147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scaleup

Morgan Teachworth was the head of Hardware at Meraki, a company that was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion dollars, and is now the VP of Engineering & Supply Chain there. He has been involved in the development of hundreds of physical mass-manufactured products leading to approximately 16 million units of his products being sold around the world in his 15-year tenure with the organization. Today Morgan is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand the difference between developing a product to sell as a startup to then developing products to sell as a growing scale-up brand, and what you can do to best strategize for this kind of explosive hardware company growth in the product space.

Today you will hear us talk about:

• How the customer changes as you scale your hardware product business
• Your customers become your salesforce in the very early stages
• Your next tier of customers are the wholesalers, distributors, resellers, etc.
• What are some new stakeholders
• Think about the factory, the installers, the resellers, 
• Micro stakeholders and macro stakeholders
• You can tune the product design, the packaging, the product experience, the manufacturing, all around multiple stakeholders
• Simplicity is an important part of design considerations, but also in all other stakeholders this should be considered too.
• Keep your product simple, it’s actually easier to do as a small physical product business than it is as you grow, so start now.
• As you grow, you become the big incumbent now that other small innovators are trying to take on.
• Cross-functional initiatives help as you scale.

EPISODE LINKS

Morgan Teachworth Links:

• Website: https://meraki.cisco.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mteachw/

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

• Website: https://www.ProductStartup.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ProductStartup/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ProductStartup/
• Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ProductStartup/
• Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProductStartup/
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ProductStartup/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProductStartup
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MakoInvent

Mako Design Links:

• Website: https://www.makodesign.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MakoInvent
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MakoInvent/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/MakoDesign/
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