There are many fantastic tech incubators in the Vancouver area. They have lots of startups going through their programs, right? Yes ... but. Did you look at those companies? Nearly all of them are SAAS (Software as a Service) companies. SAAS has its own unique challenges. However, they are not the challenges of hardware developers.

Your product has to comply with international standards, such as CE, CSA, DOC, Energy Star, FCC, REACH, RoHS, WiFi, UL, ZigBee Alliance, etc. This is all Greek to the SW people. But you need to know what they are, how they impact your designs, how to design to pass these requirements, and who to take your product to for compliance testing at reasonable prices.

NOTE: Compliance testing is one of those special fields where quotes for the same work can have more than an order-of-magnitude range in costs.

We have experience getting product certifications, and doing it locally, at a modest cost.

And so is your relationship with them.

Hardware companies have many challenges that software companies do not encounter. Take suppliers for example. If a SAAS company uses a cloud provider such as AWS or Google or IBM then that's pretty much it for suppliers, other than coffee and cleaners and PCs. But in the HW world, you need suppliers of components who will reliably supply the parts that you need. Tier-1 distributors (the easy bit), Tier-2 distis (who sometimes deliver cost savings compared to Tier-1), off-shore suppliers too, and those are trickier to qualify. You need contract manufacturers to assemble the circuit boards. You may need plastics people (both mould designers and injection-molded production), sheet-metal fabricators, machinists, painters, anodizers, assembly teams and a shipping department.

You need an RMA process (Returned Merchandise Authorization -- the "ticket" assigned to a device being returned for repair). A parts numbering scheme. A documentation management system. ECN documents and procedures (Engineering Change Notice). Large companies spend man-years of effort on each component of this. Fortunately for you, we come from a design and manufacturing background, and we have all of this available for you.

As a startup, you have the ideas for the product and the market. That's great! That is essential. However, you may not know the secrets to PCB design that minimize the damage from ESD caused by handling boards in the production or R&D process. You might not know about how to use "guard bands" around input pins of an op-amp to eliminate some types of noise for micro-power signals, such as detectors for XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence). You may not know how to lay out traces for high-speed USB ports (or calculate their optimum width). Or know how to route a trace from a passive antennae (such as GPS) to the LNA input on the receiver. Or how to curb noise from the display cable of your LCD so that the product passes FCC. Or what type of crystal to specify for a radio chip.

We know all of those things, because we've had to solve them in real product designs. Decades of product design experience, all available in one place!