Last year, HWTrek sponsored 30 hardware startups and creators to visit Taiwan and Beijing on the Asia Innovation Tour 2014. We’re doing it again this August. We reached out to Mike Kasparian (CTO and co-founder of Atlas Wearables), a participant in the tour last year, to see what he’s been up to during the past year.
HWTrek: We’d love to catch up with what you’ve been doing since you attended Asia Tour last year. What are you working on?
Mike: We’ve made a lot of progress since the Asia Tour including securing our CM partner, completing tooling development, and 3 pilot runs. We’re now a couple months away from mass production of our first product.
What are some of major lessons you learned along your entrepreneurship journey?
Build your network early on, utilize it, but also give back. Strong relationships, and close friends are key, especially as you grow your company into new territory. Hear lots of people’s stories (especially those similar to what you’re working towards), learn as much as you can, and continue learning as you grow. Remain open to advice, and make informed decisions.
Test, test, and test more. There’s no better way to make a decision than by backing it with data.
What advice would you give someone who might have an idea, but has yet launch a hardware startup?
Especially in emerging hardware startups it is extremely important to design and iterate as much as possible early on in the design and development of the product. The further along you get in development, the harder it is to turn back.
Hardware is hard! Be prepared for a long journey. Prototyping is just one small step to production – it’s a much larger beast to get a hacked together design turned into thousands!
Looking back a year on now, what are your takeaways from participating in the tour last year?
Two of the biggest takeaways were networking with some very smart people in a similar space, and getting to see the technology and manufacturing landscape in China: the largest manufacturers, smaller, more niche suppliers, and everything in-between.
What trend do you see that is changing your sector or what shift would you like to see happen?
Certainly seeing smartwatches slowly take over a lot of the fitness tracking market which we expect to happen over the next 1-3 years. We expect this to continue and in the end see a coexistence of true activity trackers (like the Atlas Wristband) with smart watches due to different design and user experience requirements for the different use cases.
Do you have any recommendations for a must-read/watch/listen article, book, blog, film, or podcast, etc.?
Some of the best stories to learn from are from the recent failed crowdfunding companies. I’d highly recommend anyone interested in getting into this space to read about the stories from Kreyos, and CST-01, and any others that come out.
