147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scale-Up

With Morgan Teachworth, VP of Engineering at Cisco Meraki

Hosted by Kevin Mako of MAKO Design + Invent

Morgan Teachworth was the Head of Hardware at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion dollars, and is now Cisco’s VP of Engineering & Supply Chain. 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 and developing products to sell as a growing scale-up brand, as well as 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, 
• How do the stakeholders
• 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 in all other stakeholders, this should be considered, too.
• Your values have to be pushed through your supply chain
• 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 LINKS

• Website: https://meraki.cisco.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mteachw/

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

• Website: https://www.ProductStartup.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ProductStartup/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ProductStartup/
• Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ProductStartup/
• Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProductStartup/
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ProductStartup/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProductStartup
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MakoInvent

Mako Design Links:

• Website: https://www.makodesign.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MakoInvent
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MakoInvent/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/MakoDesign/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MakoInvent/
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/MakoInvent/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MakoInvent/

Kevin Mako Links:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Entrepreneurs/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/KevMako/
• Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Kevin-Mako
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KevMakoPage/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevMako/

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time.