You Filed a Patent—Now What? A Baby Product Development Roadmap
A patent protects your idea; it doesn’t build the product. Here’s what to do next to move a baby product from filing to shelf.
Blog
8 Scariest Mistakes Founders Make Building a Product
The most expensive product-development mistakes are the ones founders don’t see coming: spending on protection before proof, tooling before the design is frozen, and six more.
“We Watched Him Stop Crying on the Baby Monitor”: ThumBee Founders Q&A
ThumBee founders Jordan and Nick Ripley on the 20 manufacturers who said no, a silicone mold still on a shelf in Minnesota, and the TikTok video that emptied the house.
What Electronics Product Development Actually Costs
Founders budget electronics programs as a single number and then get surprised five separate times. BOM, NRE, tooling, certification, and landed cost behave differently, break differently, and respond to volume differently. Here’s how each one actually works.
Bringing Good Coffee to Bad Places: Q&A with Search Grounds Founder Miguel Ferrer
Search Grounds founder Miguel Ferrer on 32 years in Fire Rescue, the coffee ritual that built bridges on disaster deployments, and the 72-Hour Cuban Coffee Kit.
“It’s Not Going to Be That Easy to Steal”: A Q&A with Erik Radbill
Buster Brush founder Erik Radbill on the four years before his dog toothbrush existed — the factories that said no, the patent, and why hard to build means hard to steal.
How to Design and Manufacture a Kitchen Appliance
The moment your kitchen product has a cord, it stops being a housewares project and becomes an electrical one. Safety listing, food-contact materials, and sometimes an FCC filing all land on the critical path, and every one is cheaper to plan for than to retrofit.
6 Things to Check Before You Hire a Product Development Agency
We’re on the vendor side of this, so here’s the thing our side doesn’t always volunteer: the most expensive mistake in product development is finding out at the factory that your finished design can’t be built at your price. It’s knowable months earlier.
How to Turn Your Idea Into a Manufactured Product
Every guide to manufacturing an idea hands you the same five steps, and they fail the same way. The steps only make sense once you know which of three paths you’re on, because that choice sets your budget, your timeline, and how you can fail.
Activewear Manufacturing: What It Takes to Get a Performance Line From Fabric to First Run
Activewear is the hardest category in apparel to manufacture well, because the fabric is the product. Here is what performance apparel manufacturing actually involves, from GSM and stretch specs through MOQs, sourcing countries, and the PFAS rules that now govern what your factory can put on a fabric.
How to Vet a Product Manufacturing Partner: The 2026 Due Diligence Sequence
Vetting a manufacturing partner is not a gut call on a sales call. It is seven separate verifications, run in order, and the founders who lose a season almost always skipped stage one. Here is the 2026 process, including the forced-labor and tariff exposure most checklists still ignore.
Shopify Product Description Template: Six Blocks You Can Reuse for Every Product
On Amazon you fill in fields. On Shopify you own a blank box, which is harder. Here is a six-block product description template you can reuse across an entire catalog, plus the SEO and structured-data layer that decides whether anyone finds the page.