Removing the Waterworld from Product Development

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Hey, welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. I'm your guest Mike Guyer.

And we are your hosts Parker Dolman

and Steven Craig.

This is episode 187. The macro engineering podcast design contest sponsored by Mouser electronics ends Friday, August 31. That's this Friday people enter your uses machines now we have cash prizes up to $1,000 for the winners. More information can be found on mcwrap.com/blog

There's a lot of cool projects out there. So get us in and hopefully you can win $1,000 So Mike gyres leads marketing and business development for fictive his true passion lies in transforming the manufacturing industry and having worked at Caterpillar Autodesk and Kaiser Aluminum. He has seen firsthand the waste and efficiencies that permeate the market. From large fortune 500 manufacturers to emerging technology startups, Mike has worked to solve a wide array of business challenges across the industry. His experience with hardware entrepreneurs, manufacturing venture capital firms, large format, additive manufacturing, closed loop servo networks, and fabrication of generative automotive chassis provides him a unique perspective on the rapidly changing landscape of manufacturing, at fictive. He is currently focused on the DIS intermediation of traditional manufacturing supply chains and bringing distributed manufacturing to life for manufacturers of all sizes around the world.

That was pretty good. You pass the test even nicely done.

Thank you so much, Mike, for taking some time out of your busy schedule to come talk to us goons.

Oh, hey, it's great to be here. It's It's really an honor a big fan of what you guys do. So thanks for having me.

And before we get started with the topics, Mike, what is fictive?

Yeah, so effective is a distributed manufacturing platform. We specialize in custom mechanical products. So 3d printing, CNC injection molding, urethane, casting sheet metal, pretty much if it's a mechanical component for any kind of product around the world, and you need it fast, high quality, high precision, high complexity, we're the place to do it.

And so the topic for this podcast is going to be the state of hardware, fictive came out with a 2018 report about hardware product design. And I guess we're going to kind of go over like the bullet points of it, right? Yeah,

that sounds great. So we came out with a 2018, we came out with a 2019. And we're gonna Oh, this is the 2019. God willing, we're gonna do one and 2020 as well. So I guess they give a little bit more background on kind of fictive and how we started. Company was founded by a guy named Dave Evans, and his brother, Nate Evans. Both Stanford grads wanted international business and international trade and the other mechanical engineering day was the mechanical engineer. And one of the first jobs he helped us with Ford and the Palo Alto Research Lab. So he was kind of setting that research lab up as for just trying to get closer to innovating at the speed of Silicon Valley, if you will. And Dave was charged with figuring out how to make it so that when the new Ford came out, the touchscreen didn't suck, because it was seven years old, because it takes seven years to develop a car, and new touchscreens and phones and whatever else are coming out every seven to eight months. And so that was that was kind of the genesis of a problem statement that the day was looking at when he was a Ford. And what that led to was him did

he managed to solve that.

He didn't manage to assault. I would say anybody that's driven I think Ford has gotten better at that. But anybody that's driven some of the Fords, you could tell that they're still Working on user interface and those kinds of things.

So I noticed I've never driven in a car that I was like, I enjoy this user interface. That's true. I sent

in a Tesla wants in their interface is pretty cool.

That is a pretty cool interface, I have to admit I did. I had like a Ford Mustang rental once and I was just so pissed off by the, the interface actually went through and counted all the buttons, and different options, like 37 different buttons, right, there's like, four different ways you can manipulate the seat and all this stuff. So I think there's still some work for him to do on the interface. But what, what they found was, he was trying to source prototype parts for like dashboards and consoles and stuff. And he was, he did some experiments where he was like, hey, you know, I know that if I request a quote, with my four.com email address, they're gonna send me the highest possible price and the longest possible lead time, because I'm building cars. And we know that cars have a long lead time. So the suppliers that he was getting in touch with were like, whatever will Jack the price or the roof and he doesn't care about lead time, and quality can be whatever. And so Dave started doing some tests where he used his personal email, he's probably running Hotmail, or Yahoo or something at the time. And, and then a Stanford email. And what he found was with the exact same suppliers, he was getting completely different lead times completely different prices, and said, Look, there's a gap here. And so what Dave did is he convinced his brother to go in with him 5050 on buying a MakerBot Replicator two, everybody's probably seen the first like, nice looking MakerBot. The black one that was actually reliable might be the last one was actually reliable, too. Don't quote me on that. And so they bought one, you know, they put it in the laundry room, they had some friends that graduated with them who were making a phone case for some of the first iPhones where you could actually slide a credit card in, right, which now seems totally obvious, but at the time was a novel idea. And they, they said, alright, well, you know, we're gonna print these cases for these guys and make it for them. And if we can, if we can pay off the printer, and the first What did they say a month or two months, then we think we got a business or we're going to quit our day jobs and do this stuff full time. So they paid off the printer. They quit their day jobs, they bought a cheap Chinese red scooter. They're both big dude. They're both like six five years like looked like Lumberjacks. And the early story is that they would go and deliver these 3d printed parts around San Francisco. The both of them on on the red scooter. And so that's unfortunately where

these two these burly dudes on the scooter right

now Goofy 3d printed prototypes in San Francisco so not a now that I've taken over marketing. I keep thinking we need to have some kind of internal T shirts or something of two big burly dudes on on a red scooter. But like, I guess we'll see if we get that pulled.

