There are a lot of people who have an idea but don’t know what steps to take to get it up and running. These are usually ideas which need to be seen and touched first before the value can be appreciated. There have been attempts to have these ideas crowdfunded, however, the truth is, there is a lot of work needed before an idea can be presented to the world for crowdfunding.
In most cases, it would be better for the project creator to launch a campaign once they have a working prototype, and a good idea of the costs associated with manufacturing and fulfilment.. A working prototype should be the first of your goals.
Our guest this episode is Dylan Horvath, the head of Cortex Design. In the past, Cortex has helped many successful crowdfunding projects with their end-to-end services.
This is an animated discussion which shows Dylan’s passion for engineering, design, and getting a product through the whole design process from research and visualization to prototyping, manufacturing and logistics.
We discuss why it’s important, and what you can do to get the product funded, certifications, off-shore manufacturing, and long term relationships with your fulfillment partners.
Dylan has had a life long love affair with engineering and how things work and he has leveraged it into an engineering design firm which provides solutions for startups. If you have a product you want crowdfunded, but is still in its infancy stage, this episode will help clear up what you need to do next.
“You have a whole lot of risk, especially with your timeline when you’re right at the beginning. As you try to mitigate risk as you go along, if that risk mitigation is under the watchful eye of 2,000 people on the crowd funding campaign, it could be a difficult place to operate from.”
Raising money to develop your prototype a hard sell, and extremely dangerous if you don’t have experience in estimating costs.
You could end up raising money, and realizing you don’t have enough to complete a working prototype, yet alone bring a final product to ship.
Dylan carefully outlines the steps toget an idea moving with a prototype, and on to manufacturing, and distribution.
This is one of the longest episodes we’ve had and it is well worth the time to listen to.
Resources Mentioned
Cortex Design “Kickstarter is Debt”, The Bold Blog Cortex Design YouTube Channel
