Ronald Wijnsema had never been to China when he pre-sold $64,000 worth of his product Button+, a modular smart wall switch for home automation. He'd never manufactured anything.
Today he's shipping from stock, has sold out multiple times, and just fulfilled every V2 pre-order.
I want to tell you how he pulled it off.
Ronald was one of the first members of the Hardware Academy. He's been getting guidance at every stage of his product journey since.
Along the way, he connected with Renaud Anjoran, one of the Academy's manufacturing experts. Ronald's first trip to China was a month working out of Renaud's facility, learning manufacturing from the ground up.
Renaud doesn't normally take on someone's first product. But Ronald had $64,000 in pre-sales and a strong review from a major tech publication, so Renaud made an exception.
That's what real product validation can do for you.
About a year into production, Ronald kept getting customer complaints that the plastic parts had some manufacturing defects.
So he flew to Shenzhen again to visit the mold factory, a separate supplier Ronald had chosen on his own.
Agilian, Renaud's company, also sent an injection molding expert there to investigate on-site.
What they found was bad. The factory had used prototype-grade steel, rated for only 1,000 to 10,000 shots, on molds that were supposed to handle 100,000.
Ronald would never have caught that on his own. Most people wouldn't.
The mold failure forced new tooling, and Ronald turned the setback into a full V2 redesign: glass fronts replacing polycarbonate, redesigned locking mechanism, and an upgraded ESP32-S3. He came back with a better product, not just a replacement.
Ronald funded much of the operation through pre-sales and customer revenue. He drop-shipped directly from the factory to avoid tying up cash in a warehouse, then added EU warehousing only after volume justified it.
When the V2 delays slowed pre-sales to a trickle, he believed in it enough to put his own money behind it rather than taking on investors or bank loans.
That's not the same as risking his savings on an unproven idea. The pre-sales and validation came first, so putting his own money in was a calculated investment, not a gamble.
Ronald's now expanding the product line on his own, including a Power-over-Ethernet add-on he prototyped himself, and exploring new sales channels.
In his words: "I'm over the moon by this, but it did not come easy. I spent more than 4 years developing this, of course with the help of John Teel and others in the Hardware Academy."
Inside the Academy you get guidance from engineers and product experts who've been through this before. Ronald's story is what that looks like when it works.
So if you're working on your own product, you can get started inside the Hardware Academy.
Join the Hardware Academy
Cheers,
John Teel
Founder / Engineer
Predictable Designs
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