Like I'm like those moving companies where it's like three dudes in the truck. You burly dudes in the scooter.

We you need prints, we got prints like one 800 got junk when it entered? We got prototypes or something, right.

So we give out the best ideas for free here,

no doubt, right? We should, we should write these down. So fast forward a little bit. And they quickly evolved from just doing 3d printing into CNC. Because being in the Bay Area, you've got access to all the most well funded and cutting edge startups in hardware around the world. Right? The the Bay Area hardware startup Meetup is about 200 people every month they get together because they're working on different hardware products. And it's not just consumer electronics. Now it's flying cars and privatize spacecraft. And companies like Tesla, who was actually one of the first companies we really started doing serious work with on the CNC front. And then about a year later, we added injection molding and a number of other processes. Kind of the way the business model works is we don't own any of the factories or the machines that actually produce the parts. We work with a network of partners, typically smaller manufacturers, and they love us because we're able to serve as kind of like a sales and marketing function for them where we can bring business in the door, they get to focus on making parts and cutting metal and melting plastic, which is what they love. And their founders don't have to go out and drum up business, we're just able to shoot business to them. So it's got a really cool kind of small business, invigorating local manufacturing vibe. At the same time. We're kind of consolidated we think about the business model, we're consolidating fragmented demand from some of the most sophisticated product development companies in the world down to two and three personal startups that are also working on sophisticated stuff. And so it's kind of it's a cool spot to be in because our supply side doesn't feel like they're getting screwed over. For our customers feel like they're getting a great deal, I share our supply side loves us, we get a lot of requests every week for people trying to come on. And so what I'm trying to parlay that into is why we do this, this report, right, and kind of being the the mix of manufacturers on the streets, you know, with chips in their shoes and cooling their hair, and maybe they're missing a finger if they're not very good CNC, machinist, or whatever.

I think Stevens got all his fingers. Still.

I can't count that. Hi, I'm not entirely sure.

Totally, totally fair. But so it kind of puts us at an interesting position where we get to see a lot of stuff that's coming. And we really like to try to share that back with our user community as best we can. And so that's why David, Nate, and their sister Christine, who's actually a founding member of the business, started putting out the hardware report, I think this is our fifth year of doing it. So they've been doing it almost since they started the company. And it's really about kind of let's understand what's going on. Let's ask people, What are they hearing? What are they seeing? And trying to share that back and kind of stimulate the conversation? And so we put out the report thinking

on where does the sources of this report come from? Yeah,

so it's about 1300. This year, it was about 1300 individuals who we asked to participate and we put out some prizes. Largely it's folks that follow the fictive newsletter. So we put out a monthly newsletter. If you don't subscribe. You're totally missing out because it's some great stuff. Click that subscribe button people. They hit the subscribe button wherever that bell. So that's kind of how we find folks. Right? And we did it. What was the joke and

this perfect? Oh, that's what you do. People say all the time. And we're a podcast.

You too. What's that? Just kidding. Yeah, so that's why we do the report. And then we publish it. We kind of stuck the conversation online, and then we go out and do a roadshow. And so I was lucky enough to go to around to a bunch of cities and sit down with really smart folks and kind of have a panel conversation. And we had beer and pizza. We did some tear downs, actually, where we tear a product apart and had contests and stuff. And it's really about just getting together with folks that love to make stuff.

So this is where you get to sit down and talk to people who are not that smart.

You guys, yes. I don't think that's the case at all. Right? I see some of the electronic test bench. Is that in 64? In the background there, Parker?

Yes.

There is I know there is one back there.

Right, right there. Yeah. It's getting to HDMI mod that one of my friends built.

And then you get a rock some golden energy. Starfox. Good times. Good times. So anyways, we put off the report, have a bunch of conversations about it, and then go around and do stuff like this and kind of look at it as a way to start a conversation and kind of engage folks on what's going on in the world of bringing hardware products to life. So imagine that's something you guys can relate to?

For sure. Cool. You know, I think before we go a little bit further, let's go ahead and tell the listeners where they can go and check out this state of the hardware report in case they want to follow along. Yep. Is it? Is it available from your website?

