Almost everyone who gives you advice on your product gets paid more when you buy more of what they sell.

Most of them are honest, but their goals aren't quite the same as yours, and on a first product you usually can't tell the difference.

Ask any patent attorney whether you should file a patent, and the answer will almost always be yes. They don't make any money by telling you no.

An engineer who bills by the hour gets paid for every hour, so every feature you add is more work for them. Nobody in that arrangement is paid to tell you to build less.

Too many founders already want to keep adding features until the product is perfect.

Pair that founder with an engineer who gets paid for every feature, and the project often gets lost in development and never reaches the market.

Invention firms are the worst case, because their whole business is telling you what you want to hear so you'll keep paying.

Even test labs have this problem, since they get paid for every test they run.

One of my members was about to start selling a battery-powered product, and two different labs told him he needed a full UL safety listing on the whole device.

As he put it, "The UL listing is very expensive."

So we looked at his product and what it needed to be sold legally, and our conclusion was that a UL listing on the whole device wasn't necessary.

We also pointed out two requirements that neither lab had mentioned.

A third lab later agreed he might not need it, and he wrote back, "You may have saved us a huge upfront cost that wasn't necessary with the UL listing."

Free advice has a different problem.

A stranger on a forum gains nothing by helping you, but he also loses nothing if he's wrong, and you're the one who pays for the next set of boards.

So before you act on any advice, ask two questions. What does this person gain if I say yes, and what do they lose if they're wrong?

You should ask the same about me, because I have something to sell you too, which is a membership in my Hardware Academy.

I get paid when you stay a member, and you only stay if the advice moves your product forward. If our engineers steer you wrong, I lose you as a member, along with the reputation I've spent years building.

That's also what separates it from a free forum. You'll get feedback from other members too, but the core advice comes from experts I've vetted and pay to be there.

Nobody inside bills you by the hour, and I don't push members toward hiring anyone, so nobody earns more when your product gets more complicated.

So when one of our engineers tells you to cut a feature, or that you don't need a certification, they have nothing to gain either way.

You have a few ways to handle this. You can check every piece of advice yourself by asking what the person gains if you say yes and what they lose if they're wrong.

That works as long as you know enough to recognize a self-serving answer.

You can also pay a second expert to check the first one, as long as your budget allows it.

Or you can bring it inside the Academy, where engineers and product experts look at your actual design and tell you what they would do in your place.

Talk soon,

John Teel
Founder / Lead Engineer
Predictable Designs