Ben Nibali, founder and President of Aptus Design Works, with Connor Richardson, the Electrical Designer, are our guests in this episode. We will discuss how you can plan the cost and lead times to successfully launch your product in the market.

Ben and Connor share some excellent advice for designers and companies to streamline their product development process from prototyping to manufacturing.

Show Highlights:

• Aptus is a design and engineering company, and they’ve been around for about 15 years

• They handle initial concept development, mechanical development, controls, and mechanical prototyping and help their clients through the launching and manufacturing of their products

• Other challenges include expectations from not knowing the process and cost expectations based on the higher volume of current products that really can’t be met in a US market-based launch scenario

• You can’t have fast, cheap, and high quality at the same time

• The “minimum viable product” is a great idea and works exceptionally well in software because you can add, modify, change, and grow something slowly after you deploy. In hardware, it is an entirely different cost structure to make changes once you start making anything physical. 

• Another exciting prototype they created is the cow-milking robot

• The most important factor is market research, understanding what this thing that we're going to sell is? How are we going to sell it? Who's going to buy it? What features matter? 

Links and Resources:

Connect with Ben Nibali on LinkedIn