You can find it on the website, or I think the URL might be too difficult to relay here. But let me see if it's something that can read out.

I deleted the URL off the notes.

Well, the website is fictive.com. That's fic ti v.com.

Oh, I got it. Yeah. fictive.com/ 2019 hyphen, state hyphen of hyphen, repair hardware hyphen report.

It's really straightforward. Very straightforward.

Depends on me paper people take notes.

Yep. Or just search 2019 said hardware. Either way. That's where you can get it. We did a webinar on it. I don't think we recorded any of the tour. The tour is over. But if you're interested in participating next year, that'd be good too.

So it wasn't a fair world tour.

It was not a fair world. Although, I gotta tell you, we did our last event in Pittsburgh, and Bosch donated a bunch of these woodworking routers. And so we broke into teams and everybody after they had been drinking beer all night.

Give to us power tools.

They didn't use them. They tore them apart, but it was definitely it was definitely a farewell tour for those those routers, that's for sure. So

okay, so this hardware report, and well, the state of hardware report, what what? What kind of information are we going to see in that?

Yep. So the big thing we look at are kind of what are the trends that are impacting team's ability to bring new hardware products to market? Right. And so, one of the things we started seeing last year was signals about the global trade and the tariffs and, and all this kind of stuff that is pretty hard to avoid seeing some news about almost daily, if not hourly, some some of the trends that came out this year, we're really talking about kind of moving from doing prototyping into production, right. So so many early stage hardware companies, this is where they really, really struggle is now that the barriers have come down to kind of making your first one or two prototypes, a lot more people are doing it. But where they really struggle is going into that point where you've got full product market fit, and you're making 10 20,000 of these things a month. And then the other thing we wanted to look at was really just kind of more the personality side of of who is it that's making hardware and kind of what is the, you know, what is the makeup of these folks? And what do they think about what gets them motivated, we'll, how much coffee they drink, and that kind of stuff. So those are, those are kind of the big three things in terms of category. One, I guess, to kind of jump in, like one of the things we saw, was surprising, but not surprising, I guess not surprising the showed up. But surprising the to the extent that people said that this was impacting them, was the stat around 62% of the folks we surveyed. So the tariffs have increased their material and component costs. And that spans both mechanical and electrical stuff. We have one, one company, there's a story to tell their startup in Boston, and they work in a consumer electronics product. And the product is got about $1,000 price point, they kind of have to keep it under $1,000, to be able to sell this thing in the market. And they started in 2018, they started telling the story of the tariff on their cost of goods sold, because they're having it made in China had a big contract manufacturer was like half a percentage point, right, kind of not a big deal. And then some of the new tariff stuff got rolled out in June and it goes up to 10%. Using about 10% on the cost of goods sold for, you can guess what the product cost needs to be they hit the margins. And then in the fall, they're looking at 25%. Right. And so they're early stage company that can't necessarily just say, Hey, we're passing that on to our customers, because they don't have they don't have a customer base of an Apple or Samsung, right, and

you don't have the marketing clout to do that.

Right. And so it's kind of, you know, creates a really challenging situation for some of these early companies that are really trying to disrupt the market and do something different. And so that's kind of something that came out in the report, you know, 19%, so the experienced product launch delays, almost 20%, were already trying to rethink their supply chain, right. They're trying to think of places other than China to get their stuff made, which, for anybody that set up supply for a mechanical component. It's hard, and it takes a long time, you got to hire a bunch of people, you got to go and vet the factories and get the quality, right and get the contracts and the finances and the tax and all this stuff. And to move it out of the country is it's a lot of overhead right?

Now, I would say the biggest problem with that is like how do you maintain your quality as you're moving to a different factory or a different country? Or if you're on shoring your product back to your product? Like how do you maintain that quality?

It's a big challenge. I think you hit it on the head, right? I mean, even even if you're not moving factories, it's hard to maintain your quality. Right? Factories working on multiple products at the same time. They can material sources can change, especially if you're doing overseas staff can change the plant manager can change you get all a lot of variables that go into making these physical products. And yeah, it's it's a tough tough thing. Parker, I think you hit it on the head.

Well, on top of that, something we've actually mentioned a couple times recently on the podcast is the idea that you know you you may have already established relationships with a manufacturer or a vendor, you you know them by name, you know that people you're in contact with. So when it comes to quality issues or maintaining quality, you have that relationship established If you're flopping around from vendor to vendor, that relationship just becomes a document that says you must do a good job. Right? And that's kind of hard. Yeah.

