bit of a smaller company. This becoming more accessible to more people and this really opens up product design to a new people. There are great tutorials about digital design tools. It's really accessible, some of them are free. When you don't have to spend any money at all. It is free the cheapest so with less capital needed and less pressure to hit that home run. Your first product idea out there to test in the market. There's not that huge loss too.

If you invest a ton of money in machines or casting and if product doesn't work. Then you're left with all that capital wasted. What we wanted to make our very first idea. It was a good thing just the idea of trying to make, any sort of scale. We got inquiries a lot about renting or borrowing or buying them. They are massive & delicate and wouldn’t ship well and also they take a really long time to make. But that was ok, it didn't hurt us we kept going and kept moving and kept trying out other types of products. We started on our computers in our garage. We invested in one 3D printer once that printer had paid for itself. We had enough orders to start getting more things & start expanding our product line. We got we're up to 4 3D printers and 2 CNCs. So you can start with just that one small investment, you don't have to buy your entire robot army all at once. You can grow from there.

The product designer and these big machines that companies have to make their parts are really impressive. These impressive capabilities comes very expensive price point. We've been working ever since on products at home. I haven't really missed those you can accomplish so much now with a small shop with limited budgets. The design you make before you start making cuts. You can do that free design software. Once you have that design ready you can make it yourself less cost. You can go to a local maker space, if you don't have a local maker space nearby there is the internet. On the internet there are people who want to make money with machines. They will help you out once you have that proof of concept with your product. If you want to start making it in house, you can setup a whole little shop for yourself have your CNC,3D printer, power tools, hand tools. Whatever it is you need, it seems expensive if you're looking at the prices now. But if you compare it what you're pulling in with your products it's a reasonable business cost and I think that's really cool. That it's actually within reach now.

I think that's super awesome and hopefully by the time that you buy the CNC you have products designed you're selling some. You can use that profit as return on investment. The design work in CAD, all of the computer aided manufacturing work to plan out. It would take how much material it'd use so we knew all of the variables of this product before we spent any money at all.

If we need to hire help to make more of these or outsource this outside of our shop. We can do that because, we know that this design works and we've optimized it. Discuss about manufacturing and same time it is very important good product design. I think is the key to selling things, because without the thing you can't sell it. We need type of machinery for CNC work and 3D printing etc… It's molding and casting each of these works with some types of designs and not the other types of designs. You want your design to work with manufacturing method and not against it there was once a product.

Another thing is when we're 3D printing we try to keep those layer in mind. We try to keep the layer lines that are part of the 3D printing process in mind and maybe even make them a feature. We came up with a topographical Texas where each layer was like a layer of the topography a layer of the topography. We try to keep human intervention down as much as possible so avoiding things that have to be hand painted or hand stitched or hand anything really. I mean we still do put a little bit of work into it but we try to minimize.

All part of optimizing our process tied to keeping human time down. We try to keep robot time as high as possible so that while they're working.

There's so much that you can do to help your business, besides making things like come up in your mind. Let robots make them, another thing to keep in mind is cost wise it's going to be challenging to beat a big company. It's just a losing game but there are other things that you can do, that big companies can't do. One of those is customizable products or coming up with products that respond to trends or seasons you can be a lot more flexible than a big company can be another way to set yourself.

You can go into the details engraving initials and dates on to the back of our ring for weddings and stuff like it takes what literally 2 minutes actually 1 minute and it makes it so much more special and more meaningful to the people you're selling it to and it's something that big companies can't do as easily. I mean probably they can but they wouldn't bother so.

END...