Bringing a new product to life is hard enough.
What makes it harder? Repeating the same mistakes thousands of founders already made before you.
We’ve worked with dozens of product teams: some shipped and some failed. And the difference often came down to a few key avoidable errors.
This post isn’t here to scare you.
It’s here to help you steer clear of the classic traps: from falling in love with your prototype to skipping testing or chasing the wrong cost metrics.
If you’re building a real custom product business, not just a cool gadget, this one’s for you.
Here are the 8 most common misconceptions about the process… and how to avoid them.
Just because you can build it once doesn’t mean you should.
Your early prototype is not your product, it’s a hypothesis in physical form.
Don’t confuse "it works once on my desk” with “it works at scale, in the wild, for thousands of people."
It has served it initial purpose well but it'll most likely need to be re-engineered.
Your partner can build anything. But only you can decide what should be built.
Working with a design or manufacturing partner doesn’t mean you can go on autopilot.
You are the one who needs to own the key decisions: from what features matter, to what trade-offs are acceptable, to what success looks like.
On the flip side, it is detrimental to the progress of the project that you'll learn and understand each and every step. Are you trying to ship and scale your product or are you trying to learn how to launch an engineering and manufacturing house?
If you don’t test it, your customers will. And they won’t be gentle.
It’s tempting to rush to mass production after seeing a working prototype but skipping validation stages means you’re betting your launch (and reputation) on untested assumptions. It always baffles us to see this type of bet because not only is it extremely high risk, but it is actually low reward too.
So let us be clear here: whatever testings you didn't make prior to mass production will be made on the market.
From there, your future could turn for:
Avoiding testings will save you weeks at best but it is extremely unlikely that your product is defect-free. The defects are here, you just didn't bother to discover them through testings. Remember that the cost of fixing them is excruciatingly more expensive once the product has reached your users.
Quality is expensive everywhere.
China isn't cheap anymore but all things considered, you can still access extremely competitive prices through volume scaling.
Where China really shines is on the speed of execution thanks to incredible resource concentration, top-level infrastructure and a unique local culture.
Update your focus: your edge is speed with quality on custom products, not cheapness. That’s what makes you win eventually.
China is the land of where scale happens.
It all depends on your industry but for consumer electronics, aim for 3,000 to 5,000 pieces in year 1 per purchase order as minimum order quantity.
At this level of volume, you certainly won't get the best price - that's for later during further scaling - but you definitely can get started and onboard a manufacturer (like us) to support your project while being competitive on your market.
Don’t go to China with a plan for 500 units or an unclear PRD. You’ll get ignored or overcharged.
Define your target cost during discovery phase and have your partner design-to-target.
What's the point of hiding your target cost from your design or manufacturing house?
Don't be afraid you'll leave a few margin points on the table because you gave a target cost to your factory. Most of the manufacturer (like us) apply standard margin % anyways.
You definitely should give a challenging but fair target cost (or even range) to your design or manufacturing partner.
This is the whole point of design-to-cost: technical choices will be made according to your target so if you low ball the number, you might end up with function insufficiencies and re-design costs.
We would argue setting and tracking a target cost early actually helps your busine ss: all founders are subject to feature-creep (more is better) but having a reasonable target cost helps make reasonable trade-off decisions. Strip down as many nice-to-have feature as possible, that's how you avoid building a $100 product that you can only sell for $79...
Set a target landed cost (including BOM, labor, freight, etc.) from Day 1 and design to hit it with your partner.
Aligning your market with your supply is crucial to your business.
And it signals to your partner you've done your homework, making you look good.
You must treat your PRD like your most important communication tool.
Your job is to make sure your partner is clear about your product-market fit. And you don't necessarily need to give too many technical hints, the goal here is to make understand your partner what your market wants on the functional level, not to prove your own technical level.
If you aren't clear about what you want, don't be surprised if your partners make assumptions (that will kill your schedule and budget).
The process will always take more time than what you expected.
Some steps like mould tooling, certifications or pre-production are hugely important and can create huge delays if not planned properly.
These steps are not an afterthought, they are compulsory so they will be your bottleneck if you ignore them.
Mistakes in hardware cost real money and time you don’t get back.
But most of them aren’t new. They’ve been made a hundred times before and hopefully you won't have to repeat them.
If you want to launch smarter, avoid rework and protect your margins from day one, then start here:
Get the basics right. Stay involved. And don’t skip important steps because you lost some on unimportant ones.
There’s no magic, just hard-earned clarity so you can make the right trade-offs. It isn't as hard as everyone projects it to be.
Hopefully this post will help you save six months and six figures.
Need a sparring partner who’s been in the trenches? Reach out to hello@sprnv.com.
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