How long does it take to develop a new product and get it to market?

How long does it take to develop a new product and get it to market?

One of the most popular questions I get is how long does it take to bring a new hardware product to market? The simple answer is, a long time. The more accurate answer depends on many variables, including the following:

Variable #1 = The Product

Likely the most critical variable that determines the time to market is the product itself. The more complex the product is, the longer it will take to develop and scale to manufacturing.

One of the best ways to reduce your time to market (and cost to market) is to simplify your product. As a small startup company, you want your product to be as feasible to bring to market as possible.

Product complexity is a black hole for hardware startups!

Bringing a simple product to market is hard enough, and bringing a complex one to market is exponentially more difficult.

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Most entrepreneurs don’t understand all the implications of various product decisions. A “simple” feature can often dramatically increase the development cost and the time it takes to get the product to market.

For example, a member in my Hardware Academy recently shared his product details to get feedback from myself and the other experts there to help. This entrepreneur was quite technical and had spent serious time specifying his product in detail.

But, he didn’t understand all the future consequences of the features he had specified.

Immediately we explained to him that one feature of his product was driving up all of his costs including: development, prototyping, electrical certifications, and injection mold costs.

In fact, I estimated that this one feature made his product about 3 times as complex and expensive to bring to market.

You know what? This feature wasn’t even necessary! It was just a cool, nice-to-have feature that could be easily replaced by a less complex equivalent feature.

This small feature change saved him at least $50,000 and a year of development time!

Unless you’ve been through the entire process from idea to market how could you ever know all of these implications way down the road?

You can’t, and this is why you need to talk with those who have been through the whole process.

Keep in mind that asking your primary developer to help simplify your product creates a conflict of interest. A developer has no self interest in helping you simplify your product. The more complex the product the more money they get paid.

This is why I recommend working with experts independent of your primary developers to help simplify your product.

Always remember, you don’t have a proven product idea until its actually on the market and you see what consumers really want . You may think your idea is a winner, but you cannot be sure.

The only way to know what consumers truly want is to sell them your product and get their feedback. Then you can implement this feedback to create the product they really want to buy.

So you need to focus on getting the simplest version of your product to market as fast as absolutely possible. Then use the feedback from users to fine-tune the product to include the features that buyers really want.

Variable #2 = You

Yes, you are one of the biggest determining factors to how long it will take to develop and manufacture your product. The truth is no one will ever work as hard or as fast as you (and any co-founders).

If you have all the necessary technical skills to develop your own product, then doing it yourself is the fastest way to market. But that’s rare, and even if you’re an engineer you will likely have to learn many new skills.

For example, the hardware product that I brought to market back in 2010 required significant mechanical designing and 3D modeling. Since I’m an electronics engineer I hired a mechanical engineer to help develop my product.

Being an excited entrepreneur I wanted things to move fast. I was very impatient and I’m sure the engineer I hired thought I was a pain to work with. He didn’t work fast enough to suit me so I switched to another mechanical engineer. But the second engineer wasn’t fast enough for me either.

Finally, I decided to teach myself 3D modeling and how to design for injection molding so I could finish the mechanical design myself. This helped to drastically speed up the development of my product.

The positive impact of doing a design yourself is more significant when appearance is critical since getting the “look” of a product right requires a lot of back and forth communication.

There are two morals to this story: First, no one can ever out work an excited, hyper-focused entrepreneur with a vision! Second, knowledge is power so the more you learn the more likely you are to succeed, quickly.

#3 – Money

Although you and your product are the most critical factors impacting the time to market, of course money is important.

That being said, the careless use of money may actually increase the time to market. This is especially true for first time product entrepreneurs. Don’t make the mistake of throwing lots of money at a problem you don’t fully understand.

It’s unrealistic to think you can do everything yourself, but the more you do yourself the better off you will be.

Okay, everything I’ve said so far is rather abstract. You want some concrete numbers on how long it will take to get your product to market, right?

If you have an experienced product developer on your founder team, and you have a product of moderate complexity, then you should be able to get your first prototype within about 3 months, and a final works-like-looks-like prototype within about 6-9 months.

If you have little product development experience on your team, then it will likely take longer. In this scenario the amount of money you have to spend is an important factor since you will need to outsource product development.

In order to pay to outsource your product’s development you may need to take it a bit slower to give you enough time to spread out the costs. If you run out of money then you may be forced to put a hold on development while you save more money. But that’s okay, and you should never spend more than you can afford to lose.

A final works-like-looks-like prototype doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready to be manufactured. Typically, additional time will be required to fully optimize the design for manufacturing.

For example, although you may have a plastic enclosure that can be prototyped, you’ll now need to prepare that enclosure design for injection molding.

I would suggest you allocate an additional 6-9 months after having a final prototype to get your product ready for mass manufacturing. During this time you should also take care of additional steps such as obtaining the necessary electrical certifications.

To summarize, if you can get your product from concept to market in the fastest way possible, it will take about one year. That time frame applies to the ideal situation, meaning you have lots of development and manufacturing experience on your team, you have a good amount of capital to spend, and your product is moderately simple.

But to be honest this is a very rare situation. You really need the stars to align in order to take a concept to market in only one year.

For most founders and products, two years is more realistic. Taking one year for development plus one year to scale to manufacturing is an achievable goal for most hardware startups.

This is why you really need to have a long-term mindset. Bringing a new hardware product to market is always slow, even for experienced tech companies. Although time to market can be critical, don’t rush. Most likely you will be working on bringing your product to market for at least a year or more.

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Robin Welch
Robin Welch

Hello John,

I hope your having a great day. My name is Robin. I have been working on a invention since October 24, 2018. It’s called the toilet Diaper. The toilet Diaper doesn’t have any electronic features. The purpose of the invention is for saving time on cleaning the base of the toilet. That all of us hate doing each week placing our face at the bottom of the toilet. I paid Davidson invention Land in full to make the toilet Diaper. The question I have, Does it take 1 year for the Marketing team to receive the invention? The 24th of this month will be a year and I haven’t seen or talk to the Marketing team. I feel something is wrong but know one is telling me anything. I receive a call each week for 4 months saying the toilet Diaper is almost finished. Should I worry or stay calm?

Robin Welch

Cobus
Cobus
Reply to  Robin Welch

They cost me more than R100000 and endless phone calls and promises, and more payment requests. From 2012!

ed heussner
ed heussner

My project is an advancement in refrigeration technology for the home. As an independent inventor, I do not plan to build a manufacturing facility, rather to license the product to a kitchen-electrics, or small refrigeration manufacturer. My initial attempt at getting an agreement resulted in the question – do you have a working model? So for the last couple years I’ve been assembling a system. This has been complicated by 2 factors: My limited knowledge of refrigeration, and access to key components {for example you need a license to purchase many components}.
Do you have any thoughts on the licensing process as yet another approach to getting to market.

Rahul
Rahul

Hello John,

For a product where there are multiple manufacturers for different components like PCB, enclosure, optics etc. How is assembly process carried out? Are there companies that provide services to assemble the parts or is it something that one has to do themselves.
For simple projects which can be done under one roof is one thing but what happens when multiple components of the same assembly are getting manufactured at different points. Who and how are they put together?

Best,
Rahul

Paul
Paul

Hi John,

is it possible, that with Industrie 4.0 and the SMART Technologies, it will takes longer to develop in the future?
I´m not a technical guy, I´m just curious :).

thanks

Paul

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