Ryan and Ben welcome Alex Malcoci, CEO and founder of MiniProto, to talk innovations in hardware prototyping, the evolving complexities of the global supply chain, the impact of the US-China trade war on manufacturing, and how automation in production could lead to new training programs for future engineers.
Ryan and Ben welcome Alex Malcoci, CEO and founder of MiniProto, to talk innovations in hardware prototyping, the evolving complexities of the global supply chain, the impact of the US-China trade war on manufacturing, and how automation in production could lead to new training programs for future engineers.
Episode notes:
MiniProto is a US-based prototyping manufacturer revolutionizing the way we develop and interact with hardware.
Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.
Shoutout to an Unsung Hero of Stack Overflow, Hamed Jimoh, who deserves upvotes for their more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score.
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Ryan Donovan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Stack Overflow podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am Ryan Donovan and today I'm joined by my co-host Ben Popper. Hey Ben. So you brought us today's guest. You wanna kick us off and tell us what he's about?
Ben Popper: It's fun for me 'cause it's a little local flavor. I went to a Hudson Valley startup event near where I live, a couple hours north of New York City and a gentleman there, Alex, was presenting from a company called MiniProto. And he was talking about the way people typically think about the supply chain, you know, you need to get different components. You're gonna create a new milkshake machine, you're gonna build a toaster, you're gonna build a drone, and that there were kind of two alternatives: you can go to the supply chain in China, which is very well known. Maybe you get something cheap, it takes a little bit of time to ship, but the quality and the ability to interface with the person who's building is a little bit more difficult. Or you could go to a more old line manufacturer here in the United States, but then the cost and the timeframe to get it are much, much higher. The company that he founded MiniProto is trying to say like, what if we did something in between? You come to our website, you're able to pretty easily customize stuff in a way that's intuitive and the cost, you know, well, maybe a little bit more than what you would spend in China, is less than what you spend in the United States. The timeframe to get it is less than what you'd get in the US and the ability to, you know, have that kind of control maybe overall provides you with value. And I thought that was really cool at the time. And then we entered a global trade war. Who knew? We heard it was coming. So it's super relevant. I got the chance to hang out with him and talk about, yeah, just the massive influx of sort of new demand this has created obviously. People look to figure out how to resource stuff and avoid tariffs that are prohibitively expensive for startups that are creating, you know, like hardware. I saw a tweet earlier today from a company that makes cool light bulbs and little home cameras and stuff. And they were sort of saying like, we just got our shipment we made before things kicked off. The tariff price is more than any of our founders earned all of last year. It's like more money than we would pay, like the senior leadership of the company for a single shipment. So not sure what we're gonna do next. So yeah, I thought it'd be great to bring on and chat a little bit about the hardware side, the customization side, and how this all fits into global trade -
Alex Macoci: Thank you. Happy to be here.
RD: Top of the show, we like to get to know our guests, how you got into software and technology. How did you get into prototyping hardware?
AM: I got into tech, honestly, first robotics in high school, competitive robotics throughout college. I really enjoyed that. And I've always been on the interdisciplinary space of things. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I've always dabbled in electronics. I've always been envious of the software guys. I wanted to blend a bit of everything, so I've been learning and I just enjoy hardware. I enjoy actually feeling and touching the thing that you're making.
BP: What are some of the companies that you worked at before you created your own startup?
AM: I started my career at SpaceX, that didn't go so hot, it wasn’t my jam. Moved to a more traditional aerospace company down in Long Island. Worked on a lot of cool projects, but it was just a bit old. Joined a startup over in the Hudson Valley doing prosthetics. Learned a lot about 3D printing on the bleeding edge of things there. And then I actually worked for a contract software development company out of India, just seeing how to build things rapidly and cheaply.
RD: The hardware prototyping locally is interesting. A friend of mine created a coffee robot and he flew to China to sort of get the prototyping. Why start up the hardware prototyping business?
