Product Startup Kevin Mako of MAKO Design + Invent

Jeff Lerner is the CEO of Misnomer, a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer and Brand Development Agency. He boasts an impressive career, having collectively raised $400 million through venture capitalists and formerly served as a marketing lead at Google for several years. Today, Jeff will draw on his extensive experience to afford insight to inventors, startups, and small manufacturers looking to sell their inventions directly to larger corporations for promotional use. He will detail effective strategies for identifying how your product can impactfully enhance a corporation's value or improve operations, as well as the various types of promotional products that new product startups and inventors often overlook and their varied applications.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/227-how-to-sell-your-invention-direct-to-companies-as-a-promotional-product/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
How does selling your product to companies as a promotional product differ from D2C sales?

There are multiple avenues you can take to get your promotional product sold to larger companies. 

Find the one person in your target organization that encounters the problem your product solves. Make this person look like a hero by bringing that solution to their team.

Reach out to various members within the company to gain an understanding of the overarching organizational situation and evaluate how your product or service can solve large issues.

How does your product improve the value of the organization?

How does your product add value to their sales process? Every company wants more business and greater revenue.

There are a number of creative ways to determine how your product fits into the promotional products landscape of a corporation.

If your product is new, you have an advantage in that it is unique and has never been seen before. However, the disadvantage is that you will need to educate the customer as to why they need it.

If your product is an improved version of an existing product, it will likely be easier to educate potential customers and thus sell.

Start by selling locally through networking groups or local trade shows; you will be surprised at how many you find.

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, a href="https://www.makodesign.com/services/mechanical-engineering/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

Valentin Radu, CEO and Founder of Omniconvert, wrote the book on Customer Lifetime Value – literally. He has collaborated with an extensive range of direct-to-consumer eCommerce brands to elevate their marketing strategies, which informed his development of "The CLV Revolution," a guidebook dedicated to revolutionizing customer value optimization for eCommerce businesses. Today, Valentin will divulge the core frameworks of his guidebook salient to today's inventors, startups, and small manufacturers. He will detail how to differentiate between profit and perceived value – emphasizing the importance of centring your marketing efforts on the solution your product offers – and share strategies for boosting the price customers are prepared to pay for your latest invention.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/226-maximizing-your-inventions-perceived-value-through-marketing/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
Nail down the unit economics before you begin developing marketing approaches.

The core formula to use is customer lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost.

Customer research is a vital step to take before spending money on marketing.

Try to maximize the sales up front! This requires great brand and product messaging.

People don’t buy products for the features; they buy them for the solutions they provide.

It is better to focus on the pain point, as people are more inclined to shell out money to solve these issues.

Based on your marketing approach, you can increase the price people are willing to pay for your product without changing any features.

Harvard Business Review states that most buying decisions are based on emotional decisions, not logic.

Use features and technology to validate your claims regarding how you are improving your customer's life.

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping,...

John Conafay entered the manufacturing sector in 2014 after contributing to the United States Air Force for years as a communications and systems specialist. Following a wide array of collaborations with hardware startups and aerospace companies, he noticed a lack of refined communication tools, which culminated in the creation of Integrate – a unique software designed to streamline communication in the hardware development realm. Today, John will share how he made this discovery and how critical segregating communication channels is for modern inventors, startups, and small-scale manufacturers. John will identify the primary stakeholders in product development and elucidate the advantages of a meticulously constructed information framework for hardware product businesses.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/225-communication-silos-for-product-design-stakeholders/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
Hardware development requires extensive communication between internal designers, internal engineers, customers, manufacturers, and investors. All of them need the right information at the right time.

It’s important to have a system that controls how information is disseminated to ensure the right information is available for the right stakeholders.

Firewalls are incredibly important for information security in consumer product development.

Make sure you maintain your source of truth!

Ensure that changes that occur in documents are tracked in real time so that all team members are on the same page.

Intellectual property should be protected to a high degree!

You heavily reduce the need for meetings, overhead, and unnecessary administrative work when integrating communication silos.

Risk is reduced if you have teams spread across a variety of places and even a variety of countries.

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and a...