And those, I mean, those documents are only as good as the trust that they're built upon, right? It's the relationship and the communication behind them. Right? Right. Because, you know, what are you going to do go sue a big factory in China, if your stuffs not coming out? Right, let's forget about it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's a place where a we were optimistic from the fictive side, and that we think we can help offset some of them because we're kind of managing the communication and the systems and we've on boarded a network of suppliers and multiple countries. And so in theory, we're able to redistribute that, and offset some of that risk and make it a little bit easier to switch. Because you're, you know, if you're Steven, you're the guy or the gal is building the product. You're talking to me fictive and I'm a manufacturer of record. And it's on me to manage the relationships with my, my quality engineers that are on site and with my suppliers that are in China, Taiwan, Taipei, Japan, wherever it may be. And so that's, I think one thing where it was interesting for us to hear this, it's encouraging, but also puts a lot of pressure on us right to be kind of part of the solution, and not just pointing out the problems that I think everybody can see.

Yeah, so what are what are some ways engineers can reduce these impacts these tariffs, just look for loopholes,

man, look for all the loopholes, you

know, trying to fill up your briefcase full of you know, resistors and capacitors and then hop back on the plane? Well, that's

a challenge, right? You guys probably see a lot of stuff with counterfeit components in the electronic space, right? Oh,

is probably up in the top five problems. Yeah. Yeah. If not one or two. Especially supply chain. Yeah.

It's huge. Right. So, you know, on the mechanical side, counterfeit materials are more of a problem than counterfeit products, because you can pretty easily identify counterfeit product. But some of the stuff engineers are doing is

it wasn't their thing recently with NASA getting uncertified or getting materials that were certified and they weren't real thing.

I don't know if I heard about that. It's entirely possible. Yeah.

And there was a there's a Japanese steel industry also was caught with that as well. That was like last year, I think, though, oh, really, you have to send me the letter. It was what it was materials, as you were saying. It wasn't like fake fasteners, it was like the materials themselves had spoofed documentation, saying it was something that wasn't that

it's really common, we actually did buy some special equipment in our, our operation in China to scan the metals, because you, you can't really tell by looking at it right. And just because I actually worked at an aluminum Smelter. And the way you tag it is you just put a sticker on this nearly molten hot piece of metal. And it's a barcode, right, and then it gets caught and it gets flattened. And you think about, there's really not a good way to physically track what this stuff is. And the cost in some of these materials can be drastically different. So it makes sense that people are counterfeiting stuff, more aboveboard ways to deal with it, our first kind of try to value engineer or engineer around the tariffs. And there's even terms you know, people are using, like tariff engineering to try to do things like

keep the cost down.

There's a term for that now. Yeah, right. But um, you know, just simple things like, hey, where you have it assembled can impact the cost of the tariff, right? Where you source different components can

come Don't pick that Chinese led picked that Taiwanese led Exactly.

Well, and hey, I actually just kicked the link over to you guys. We can put it up in the show notes, but apparently, that that NASA material that was faulty, came from an Oregon based aluminum extrusion manufacturer. And apparently, it looks like they've been doing it for 20 years.

Wow. Yeah, that's tough. So I will say that was not the aluminum smelter that I that I worked at the one I worked at was in Spokane, Washington and has long since been shut down. So they probably had even more egregious errors than that one. But just because I'm based in Oregon doesn't mean I'm, I'm intrinsically linked to the steel trade here. of the stuff that I'll admit to on this podcast. So you don't other stuff is like you just you pick what you have to move the country that the stuffs being sourced in right. And we get companies coming to us because they see that kind of having the distributed model is a good way to go about it. Also, just where things are assembled, can make a big difference, right? If you just bring in the parts and you have them assembled in the US, it's a different. It's called the HCC code, which you guys probably know. But that's how the tariffs are classified for different care, Harmonized Tariff code. There you go. Now we're getting deep. So we're talking about Harmonized Tariff, because now

those are the most solars things you've ever read in your life.

It's just pages and pages of numbers and what it references, right.

Yeah. And it's like, Does my thing mean this? Because like, it's really weird because some products can fall under multiple different tariff codes. And really, you can put that on there and it's up to the customs agent to be like, no. All right, okay. Yeah.

Well, that's where that's where the tariff engineering comes in. Right? You you need to know the right code to get the cheapest

price. Make it look like a microwave what's actually a blender? Yep.

Or if it's like the Coolest Cooler, maybe it's all three combined. You guess the coolest?

Sorry. Was that the cooler with the speakers on it? That was on Kickstarter

that was also had a blender. Oh, it has. Okay, it was like a Bluetooth speaker.

I knew I had a Bluetooth speaker. I didn't know how to blender and

I have to look this up. It's called The Coolest Cooler. Oh,

yeah, I gotta send you guys that solid. We just we just did a post on. I think one of our social channels with the picture we did we

do a teardown, you know, the only thing that this is missing. Have you guys seen the coolers that like have a straight up engine on it and you can ride them around? Like that's, that's the only thing that's

missing. So Steven, you missed. When we were at Vegas for DEF CON. There were people driving around with those in the casino in the casino in the casino and then just going straight on the strip and driving down the street that's filled up. It was it's like how why do people not stop? I guess that's okay.

