It’s a tough business, that’s why there’s so few. Services are hard to grow. The majority of general public doesn’t have the funds to make it to the finish line so we won’t take just any project which limits the market size. If we were uncaring people, we’d take any project that walked in the door but then they’d run out of funds half way and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and especially their money. For some people, trying to license is the better route which can provide some some development work for us to make something presentable and functioning for them but even doing just that much is pushing $10k a lot of the time. The vast majority of our customers are going to tooling to try to make a business out of it or they’re already in a mature business and we’re just making their next thing. We’d only take on a project that is oriented toward licensing if they really are going to put in the work to do it. It’s not a “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. It’s getting it out there and pounding the pavement so to speak so we want to make sure they have that in them.

The job itself is generally awesome. We get to invent, brainstorm, build, and test stuff every day which is the ideal place fore engineers. The happiness level of the day totally depends on the customer’s personality though. Some people understand R&D and some people don’t. We have to drive that home so much to them but some people just don’t understand that each prototype is a test no matter how many times their told that. We even meet before we build stuff to say here’s what might go wrong and our plan B and C. So difficult customers make for a difficult day, said every entrepreneur ever. But the cool customers that get it and who are experts in their field are freaking awesome and an absolute pleasure to work with. They’re really involved and add a lot of value to the project as a member of the development team rather than just being a funder of the research. So we try our best to filter out potentially bad customers but some get through once in a while.

I’m guessing you work in a factory because most people aren’t designing the production tooling as that’s a job in and of itself. Prototype molds for something like RTV castings sure, no problem doing that in-house, but designing the entire production mold is usually done by the tooling company. Did I get that right or what type of place do you work now?

If you’re thinking about making the leap, I’d have two suggestions:

Make sure you have a lot of work lined up to keep you busy before leaving your day job. It takes probably a year before you’ll have enough to be full time and comfortable. It’ll take several years to figure everything out before it runs smoothly. It took me six to really run well and could sleep well and we’re still making improvements all the time more than ten years later.

Manage your cashflow and business savings like a hawk. It’s very easy with expensive COGS to get into a scenario with tens of thousands in receivables, which sounds great, and yet no money coming in for a few weeks for a payroll that’s due now. We have a line of credit and savings but that came with a little time after the first few years of figuring stuff out.

Ultimately it’s rewarding, fun work but it likely won’t make you a millionaire. Developing your own products just might though.