The Contours of a Happy IoT Startup — a book by Yuichiro Kuzuryu
幸せなIoTスタートアップの輪郭 (The Contours of a Happy IoT Startup)
Yuichiro Kuzuryu / Gentosha Media Consulting / May 2022 / 286 pages / Japanese
ISBN 978-4-344-93741-3 (paperback and Kindle)
What the book is about
This book collects the questions I have been asked by people who started, or were about to start, IoT and hardware companies, along with my answers.
Hardware startups face a stream of decisions that are hard to undo: prototypes, mass production, certification, inventory, quality assurance. I wrote down what I and the people around me stumbled over, and what we learned from failures, across mass production at Yamaha, joining a Silicon Valley startup as its first employee, and building DFree from zero as its founding CTO.
Each question can be read on its own, but read from start to finish, the book is meant to give you a structured way of thinking about building a hardware company.
Who it is for
- Founders and early members of IoT and hardware startups
- Researchers and engineers planning to start a company
- People leading new businesses or new hardware products inside large companies
- Investors, corporate partners and support organizations working with startups
Contents
Chapter 1: Understanding the basics of startups
Do you need an unusual idea to start a company? Is "speed is everything"
really true? Should you found alone or with co-founders? Start from
technology or from the market? Do personas matter?
Chapter 2: Understanding the common struggles of running a startup
The pain of being small, the problems that come with growth, hiring, and
adjusting team culture.
Chapter 3: Understanding the typical pitfalls of IoT product development
Requirement specs, prototypes, PoCs, quality assurance, customer service,
manufacturing, patents and regulation.
Chapter 4: Going one level deeper
Harder questions drawn from things that actually happened to me and to
founders around me, and from painful mistakes.
Related articles (English translations)
- Yes, Start a Company Even With Just an Idea
- Startup Speed Is Not A Virtue But A Survival Necessity
- Solo founders and co-founders each face their own hidden risks
- China's wireless certification really does cost more time and money
About the author
Yuichiro Kuzuryu is an advisor to IoT and hardware startups. He is CEO of Clay Tech, a board director at Switch Science, and a specially appointed (visiting) professor at Tohoku University. After developing mass-produced products at Yamaha, he joined the Silicon Valley startup Miselu as its first employee, and later served as the founding CTO of DFree (formerly Triple W Japan). He has been involved in zero-to-one work at several startups that together raised more than ¥3 billion.