It's Vegas. Wow. Okay, so they're there, their price ranges go all over the place. I'm seeing $430 to $1,400 for a Coolest Cooler.

Yeah, I think they're pretty rare now. But anyways, we do tear downs we do. We'd like every month we'll take a product and we tear it apart. And sometimes they're commercially available. And sometimes our companies have gone out of business. And we use it as a way to kind of deconstruct and reverse engineer this stuff. And you can even see in some of those articles that we put out. Some of the decisions people are making around trade offs and how they're, you know, they're cutting corners, or they're going overboard on over engineering, some of these things we didn't want to do Cerro right, and just like that is another great and sad story. But you just look at how over engineered some of these things are. And it's, it's, that's kind of baffling. That's

one of those stories where that you give your engineering team a nearly endless budget and just say like, have fun, you know. That's good.

I want one of those.

So why are you posting these tear downs on YouTube? Because that sounds awesome. I would watch.

Super awesome. Yeah, just search on the fictive teardown or teardown we did one of a Dyson fan. I think if you just search like Dyson fan, were like one of the third or fourth PageRank results. The other thing that kind of kind of is happening though is there's like for a long time, in my previous job at Autodesk. We talked about like nearshoring and onshoring. And these as kind of like emerging trends. But some of that stuff's actually becoming a reality now as as companies are really making moves to bring production closer to the point of demand.

I do like the term near shore because it just means Mexico.

It could mean Canada. Sure.

shares a shoreline, right.

Yeah, I always I always imagined though, like you got like one of those like oil rigs, and it's 200 miles offshore.

And there's a manufacturing facility. And

and we've talked about this a lot, right? Well, if you just set up your manufacturing facility on an old container ship, you're in international waters, you're not subject to any import or export regulations,

and then bring your ship in when you have to offload all that's brilliant.

There was Google setup. They had like an acro boat, they had a container ship offshore. And in the Bay Area. There was speculation that that was part of of what they were doing, at least amongst those of us that are into containerized factories and 3d printing fully customized.

Maybe it's just a bank boat, and they put all of their money on it. And it's international waters. No no taxes, right?

Yep. Yep. There's also

there has to be a thing. Oh, yeah.

This podcast is just solid ideas the entire

the lawless flotilla right you get a container ship you take it out into international waters. As you do, I had some buddies at Mega bots and they were going to stage one of their giant fighting robot battles on a container ship because they were like, Look, if somebody gets hurt if somebody breaks a leg,

just toss him overboard totally.

We had Dennis Hopper and Kevin Costner up in here. Just the lawless flotilla is what we what we call it. Anyways, alright, so coming back to the report before I go completely off script about Waterworld and everything else. So yeah, the idea of like tariff engineering is real, the exciting thing is like nearshoring. And I believe that's going to start to push some of these more advanced technologies for producing things, right. 3d printing circuits, large format, printing, high resolution, I think is actually going to be pretty advantageous for a lot of the folks that are in these newer manufacturing technologies that haven't quite reached traction and full production. Think the cost of doing stuff. And the risk of doing stuff overseas is going to start to come to a point where we say, well, let's just find a different way, and do it closer to home. And that's kind of one of the ideas, that's always been really, something a passion for me is going back to hanging out with guys like Jay Rogers at Local Motors and Mark hatch at Tech Shop. And a lot of folks that have always said, you know, you should be able to buy a car that's produced within 50 miles of where you live. And most of the crap you buy should be customized to you. And rather than somebody in marketing, guessing that like, Hey, this is the headset that Parker is going to want, like, let's go and then stock it on the store shelf and hope to hell that he buys that one and not the other shit, man, what headset do you want, design it yourself, we'll make it for you. And it'll be all on demand. So that's when that's kind of the vision of where some of the stuff can go on. But right now we're in a, we're in a pretty tricky time with just people trying to get through this, this grind of like, how do I deal with shit? That's 25%? More, more

expensive? Yeah, like almost overnight for something's

been drastically right. And to the point where if you're a small business, like you said, you can't you don't have the marketing resources to go.

Or there's the just a, you know, checkbook to do it. Yep. So you can't you can't even be like, like, you can't even purchase your supplies, because it's 25% More expensive now, where if you're a large company, yeah, you can probably absorb that 25% and then build the thing, put it on the shelves, and then then the customers can absorb that 25%. But if you're a small company, you can't even absorb that first 25% impact.

Cash flow, right? And if you're big enough, you can blame the powers for that, like if Apple said, Hey, our phones are going to be 25% more because people made them 25% more. I guarantee you people would sit back and just be like, well, that's reasonable. Because people said that you can't as a small company, you can't pull that off.

