147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scaleup

Morgan Teachworth was the head of Hardware at Meraki, a company that was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion dollars, and is now the VP of Engineering & Supply Chain there. He has been involved in the development of hundreds of physical mass-manufactured products leading to approximately 16 million units of his products being sold around the world in his 15-year tenure with the organization. Today Morgan is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand the difference between developing a product to sell as a startup to then developing products to sell as a growing scale-up brand, and what you can do to best strategize for this kind of explosive hardware company growth in the product space.Today you will hear us talk about:
How the customer changes as you scale your hardware product business
Your customers become your salesforce in the very early stages
Your next tier of customers are the wholesalers, distributors, resellers, etc.
What are some new stakeholders
Think about the factory, the installers, the resellers, 
Micro stakeholders and macro stakeholders
You can tune the product design, the packaging, the product experience, the manufacturing, all around multiple stakeholders
Simplicity is an important part of design considerations, but also in all other stakeholders this should be considered too.
Keep your product simple, it’s actually easier to do as a small physical product business than it is as you grow, so start now.
As you grow, you become the big incumbent now that other small innovators are trying to take on.
Cross-functional initiatives help as you scale.
EPISODE LINKSMorgan Teachworth Links:

Website: https://meraki.cisco.com/


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mteachw/

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