Changing the world, a hardware startup at a time.

Pirates #family

Let’s say you have an idea for a hardware gadget, maybe a connected device for the consumer market or for business. Where do you go?

That was the question we had heard several times before me and a dozen other founders decided to create Productized association. Being involved with several startup accelerators for the last 7 years, I’ve personally witnessed the local startup ecosystem grow from virtually zero to what it is today, having organized many editions of Startup Weekend (and writing about the lack of good startup ideas here), and co-founding Beta-i, then the Lisbon Challenge accelerator — in many ways I feel that we’ve won a big battle — the Lisbon eco-system was flying out of the radar for too long and is finally getting deserved media attention in Europe, also spurred by the move of WebSummit from Dublin, and stellar upstarts like TalkDesk and internationally recognized accelerators like Lisbon Challenge and world class incubators like Startup Lisboa and Fabrica de Startups.

A battle won. Many more to win.

The teddy bear is MIA.

As exciting as the Lisbon startup scene is right now it does not reflect in the “real-economy”, in many respects the Portuguese economy is still plagued by low productivity and even if Portugal has developed a number of companies in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), a sector that accounts for 4,5% of the national GDP, it has not performed poorly to create companies that develop products of high technological density, exportable and competitive in international markets. In this context, national ICT companies are still highly dependent on the development of solutions and services with very high marginal costs, and therefore hardly able to develop scalable productized solutions.

As the art and science of building mobile & web software startups is being mastered, by the hundreds of organizations that are now working in this space. What used to be black magic of evaluating and growing SaaS business is now pretty standard. The acceleration eco-system has developed a market equilibrium and accelerators in Europe tend to offer very similar deals, also, the quality of VCs is more transparent, the seed deals are quite the same. In fact, most accelerators tend to be the same, because they are all clones of Y-Combinator, which started this industry … with proven success cases for SaaS business models.

Products make more sense than ever.

But what if you want to develop product companies, or if you want to venture into a hardware startup or bring R&D to the market, there are much fewer options and you must be prepared to take the path less traveled.

In the words of fjord lead service designer Alex Jones, the software panacea is flooding us in a sea of sterile apps, and we simply don’t touch the world anymore. Everything we do is now accessed and controlled through a sheet of scratch-resistant glass. In a growing number of cases we’ve lost even that primitive interaction as vocal commands and gestures manage the interface between us and more and more of our life.

At Productized we believe that creating better products is the next battle to be won, so we’ve organized the Productized Conference in 2015 (see video below) and a number of monthly events the Productized Talks to organize the nascent product and hardware startups scene in Portugal.

Working with Pirates

So, when we approached the Startup Pirates team in the Spring of 2015 to organize Startup Pirates in Lisbon 2015, the 1st edition entirely dedicated to hardware projects, their answer was really enthusiastic, which motivated us to go ahead. We had several dates in mind to organize this first hardware startups pre-accelerator, firstly we tried to organize it in July, then September, and then December. In all interactions, the Startup Pirates team was super friendly, and understanding of our multiple delays, mostly due to the Productized Conference. We finally set to organize it before the end of 2015, from December 12th till the 19th.

While planning the agenda of the event we spoke with key people in the hardware acceleration scene in Europe, including Damien Cavaillès from Startup Weekend Makers and Jeff Katz co-founder of Hardware.co in Germany. They gave us precious feedback on which topics we should include in the event scheduling along the week.

Part of our team working (from left to right - Karelle, André, and Noora). This picture captures well the team spirit.

Pirates, drones, and cyber-sharks

Flying Quad-copters

From my previous experience running other accelerators, I also knew that team-building activities are crucial to help participants create strong inter-communication skills along their journeys.

“I liked the friendship that was created inside that room. The team building in the beginning really helped.”

So for Startup Pirates Hardware edition we decided to include a team building workshop at the very beginning of the program, The First Floor Challenge, that challenged teams to assemble a working quadcopter from bare-bone materials because we though this would be a funny, witty way to helps teams build confidence on creating a methodology even for creative activities. One of the criticisms we got was that the TF1C workshop needs to be longer in order for people to understand the PM methodologies behind and not just the engineering challenge of building a quadcopter. Either way, actually building a quadcopter that participants end up flying themselves and competing against each other was huge fun.

“Let me cut first”

“it would be better to do the (team building) workshop after the project teams are formed.”

Every time I organize an acceleration program I take so many lessons learned — one of the main purposes of the TF1C was to help the participants of the SP Lisbon edition to create better teams! In that sense, the TF1C worked really well, because the 10 teams that ended up being created were rock solid for an entire week! Still, from a project management point of view maybe we could have arranged this workshop after the teams had been created.

Pitch training and business discovery are more important than a working prototype for demo day…

“Let me sleep a little bit more”

“way too much focus on the hardware, while it was expected nobody would be able to finish a prototype. Made every group stressed about it…”

Very early stage hardware projects have no way to build up users without having, at least, a prototype - at most you can build up pre-orders and backers but no real users. But, that should not stop teams from perusing product market fit! So the lesson learned is that organizing a pre-acceleration for hardware with a strong initial focus on prototyping an MVP was a mistake, they should have spent more time out of the building.

Teams killed themselves to develop a working prototype

“I code and hack 24h/7”

Doing hardware acceleration is very tricky for a one week pre-accelerator format. I think one of the biggest takeaways is that we should have a bigger focus on “normal” acceleration topics like Business Development, Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas — as we felt that these bread and butter topics still remain core for hardware projects. Instead, teams were pressed to have a working prototype by the end of the week, without having time to do fundamental market validation.

You don’t need tons of 3D printers to prototype…

…Nor soldering stations but you still need some. I would recommend 1 pair of soldering station/ 3D printer per each 10 participants. We had two stations and 3D printers that were busy all the time but, we still managed to do the trick.

“It was a really good networking atmosphere. Very nice and helpful mentors and organizers.”

We were lucky to have the very best speakers and mentors. In Startup Pirates Lisbon, we had a great line-up and every workshop was given by experts to whom we are really thankful. We are super proud of the quality of the working demos. This was only possible because all teams and mentors worked insanely during the 8 days of the program.

Walk the Plank. Watch for the Sharks!

Demoday at Microsoft Portugal

We took some time to write this post so we could understand with one-month distance from the end of the Startup Pirates Lisbon, how many teams were moving ahead with their projects for later acceleration programs, and from the original 10 projects 3 teams are still alive and kicking.

We’re really proud that project Ariane, a connected bike alarm has been selected to showcase they project at Shark Tank Portugal! To be aired before the Summer. Good luck to them!

“Would never have done it without the precious help of all the great people that the Productized team has put together. Thanks… Really!” - Ariane co-founder.

Pirates will be pirates!

Pirates also kill monsters :)

We had very specific issues from having organized the 1st hardware edition, so in a sense we were lab rats, and we knew we would be navigating uncharted waters, and it’s still unclear to understand if there is a market space for a hardware startups accelerator in Portugal. But, we’re already thinking about our next challenge. Stay tuned!