You cannot Yeah, that if Apple did it, people will be like, oh, I want it even more now.

The tariff fatter. It's $1,500 1000.

Yeah, that seems like a great idea. So on that, like, you know, the the next big topic is kind of this idea of like scaling into production. Where we heard like, two out of three of the people we asked, we just weren't weren't impressed with the manufacturers they were working with and their ability to go up and volume down and volume.

See one out of those three or Mac five customers?

That's probably true. Why do you think that is?

Because we scale up with our customers. Tell me more with our in? Was it infinite? Infinite factory capacity or something like that?

logic that says I mean, it sounds like a great idea, right? Is people like volumes change? Right? You can't lock a company into a production schedule for a whole year. When you Wow, that's what the demand is. Yeah.

I mean, that's what most contract manufacturers do.

So we also saw like, you know, 71%, someone less than 5000 and US products and their first six months after launch. I think that's validation that like you'd launch a product, you're not immediately at volume. But

you're not immediately selling a million a month.

Funny how that? Yep. You know, 30% didn't stay on budget, which we were it's funny. We were we were doing one of these and I think it was Seattle, and somebody in the audience was like, that number is bullshit. I gotta call them I gotta call bullshit. All that number. It's way higher than 30%.

didn't save on budget. Yeah, yeah, I think I think it's because it feels bad. Or like you're admitting defeat if you're not on budget, so people are less likely to report that being true or not

totally that we're right on budget. Yep. For sure, you know, 43% so they don't really feel like they have the resources to manage a supply chain. Especially the smaller companies that make sense. When we start to work with medium and bigger sized companies, supply chain teams are like an entire department, right? There's vice presidents and senior vice presidents of supply chain organizations. And this is what they do all day every day. Right. So and then this is another one, that's probably debatable, but in terms of staying on schedule one and three, so they didn't stay on schedule. And 43 Yeah, three.

What's, there's the old, simple equation for project management, where it's like, come up with your idea on how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take and then multiply that by three. And you might be okay.

Yep. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So, and, you know, I think it's the question we had, I think it was Pittsburgh, somebody was like, Well, does that mean they're staying on the schedule that they originally put out? Or the updated schedule? That was the version of the updated schedule with the updated schedule, right? Yeah, cuz technically,

if your Gantt chart just keeps slipping out your scores, you're still on schedule. Exactly. Also,

if being on schedule is what the initial salesman asked for, like, zero out of all projects are on schedule, right?

Yep. Yeah. So true. Right. So we, let's see, I want

to know who this person is that has this quote, I worked in aerospace, we are going to Mars. I'm assuming they mean, whatever they're building is going to Mars that them? Yeah, it's hard to say

it's hard to say.

Which they doesn't say that they're coming back, it just says we're going.

A little sirens of Titan action, they're right. On a good quality, you know, 71%, or either unimpressed or dissatisfied with their production, manufacturing companies quality. And then just to kind of close this out really quickly. The last section is really kind of on people and careers. And what we saw was just a

lot. So on that quality thing. It's interesting, because it's really what we see as well. Were, like the for contract manufacturers like what's, what's that term? And I'm blanking on the marketing term for it. It's like how many people would recommend you Promoter Score, Net Promoter Score NPS. That's what it's called. And it was like, for contract manufacturers, it's like on average, like negative like five, as the industry as a whole to negative five, it's like, That is terrible. But it doesn't matter, I just got like 95 or something like that.

There was only so many options, right? It's kind of people are kind of limited. The thing

about it, okay, so quality with quality, you have to have good expectations as the person who's interfacing with the contract manufacturer, and one of the first things that seems obvious, but is missed a lot of times is that if you're the person who's looking to have something made, you need to have the expectation that you will not get 100% yield. Or if you do get 100% yield. That's because your contract manufacturer built extra, and he ate the cost. Like that's, that's just pretty much always the situation. And this whole quality 71% being somewhat satisfied or dissatisfied. A lot of that comes from the fact that people have this unfortunate, I've experienced this unfortunate situation where you make one mistake, and that's the entire order is considered bad. You know, so one quality hit on one unit out of however many units you made is basically the entire order had a quality hit, as opposed to considering it on a per unit basis. You know,

yeah, he's talked about when, when Steven was working here at the FAB, well,

there's that but no, no, I've experienced it elsewhere, too. Okay,

so we have two different metrics here at the Fab Four. For failures, we have that metric, which is if something failed in order one thing, like, that's, that's that whole order failed, then we have just like the overall like that one unit was like 99 is like 99.99% yield still. So you have two metrics, one's the customer facing NPS score kind of thing. And the other one is is like, what the actual process is

doing. And you use the one about the process to kind of hold yourselves to improve right, is that correct? Yeah. Okay. And so you kind of hold a higher standard for yourself than necessarily what you like report out is that not so? So

the other one is like Making sure like, because I mean, if you order 100 or something and one was bad, it's still kind of like, oh, man, that kind of sucks. But you I understand that and most people understand that, that that's just how manufacturing works. You have yield rates.

