This article “Your Favorite Start-up Might Not Have Made That Thing It’s Selling Meet Doris Dev” highlights that many startup companies rely on a single source for their hardware design and production: a company named Doris Dev.
Doris Dev is “an agency that handles product design, engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, and even fulfillment from its offices in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and Hong Kong.” – “a team of product development experts who can lead any project from idea to market, including design, engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, testing, distribution and beyond” according to their website.
This can easily be understood taking into account the amount of design and production knowledge that is needed to produce hardware. Start-ups then focus on defining the product, brand and marketing. I find that it is a clever positioning for the Doris Dev company. “Doris Dev clears a path for founders, taking on the managerial load of product development (a huge plus for the many first-time entrepreneurs with minimal experience managing a team) and enabling more types of entrepreneurs and more types of products to go to market“.
The start-up ecosystem has thus evolved to enable outsourcing of hardware production. Still I can see some drawbacks in this approach, because the product may fail to deliver and it can certainly be cheaper to own its own supply chain in the longer term. At some stage the start-up companies will have to become more industrial. Still, actual value chains never stop astonishing us!