Danny Angers, one of the pioneering Co-Founders of VOSKER cameras, uncovered something fascinating regarding how users were employing their products and used it to his advantage to expand his brand substantially. In just 5 years, VOSKER has grown to achieve an astounding $150 million in annual sales across 45 countries and boasts the distribution of over 2 million devices worldwide. Today, Danny graciously affords budding inventors, startups, and small-scale manufacturers insight into his experience scaling VOSKER. He will delve into the efficacy of listening to your customers to inform the product iteration phase in order to boost the satisfaction of existing clients and identify verticals that you may not have explored without external insight.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/224-expanding-your-product-into-new-verticals/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
Listen to your existing and prospective customers! Oftentimes, your clients will tell you what they need from your product.

Innovation starts coming in from the client.

The way you help your customers help you is by asking them how they are using your product.

As a new hardware startup, you have the liberty to aggressively reach out to your initial customers.

When your customer base increases, you can start sampling a portion of it to get a better idea of who the customers are.

Send customers who send you positive feedback the next version of your product that is designed to help a specific customer persona.

Around half of your customers will respond to outreach, which is more than enough.

Ensure that you listen to customers when customizing the product for each new vertical that you have identified as an opportunity.

You don’t necessarily need to create a product for every vertical.

Focus on an MVP at every stage, and ensure each level is successful so that you can piggyback off that success.

Failure is a key part of the process to success as well!

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, a href="https://www.makodesign.com/services/patent-referrals/"...

For nearly a decade, Tim Uys has spearheaded a diverse myriad of design initiatives as the Director of Design at MAKO Design + Invent. During his 25 years in the industrial design and mechanical engineering domains, he has made impactful contributions in senior design leadership and education roles, as well as to renowned companies such as Dell, Nike Golf, Qualcomm, and Ironman. Today, Tim draws from his abundant experience to enlighten modern inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on the disparities between mechanical and pre-production prototypes for plastic components. He will divulge the essential design for manufacturing prerequisites and offer insight into optimizing the plastic product design, engineering, and prototyping journey for maximum efficiency.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/223-mechanical-prototype-parts-vs-pre-production-parts-for-plastic-inventions/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
What are the key differences between a mechanical prototype and a pre-production prototype?

Most hardware inventions are either entirely or mainly made of plastic or have some plastic components.

The mechanical prototype helps validate the primary mechanism of the design and the overall invention idea.

The pre-production prototype is the phase in which you put the product design into its intended final format, suitable for mass production, and work on shaping the components to optimize for that format.

There is a wide variety of different types of plastic, and they all have different uses.

Once you finalize the materials selection, the next step is to choose which processes you will use, such as injection moulding.

A lot of hardware startups skip this entire step and choose to proceed to manufacturing with concept CAD. They are missing 3 key prototyping stages: the Rough Prototype, the Mechanical Prototype, and the Pre-Production Prototype.

Skipping these stages could cost you money and time down the line if something is missed.

The fewer features you have for your starter product as a startup, the easier it is to go through all these steps and the more refined each feature will be. 

Keep your feature creep to a minimum. You can add additional features later on!

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, a href="https://www.makodesign.com/services/mechanical-engineering/" rel="noopener

In addition to amassing 25 years of experience in the manufacturing industry, Micki Vandeloo has dedicated nearly 15 years to assisting manufacturers with securing government grants to propel the growth of their product ventures. Impressively, as the President of Lakeview Consulting, she has collectively secured over $250 million for clients. Today, Micki will offer invaluable guidance for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers by systematically breaking down the requisite steps and nuances of applying for and successfully securing government grants in the USA. She will delineate the various levels as well as categories of grants available for hardware startups and impart essential advice on preparing for and composing the application to maximize your chances of success.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/222-securing-grants-for-scaling-up-a-hardware-startup/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:
What are government grants?

You have to plan very far ahead before applying for a government grant.

What is the difference between state grants and federal grants?

Scaling-stage funding is when you are able to prove that you can scale. Most government grants require clear market proof to receive the funding.

There are a wide variety of different grant purposes.

Project design is key to successfully applying for a government grant.

There are 3 core elements to a grant: What are the activities you have to do to make the product business grow? What do you need in order to make the scaling project work? How much money is your product going to cost?

Identify the grant you think you can get, develop a compelling project plan in your application, and then ensure you follow the grant requirements after receiving funding.

There are a variety of grant requirements you must meet after you get the funding, so be conservative with your estimates.

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com
 
Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, a...