Yeah, that's 1%. Which I mean, that's not great. But that's also not that bad.

Yes. So thing is those, it's still trying to hit that 100% for that person and make sure that they are not this somewhat satisfied or dissatisfied, they are 100% amazeballs.

You might, you might have just invented a new category that's going to take over NPS

during the amazeballs goal.

You got to put it on, like some kind of weird, logarithmic scale where it's not just like a simple one to 10. Right? Well, it's

not because like, it's it's pretty inverse. So like one is like, like, drastically drops it. Nice. I love it. I love it. All right. So let's roll this back in.

No, that's fine. It's good. I'm just trying to think of, of how we can really evolve NPS because NPS has been around a while, right? Yeah. Cool. So then, like the last section is we kind of looked at people in their careers, right. So really just trying to understand, like, aside from the business, and the metrics and the stuff like you know, who's out there 61% of folks that they work on jobs outside their responsibilities quite often, which I think anybody that's worked at a small company or in hardware development, or manufacturing sees that this is the case pretty much at any company, right? It's becoming less and less delineated what someone's role.

I think that's 100%. Like what Startup life is about doing, we sort of you need to do, whatever you need to do has to get done. I think at macro fab, I've done everything besides accounting. Oh, really? Yeah. And even then, I've already like, I manage kind of like the engineering books, like what our budget is, so I can't do accounting, but I don't like have to report that to like, they're like, here's the money and I make sure I don't run out.

Nice. What about you, Steven? What kind of stuff if you get mixed up?

I did a lot of it might be easier to ask what I haven't gotten.

So Parker kind of hasn't done accounting.

I've done a small amount of accounting. That I would say that yeah, that's probably one of the least one of the fewest things I've been asked to do. But ya know, pretty much a good chunk of everything else.

That's awesome. Even including, was was like, once we hired Steven, I think we had like, we had like six or eight employees. And, like, church, who's our CEO, or Chief Product Officer now. And me, we would clean toilets. While we didn't have a janitor, so

like, hey, I'll clean the toilets. I'll do whatever it takes.

Yep. So on this page that gives that 61% figure there's a kind of, I guess, a little bit of a chart over on the right that says how many cups of coffee do you drink per day? And 28% of people said none that's a lie. That's that's that's a whole lot lie. I don't believe that. So I

wonder if you could rephrase that and just say caffeine, because I bet you the majority that 28% drink energy drinks

Yeah, we're like crushing monster all day right? Yeah, she's

actually I don't drink coffee or do energy drinks. But I take a caffeine pill every morning.

We just made veins it right.

caffeine pill and a glass of water Perfect. Good go for us today. It's too hot here in Houston for coffee that I guess you know iced coffee on the other hand is delicious. But you got like yeah, it's just so much easier just caffeine pill and water

that's a good call out because 20% Seems surprisingly high for no answer right for no. Yeah. It would be I would actually be interesting to go through the data and we should do

like how it does drop down like with from between two cups and three cups. There's actually a drop but from three cups to four plus, this is ginormous increase. So like there's some caffeine, coffee junkies out there.

Still right? Yeah, I want to I want to see what the monster Red Bull equivalent is though. Because I think it'd be pretty interesting.

Yeah, I think if you next year dude, like just caffeine and then have like, a breakdown of like, monster Red Bull coffee, and then I would I would say put caffeine pill. See how many people click that one.

And then the other thing I want to see is like a time graph comparing stage in the product development process to number of cups of coffee.

This is really critical data made here.

This is critical data. While I've been thinking about we could sell that data to the caffeine providers and Starbucks would be all right. Oh, we got a

bunch of, like I said, great ideas, this podcast, nothing but ideas. But your critical

deadline projects coming up. Let's see. So there's a couple of last things I want to touch on. One is founders are kind of the happiest out of out of the bunch. So like 70% of the founders, we talked to rated their happiness as a four out of five. It's kind of their job, right? They've got to be the eternal optimists, and it's their business and their creation. But

a little bit Stockholm Syndrome,

right there. Like, of course, I'm happy.

Yes, of course, why wouldn't I be doing this then? Putting it, I think, I think you hit there is it's your, your founder, because you're, it's your dream to be doing this. So even if you're doing if you're cleaning your employees, toilets and sweeping the floors, and, you know, running the books and shipping stuff out five o'clock at 8pm. That's what you want to do.

