Unsearchable Insights #6
Staying ahead of the tech curve, marketing consumer electronics and offshoring
Hello Unsearch!
It’s Friday and welcome to another issue of Unsearchable Insights!
Ever wonder how the best engineering leaders stay ahead of the tech curve? Interested in hearing first-hand insights about how to market consumer electronics? Finally, offshoring can have massive cost advantages. Should you do it?
We cover these and more in this issue.
Help us with a quick poll?
Before we jump into the Featured Q&As, the team and I were hoping to get your help on one move that we’re considering. Several people have mentioned that they would love to use Unsearch to expand their professional networks. A few of our answerers have also offered to do follow-up calls with askers in the past.
One way could be to provide answerers with the option to connect with the asker after each successful Q&A. But before we design the mechanics, this poll would help us first understand if this is something that people even want. Thanks in advance!
Featured Q&As
As a senior most engineer in a start up , how do you make sure you keep learning outside the job and be on top of the latest development in tech so you can help your team better?
- Lead Engineer, HR Tech
Ethan Langevin, an experienced senior engineering manager has this to share,
The best way I’ve found to stay ahead of the curve is to make it a point to talk to other engineers of similar experience about problems they’re working on and how they solved it. Reviewing blog posts helps too. Conferences are useful if the specific tech you’re using is deeply embedded and unlikely to be replaced.
It’s worth noting that your greatest value add as a team lead is to share your experience accumulated over a longer career to avoid mistakes
Having the best system design in the world usually won't make the company successful, but having important components that are poorly designed can kill your ability to use the technology to create leverage and thus doom the company or at least cap what the company can accomplish
Finally, it’s important to remember that the latest tech isn’t always a good idea depending on the problem that you are working on.
How to sell a consumer electronics product to a global market? What are some tips to effectively engage a global audience?
- Founder of a Smart Blender company outside of the US
Evan Foo, the former co-founder and CEO of Archt Audio shares his learnings,
Before going global, you should first focus on the local market. Use it to understand your core customers, their feature preferences, and all the ins and outs of manufacturing, distribution, retail
When you are ready for global expansion, I would start in the US. Find the right wedge into the market (first, best etc.) to be interesting to media and retailers. Retailers control the game in the US. you’ll find more success starting out with more niche retailers (e.g., targeting health fanatics) over big box/generic stores
Use these smaller retailers to get your 5-star reviews, build following and sales traction. For higher-end products, price is typically not the issue. Product quality, ease of use, packaging and unboxing experience need to be A+.
Try to figure out the price point fast as it will dictate margins. Expect initial volumes to be low, and retailers to ask for big margins (40-60% of price)
We do a lot of manual data extraction and processing. What are some things we should be cognizant of when it comes to
1) gauging the feasibility of offshoring for our business and
2) evaluating locations to offshore to?
- Product Ops, Health Tech, Series B
This question came in a few weeks back from a former colleague. Recently, I have also noticed an uptick in the number of questions I have gotten about offshoring, particularly as companies are coming under more cost pressures. As someone that lived in India to set-up an offshore operations team, here’s my response,
Offshoring can be a major driver of labor cost savings (sometimes 3-4X cheaper)
One of the most common business challenges with offshoring is coordination. In evaluating whether work can be offshored, I would ask
how discrete are the pieces of work?
how stable are your operational workflows?
People sometimes think offshoring can be accomplished quickly, but in reality it often takes significant upfront investment of time and effort to get it working well
In figuring out offshoring locations, consider time zones, information security, language and availability of talent.
p.s., if anyone is keen on the operational logistics of actually setting up an offshore team, feel free to reach out directly, or submit another question through Unsearch
Product Updates
In the coming weeks, we will be piloting Unsearch for Communities with a few professional slack communities. It is basically a free white-label knowledge management and people directory tool based on the core tech that powers the Unsearch platform
Our goal is to facilitate knowledge sharing between these communities and broadly across the Unsearch Network. If you know of any professional Slack communities that could use the above features, please introduce them to us!
Separately, we will be introducing some long overdue sharing and social features to the core experience, so watch this space.
Worth checking out
How liquid is your network? David Zhou talks about the power dynamics behind making introductions and what drives successful connections
Ever wanted to just dump a video / audio recording of a meeting and get a detailed summary and to-dos? Check out storytell.ai. We were blown away!