informal

Our co-founders Nate Padgett and Sam Holland pulled together some key learnings from their decades of experience creating amazing hardware and bringing products to life. The informal Hardware Handbook 📖 focuses on current trends, challenges, and the tools needed to bring a project from conception to completion. It is made up of advice from experts in a variety of areas within the industry, giving critical direction that can make or break any project. We're excited to have sourced this information within our informal community and to share the knowledge with you! Sign up for our newsletter in the link below to unlock access to the complete guide.

We had a blast speaking with informal member and mechanical engineer Dan Holzer for this member profile piece. Based in the fast-growing Boston hardware community, Dan has a diverse range of technical skills that he uses to work alongside early-stage startups and small technical teams to design, prototype, and commercialize new technologies. He’s received a product innovation certification at MIT, built composite products for a company acquired by 3M, and led rapid prototyping & engineering design projects at Shell Techworks. Dive into the full feature below to learn more about Dan and why he would be a massive technical asset to your team!

FREE ME RESOURCE:  informal has partnered with Hardware FYI to offer this free 8-page tool for #mechanicalengineers ! Keep it on your desk, bring it to an interview, and have quick answers to the most common ME questions at your fingertips. You can use these ME cheat sheets to reference: - Mechanics of Materials - Materials 101 (Materials Science & Material Selection) - Free Body Diagrams - Materials Science - Heat Transfer & Fluid Dynamics - Manufacturing Processes https://tally.so/r/3yyWq6

While fundraising on Kickstarter has a very low barrier to entry and is easily accessible to those who don’t wish to go down the traditional VC route, standing out in a crowded space and garnering buy-in for your yet-to-be-developed product is no easy task. To date, there’s been roughly 260,000 successfully funded projects on Kickstarter. On the flip side, there’s also been over 365,000 that were unsuccessful in reaching their funding goal. Even for the successful projects, most of them raised less than $10,000 in funding. Then we have an impressive outlier like Micronics LLC, who launched their SLS 3D printing campaign on Kickstarter with a goal of $100,000, ended up raising over $1.3 million, and achieved this as a scrappy 2-person operation. It’s no surprise SLA printing powerhouse Formlabs announced their acquisition of Micronics late last week. But will this acquisition move the needle in making SLS 3D printing more accessible? Or will this be another flop of a merger that seems to stifle innovation and haunt the 3D printing industry? Only time will tell. With the many informal members' collective experience working in the additive manufacturing tech space, including our co-founder Sam Holland, we wanted to share the news and get any hot takes from our community. So let us know what you think in the comments! #hardware #3Dprinting #kickstarter #tech #hardwarefounders #techcrunch

The final post in the Bridging the Valley series is live! With this series, informal freelance member Michael Lo explores a common stumbling point in hardware product development between lab research and the leap to implementation, appropriately named the "Valley of Death". In this final installment, Lo looks at how a few programs like Sinai BioDesign, FedTech and TechLink are helping to productize innovative technologies by connecting research and funding with entrepreneurs and industry. #valleyofdeath #research #technologytransfer #technology #development #hardware #trl

Despite the ability to snap great pictures through our phones, there's some unique value to having small pictures (with undeniably lower resolution) printed and posted on our walls. That was product design engineer and informal freelance collective member, Shivam Dehinwal's inspiration to purchase the Fujifilm instax mini 8. Once it was in his hands, he quickly realized there were many great things about this camera apart from the size, color and form factor. But the only way to truly appreciate all of the detailed engineering going on in the camera of course would be to take it apart! So here is his teardown, focusing on a small but very important part of the Fujifilm instax mini 8: the springs! We hope you enjoy. Do you have experience with the Fujifilm instax mini 8? Share your stories in the comments! Jonesing for a teardown of another product? Let us know that as well! Read the full teardown 👉 https://lnkd.in/eNxVstBU #Teardown #mechanicalengineering #designcommunity #industrialdesigners #designeducation #productdevelopment

Beneath the surface of freelancer marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork lie several hidden downsides that can impact the quality of work and the overall project outcome. This week we look at some of the most common issues that can arise when using these services, and we break down how working with informal differs. #FreelanceMarketplace #GigEconomy #RemoteWork #FreelanceCommunity #HireFreelancers #FreelanceJobs #FreelanceSuccess

This week on our blog we highlight a piece from #GrowthMarketer and member of the informal collective, Kyle Graycar, who delves into his top 8 go-to-market launch tenets. See 👇 for a snapshot + link to the article! 1. Set an exciting objective, and reject everything else 🤩  2. Embrace change 🙃  3. The more specific your audience, the better 👥 4. Customer feedback > everything 📣 5. Go deep on one or two marketing channels 📺 6. Understand your competition, but don’t obsess 📊 7. Abide by the 90/10 rule 💪 8. Do things that don’t scale ⚖️

Considering whether or not to raise VC funding for your hardware startup? You won't want to miss part three of the series Raising Venture Capital, from guest writer Andrew Chan. We appreciate his no-nonsense approach to dissecting the fundraising process, while managing to keep it fun, factual, and real. #ICYMI - here are parts one and two of the series: 👉 Raising venture capital: the pre-fundraising checklist https://lnkd.in/eGWuaG3p 👉 Raising venture capital: selling technical ideas to non-technical investors https://lnkd.in/eGhYAcvd #hardwarestartups #entrepreneurship #businesstips #techindustry #startupjourney #budget #finance #planning #riskmanagement  #venturecapital

🚀 "Hardware is hard" is a reality that most of us in the startup world are all too familiar thanks to the complexities and challenges associated with hardware development. 🛠️ We released the informal hardware handbook into the wild because if we can help even one hardware entrepreneur avoid some of these pitfalls, that is our goal. 💡 It's also why we wanted to dust off and share this conversation that TechCrunch had with Sera Evcimen, mechanical engineer and mentor for the Techstars startup accelerator, who covered 7 common pitfalls that hardware startups commonly face. Read more about the #informal #hardwarehandbook here - https://lnkd.in/e8gnH-CF #resources #learning #cool #hardwarestartups #entrepreneurship #innovation #businessinsights #productdevelopment #riskmanagement #financialplanning #manufacturing #supplychain