Product Development For Hire.

It starts with a conversation. We’ll quickly determine if we’re a good fit for your business and your product. If we’re not, we’ll let you know, and try to make a referral to a better fit. If we are, we’ll get an engagement agreement in place and schedule a start date for working on your first project.

SGW projects typically range from $15k to $2MM in development and prototyping costs.

The cost to develop a product is driven by many factors:

1. Product complexity
2. How much cost-optimization is required
3. Regulatory requirements
4. Level of design refinement desired

Yes. Over half of our clients have internal engineering or R&D teams. These businesses hire us for a few different reasons:

1. Their internal teams are already overburdened with the day-to-day sustaining engineering required for existing product lines.
2. They’re lacking the specific skills and expertise required for product development (as opposed to sustaining engineering or primary R&D).
3. Projects are behind schedule, and a fresh approach or perspective is needed to get things moving again.

The companies that have been most successful working with us have realistic budget and timing expectations, know their market space well, have access to users, and are willing to question their own assumptions about how people buy and use their products.

Developing products from scratch requires an understanding of how intellectual property is developed to create something novel enough to be compelling in the marketplace. It is through build-learn-build that innovation makes it to market. The more you do it, the more unique and valuable your solution will be. This can look unattractive to someone just wanting to know "what it will cost". Assume it will cost 3 times more than you think.

For these reasons SGW is typically not a good fit for:

1. Speculative startup ideas that are not ready to get started. Honestly, this goes for any firm. You don't want to engage a firm too early. Reach out when you are ready to move forward and have a budget.
2. Limited-funding, "Start and stop" projects. Getting going and then stopping can be very costly. Pausing and restarting means continually needing "to get up to speed" or having to communicate updates when not much is happening. The more dedicated you, are the more productive you are. It's best to get your ducks in a row and then move fast. That's the best way to create momentum, stay excited and save money in the long run.
3. Self-funded, DIY Inventors. Self-funding adds a complex emotional layer that can stifle innovation. Innovation means taking risks. Those risks are the path to success but often they are mistaken for failure. Likewise, DIY inventors have an emotional connection that is hard to let go of, they are only used to spending money on materials and not an expert's time. Without a high level of respect and trust for those whom you are hiring, you can end up being disgruntled by the cost to get someone up to speed on all that you have tried and learned to this point.

We can be your team or we can extend your team.

We need to fully understand your business goals and your constraints so that we can make development decisions that will work for you long term. We’ll be talking a lot about:

1. Cost targets
2. Target users
3. Feature tradeoffs

All of these factors impact not just the product, but also your business more broadly.

You can expect regular collaboration with our team (e.g. weekly progress reviews).

You can expect us to learn unexpected things along the way (e.g. that a feature needs to be excluded, or that a different material is better suited to a certain part). Many of the products we work on pivot from the original vision in some way during development based on findings from prototype testing.