Yeah, I mean, it's what you know, and you built this thing, right? You brought these people together to follow with you on this mission, and you demo better be happy about it, or you probably can not last very long.

One of the things my boss says, Who is the owner of the company, and I totally respect the hell out of this is he's he, he said multiple times, like, this is my dream. It doesn't have to be yours. And I really respect that, but because like he's excited about it, and he loves doing it, and like it is his thing. And so if he's working late, or if he's like, pushing really hard on something, or even just like a big thing for him, it's because it is his dream, but he doesn't necessarily sit back and expect you to do the exact same thing. And I really appreciate that.

You can't expect your employees to be as fanatical as you are. I mean, you're trying to create a cult atmosphere. But you know, not everyone buys in. That's mean everyone drinks that fruit punch, man.

It's a really healthy perspective, though, right? I love that Steven is like, Hey, this is my dream. It may not be yours, right, but still expect you to come and work hard, of course, have realistic expectations that like, you're maybe not going to grind yourself to a pulp, you know, 80 hours a week, every single week, doing this stuff. That's I think that's a really healthy perspective for a founder to have absolutely a trust our founders is tuned up at this point. The the other last thing, and it's kind of only want to put a stop to it. But like that, the thing that we heard the most positive feedback was just around how rewarding it is to finally ship a product. And to hold something in your head that you worked on either as a supply chain manager or as an engineer, as an accountant or whatever it is, just how rewarding it is to finally see this thing that you've worked on come to fruition and be able to hold it in your hand and hand it to your parents or hand it to your either your partner or your kids or whatever and say this is a product that I built. And that's this kind of I think the thing that gets all of us at fictive super fired up about what we do is when we have people, we had a company called electro spit the founder, this guy named Bosco who's a career musician with an idea for a new kind of TalkBox that you can use to modulate your voice when you're playing it through another instrument previously was only really available with like a weird to be blue into three electric guitar made an amazing product, right? All these really high profile musicians are using it now. And he's just talking about how, you know the this wouldn't have been possible, previously, and how he was able to realize this thing. And now it seems like it's gonna make a big impact in the music industry. And we all know how much reach that can have. So that's the stuff I think that makes it really fun and worthwhile, despite all the big challenges. And

I do like this word graph here, where it's like, the larger it is, the more people responded with that message. And the largest one is relief. It's not it's not being proud or joyful or satisfied. It's Oh my god, it's done.

Finally

it'd be really great if there was just right in the middle just like shit or

exhaustion, right.

Exhaustion, I would say. I think relief and exhaustion would probably they are right there. When you finally do probably that product. Yeah, you're you're relieved. Now you can like at least sleep a little bit.

Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. So. Yeah. So that's the state of hardware report. encourage everybody to check it out if you'd like making stuff, check out the blog@fictive.com are tear downs on YouTube and and also fictive.com/blog. Thanks to all of our partners and everybody that helps with the survey especially Parker and Steven and macro fab. Thanks so much for having me. This has been a super awesome conversation. So,

so before you sign us out, Mike, who could deploy Lean Six Sigma better in a company? Good willing hunting, Matt Damon or the Martian Matt Damon?

Hmm. Okay, so deploying Lean Six Sigma, in a company. We've got Matt Damon from the Martian or Matt Damon from Goodwill Hunting. That's a tough choice. Yeah, it's tough. Matt Damon from Goodwill Hunting is pretty damn smart.

But the Matt Damon from the Martian is very lean. And he is physically one person on Mars.

The ultimate definition of lean and I would also say maybe a little bit more hands on and pragmatic, where I think Goodwill Hunting is theory and chalkboard and and he's very academic is, yeah, very academic. Whereas when I was, I didn't actually see the movie, but I read the book, just marveling at like, really true kind of grit and problem solving. Right? And that how that comes across. And I think the authors that we're the book, so I kind of go with with Matt Damon from the Martian for deploying Lean Six Sigma. But you gotta you know, he's got to have a black belt. That'd be a Six Sigma Black Belt. That's right. That's maybe he's gonna have some kind of a Japanese counterpart sidekick to do the Kaizen Kanban stuff.

Honestly, if it was that pair together, that would be the ultimate six sigma. That both of those together. Yeah, absolutely.

So thank you so much, Mike, for coming on to the show. Thank you.

This is a blast. You guys. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it. Happy to come back anytime and hope to talk to you guys real soon.

Cool. With that. Would you like to sign us out?

Cool. Yeah. So that was the macro fab engineering podcast. I was your guest Mike Guyer.

And we're your host Parker Dolman. Steven Craig. Thank you everyone. Take it easy Thank you. Yes, you are listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic. Let Stephen and I know Tweet us at macro at Longhorn engineer or at analog EMG or emails at podcasts at Mack fab.com. Also, check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episode right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen, as it helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us