AM: So, as I said, I've always been envious of the software guys, right? So the software developers always can deploy their code, test it instantly. And as a hardware developer, you design something in CAD, traditionally you're waiting weeks. You have to make drawings, you have to write instructions, you have to wait on machinists, you have to wait on finishing. You have to wait on everything. It takes weeks and weeks and weeks to see anything and to iterate on it. I've been seeing kind of advancement there. 3D printing comes to mind. It's getting better and better over time, and that's kind of shortening that iteration cycle for us. Gone from months to days in some cases, but not always. And on the electrical side, which most products nowadays integrate mechanical and electrical, otherwise it would be a pretty boring product, those have been getting faster and faster with companies allowing for better access to the factories overseas, and in the US for people that are not exactly in the space, that don't talk the talk. And I wanted to create something like that for a wider degree of things in that hardware space. So there's a lot of peripherals to those things that are faster iterating now that haven't been tackled, and that's where I want MiniProto to fill in the gap.
BP: Can you zone in really quickly? Like what is MiniProto’s focus at the moment? I know there was just like a few sort of specific components you mentioned during the talk. You're like, these are in pretty much everything, this is where we're at now. And then obviously, you know, you mentioned before that there's like a wider universe of stuff that you might explore that people have been exploring how to customize.
AM: So our entry point was, and honestly this might end up being our whole business, the way it's going, but our entry point was wire harnesses. It was a very fancy way of saying cables. Cable/wires are in absolutely everything. They connect your sensors, they connect your CPUs, they connect everything, right. Those are tied to the PCBs that I've, as I've said, are getting faster to iterate and the mechanical enclosures around 'em are getting faster to iterate. But most designers find themselves waiting on the damn cables to come in. They don't have a way to speed that up.
RD: So, like I said with my friend, a lot of hardware prototyping, a lot of hardware stuff goes through China. Obviously with the tariffs, people are scrambling for alternatives. Has that affected things with your hardware business or has that changed things, how you think about it?
AM: So for us, we founded before this trade war started to happen and it was already making sense. The projections already had us making sense as things were, right. With the trade war, it came at an interesting time. We actually had the Chinese New Year demand right before this, and then we were like, okay, this is a busy season, a trade war kicked off and it just like grew three to four X right now. So we're definitely having to fill in the gap. We have people asking us to do ridiculous things that we're just not ready for right now. And it's just hard to hold on.
BP: I'm gonna try not to get too deep into the politics of it, but you know, there's an argument back and forth about what has globalization done to manufacturing in the United States. Is there a way to restart manufacturing in the United States? And you know, how should we look to realign ourselves with China, which is a manufacturing superpower. It's super interesting to me because like you said, you are now getting three, four x the demand and people are coming to you with orders that you simply can't fulfill. That implies that maybe we could create a resurgent, you know, sort of manufacturing here. The issue is that we can't do it overnight. And in the interim, the tariffs for, you know, the people who you're unable to help for various reasons, are crushing for small businesses or even medium sized businesses. You know, people who can't get concessions and can't pass the cost onto consumers. So I think that's the unfortunate part is there is a logic here of saying like, look, there's lots of talented students. I know you mentioned coming out of SUNY schools in New York that you're trying to recruit or BOCES out of high school who might wanna do mechanical/electrical engineering, but to spin up a factory, to spin it up at scale, you know, it takes years.
AM: And even before this, for us to be competitive, we had to be five, six times more productive than overseas labor. So it's really that training has to be there. The people that we hired need honestly a year or two of training just to be able to do the basic things. This is not an existing skillset in the country, right. Who's assembling basic cheap wires here? Yeah, there's high-end stuff. There's aerospace, there's med tech, but those, that's totally different. So we're really having to create training programs from the ground and get everything running it. It just takes time. We thought we had more time.
RD: The curse of popularity, right? You know, you said it might be your whole business dealing with the cabling, the wire harnesses and that. What are the sort of things that have come in since the global trade war? What's the new stuff that people are asking you to do?
