Haltian Can Save Your Kickstarter Hardware Disaster

OULU, Finland—Hardware is hard, they say. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are littered with big-ticket consumer hardware failures: the $ane.5-meg Pirate3D printer, the $iii.5-million MyIDKey, and the $3.2-meg Zano drone, for example. Other crowdfunded projects fail, but hardware projects tend to fail large.

Kickstarter recognizes the problem. Over the years, it's tightened its requirements for hardware projects, finally announcing a new "Kickstarter Hardware Studio" last month that will debut in September and help creators actually, successfully make devices.

A 2022 report commissioned by Kickstarter said that about 9 percent of all Kickstarter projects fail. The trouble with consumer hardware, as a 2022 analysis I did pointed out, is that hardware projects are often big-ticket items. Compared to, say, a $20,000 theater operation, more people get burned when a million-dollar printer projection melts down.

The story is frequently the same: Entrepreneur has a great idea, entrepreneur'due south dandy thought gets way too much money, entrepreneur doesn't know how to industry the production to meet the sudden demand. Misery ensues.

Fashion up in the Finnish sub-Arctic, nosotros found another solution. Haltian, an 85-person company mostly made of ex-Nokia engineers, has been quietly churning out Kickstarter and Indiegogo successes, both for itself and others. The QuietOn headphones and OuraRing wearable (pictured below), which fabricated $651,803 on Kickstarter, are two of the nearly notable.

Oura wearable

The visitor, like the city of Oulu itself, is a fleck of a recycled industry. Oulu was a major R&D center for Nokia in its mobile-phone celebrity days, and Haltian's original five-person team was in Nokia'south "emerging projects" department, building tablets and wearables that would never make it to market place. When Nokia complanate in 2022, Haltian's now-CEO Pasi Leipala leveraged his noesis of Nokia'south suppliers to start a contract manufacturer. At present Haltian has an blusterous suite of offices in a bustling technology-incubator building that used to house Nokia offices.

"Lxxx pct of our products are our clients' ideas. We provide design services, and they own the IP," Leipala said. Although Haltian usually gets hired before the crowdfunding starts, it can also step in when Kickstarted companies realize they're in over their heads.

"In most cases, the startups in Kickstarter do not take the understanding [of] what development of a commercial production requires, and without the right partners, try to do as well much. That's one of the key reasons [for the] high percentage of failed projects," Leipala said.

Have Omata, a "mechanical biking estimator" with a Shinola-like retro await; it netted $229,904 on Indiegogo. Though Omata was likewise started by an ex-Nokia coiffure, "They didn't accept a clue how to go far," Leipala said. "Nosotros designed the motors so had Seiko from Nihon manufacture it."

Admission to trusted manufacturing partners is one of Haltian'southward big advantages. The Chinese manufacturing ecosystem is rife with IP theft: Await at the 2022 hoverboard fad to see how quickly i visitor's idea got copied, permuted, and watered down.

Since there are even so electronics factories in Finland—another legacy of Nokia—Haltian tin make prototypes in Republic of finland so take them to factories in Eastern Europe or "Asia" (Leipala's word) that aren't likely to steal customers' intellectual holding.

"Nosotros don't take any products to Red china in the early phase, for ... some reasons," Leipala said.

Some Oulu companies make an even bigger deal near manufacturing in Finland. Bittium, which makes secure smartphones, says that making its phones in Finland helps it avert authorities surveillance in other countries during the manufacturing process.

Haltian'southward projects exercise have a theme. They're elegantly designed, mostly, with rounded edges and simple interfaces. Remember Nokia'southward physical designs in the era of the Nokia N9—the simple, bold shapes made of colorful polycarbonate? Well, the heritage shows.

At present, the company is moving into "camera and imaging products," according to Leipala, and is even developing a video game for a customer. "In that location'due south a good demand for a highly skilled, specialized engineering team," he said.