Meraki
Assemble it yourself
The Meraki framework involves doing things that don't scale, such as assembling products yourself, to get started and learn from the process. This approach can be beneficial for hardware startups that face obstacles such as high minimum order quantities for factory production runs. By assembling products themselves, startups can tweak the design faster, learn from the process, and eventually automate the bottlenecks.
- Do things that don't scale to get started
- Assemble products yourself to learn and improve
- Automate bottlenecks as you grow
- Assemble products yourselfStart by assembling products yourself to learn from the process and improve the design. This will help you to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.Pro tipUse this approach to learn from your customers and improve the productWarningThis approach can be time-consuming and labor-intensive
- Tweak the designUse the knowledge gained from assembling products yourself to tweak the design and improve the product. This will help you to create a better product that meets the needs of your customers.Pro tipUse customer feedback to improve the designWarningBe careful not to over-engineer the product
- Automate bottlenecksAs you grow, automate the bottlenecks to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This will help you to scale the business and improve profitability.Pro tipUse automation to improve efficiency and reduce costsWarningBe careful not to automate too much, as this can lead to a loss of control
Pebble assembled the first several hundred watches themselves, which helped them to learn from the process and improve the design. This approach enabled them to create a successful product and scale the business.
The Meraki framework is named after the company Meraki, which got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. The founders of Meraki were Robert Morris's grad students, and their approach has been adopted by other successful startups such as Pebble.