Know the cost per unit and the real market before the first prototype run.
Hardware is where a wrong guess costs the most. We size the market, price the bill of materials, cost the field work and write the brief, so the first money goes into the right version of the idea.
Three situations that keep coming up
Hardware concepts arrive with a big addressable market and a sketch. The gap between those two is where the feasibility work lives.
The market number has no footnote
A $40B addressable market sounds good in a deck. It only means something once it's footnoted, segmented and reduced to the customers who'd buy this version at this price.
The unit cost is unknown
Nobody has priced the bill of materials (the parts list with a cost per part). Without it, there's no unit economics, no pricing and no way to tell if the idea works at volume.
The use case is the wrong one
The problem the founder started with isn't always the one the hardware is good at. GridSentinel began as theft detection and ended up as outage detection after the feasibility work.
The services that fit
For hardware the sequence is short: feasibility first, because it decides whether there's a brief to write, then the brief itself so a hardware partner can quote it.
Feasibility research
Addressable market with footnotes, a costed bill of materials, the price of the field work needed to validate, and a build, wait or no call. PavIQ and GridSentinel both ran this way.
Build brief
The scoped version of the concept as requirements a hardware partner or engineer can quote: what it must do, what it can skip, and how you'll know it works.
PavIQ: a hardware concept costed before the build
PavIQ's feasibility work produced a CAD $580 bill of materials, a $40B addressable market (footnoted in the case study) and a 20-week plan. The survey runs needed to validate it cost $26K to $105K, and that figure shaped the feasibility call.
Read the PavIQ case study →GridSentinel: re-scoped by the feasibility work
GridSentinel is a grid sensor concept at about CAD $95 per node. It started as theft detection. Feasibility research showed outage detection was the version worth building, and the concept was re-scoped before any hardware was ordered.
Read the GridSentinel case study →Hardware concepts, before you book
Do you design the hardware?
No. We do the research and the brief: market, bill of materials, field costs and the scoped requirements. The electrical and mechanical design goes to a hardware partner, who can quote from the brief.
How do you get a bill of materials without a prototype?
From the concept and public component pricing. PavIQ's came to CAD $580 and GridSentinel's to about CAD $95 per node. They're estimates with assumptions listed, and they're enough to test whether the unit economics work.
What's a survey run and why does it cost so much?
For PavIQ it meant putting the sensor on real roads to collect data. The runs were costed at $26K to $105K depending on scope, and that number changed the feasibility call. Knowing it before fundraising is the point.
What if feasibility says the idea should change?
That's the useful outcome. GridSentinel was re-scoped from theft detection to outage detection after the research. The recommendation says what to build instead, with the reasons, so the pivot is a decision rather than a retreat.
Work in the other verticals
Hardware concepts often end up in a local business or feed a marketplace. Here's what we do in those.
Bring the sketch and the market number. Thirty minutes, and you'll know whether feasibility research is the next step and what it would cover.