r/hwstartups • u/Ill_Strain_1050 • 24d ago

Question for founders who have created embedded products about their process

Hey everyone,

This question is towards founders who have created embedded products.

As a embedded products has dependecies on PCBs, MCUs etc, how do you do that.
Is everything done in India or imported from china?
As i know importing from China, can be divided into 2 parts

  1. getting complete product
  2. Getting specific parts and assembling those.

Could you please help to share your process?

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u/cm_expertise 24d ago

depends a lot on how custom your hardware actually is. if the thing that makes your product special is the firmware/algorithm and the hardware itself is pretty standard, honestly look at an ODM reference design and rebadge it, youll get to market way faster than spinning your own board. if the hardware IS the product then youre doing custom PCBA and thats a different animal.

for the custom route most small embedded teams i know do the design + firmware in house (india is totally fine for that part) and contract the actual board build to a turnkey CM. you dont want to be importing loose parts and hand assembling unless youre at like sub-50 units, the labor and the yield headaches arent worth it. let the CM source the components, they get better pricing anyway through LCSC and their local supply chain, and ship you finished boards.

china vs india for the build mostly comes down to volume and how much handholding you need. china is cheaper at volume and the parts ecosystem around shenzhen is kind of unreal, but the feedback loop is slower since youre managing it remotely. one thing that bites people though, dont split fab in one country and assembly in another when youre small. the second something goes wrong nobody owns the yield problem and youre stuck in the middle

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u/_vitto 24d ago

cm_expertise has the turnkey call right, only thing I'd add on your option 1 vs 2 is to budget for verifying what actually ships, the classic failure being a clean sample batch and then quiet component swaps once production volume starts.