AM: It's just the quantities have been going up. So usually we fit in the gap of prototyping, right? We're doing the first 10, 50, a hundred units. And then generally we say, look, go to China. You're gonna get a better price. It's fine. That's not our market. We don't want to do that. And now they're coming in and saying, we want a hundred, we want 250, we want 500, we want a thousand. Can you be our supply chain? Uh, maybe! And you know, they're trying to squeeze us on price 'cause they're used to China prices and it's a tough negotiation.
BP: I know at the event you mentioned milkshakes as an example, but can you just talk through like what are some of the things that the wiring you're creating, are they going into barbecues, milkshakes, prototypes for new startups? Like what is the typical end product of the wiring you create?
AM: So I think the really interesting cycle right now is with industrial automation. So companies like MiniProto have to automate our production line to be able to keep up with demand. It's a nice cycle that's growing very fast. So with the tariffs, everybody is trying to automate. Everybody's growing their assembly lines and our wires need to go in there. They need wires, right? For all of the industrial automation work, for all the robotic arms that are getting deployed, for all the conveyor belts, for all the sensors. They're usually very custom and very low quantity, which is exactly what we service. So that's proving to be a big, big sector. Alongside that is drones and robotics. Mobile robotics kind of fills a similar space. We're increasing productivity of labor. We're automating. Those two fields alone are probably 70 - 80% of our business at this point.
BP: Gotcha. So the picks and shovels for automating the future of smart manufacturing.
RD: You're selling shovels for the automated revolution, do you think some of the AI advances will increase demand? That's a big automation tool, right?
AM: To me, AI just makes a lot more automatable in manufacturing. So things that would normally need a person because of weird shapes, because it's novel, are now getting easier. You have robotic arms with awesome cameras, with machine learning, with AI on them that are recognizing and figuring stuff out that they were not able to 10 years ago.
BP: You mentioned it takes like one to two years to sort of get somebody up to speed. Can you talk to us a little bit about the skillset that somebody comes with out of high school or out of college on the sort of mechanical and electrical engineering side and you know, what it is that they get when they start working with you that puts them in a position to really be, you know, productive at the company?
AM: I mean, we start them from basics and I mean basics, right? Unfortunately, the US does not really emphasize math and science skills as heavily as they should, and they don't show applications well enough in most programs. So we're having trouble just, you know, day one is units. Day one is how do millimeters work? How do centimeters work? How do you convert between inches and millimeters? Then we move to tolerances. It's just, here's the real world, right? Here's the actual application, and we have to go all the way to interpreting schematics, interpreting drawings, understanding motivation for different things, understanding components, and being able to interface with computers. It's just really, we have to start from zero.
RD: It's interesting, and I know the MEKI programs are precision guided. I remember a friend in a MEKI program at university just walking around with a block of metal polishing it to a certain micron. That is a level of detail that I don't think any other discipline has to worry about.
AM: That's what we've been training for. We've been training for CNC, we've been training for high tech. We've been training for aerospace tolerances that have to be that crazy, crazy level. And you know, we don't need that in wires, you know, plus, minus and inches. Great. That skillset isn't there. The mental math isn't there because you're training them to rely on computers and you don't need that.
BP: Yeah. I remember you and I were hanging out at the [inaudible] space the other day. You're just giving me, you know, a little tour and one of your workers came in and sort of said like, ‘I'm having a little problem with the knifing here. It's not exactly, should I reset it?’ And you were like, just do that by hand. Like, I'll show you, later we'll figure out how to automate it. But like for those 10, just do it by hand -
AM: Just tweak it -
RD: Yeah, the artisanal hardware. Yeah, I was gonna follow up on that. We're automating so many things in the manufacturing process, and then you say to this person, like, I'll just do that one by hand. It's easier by hand. Are there a lot of cases where it's sort of like, oh, this is actually easier by hand -
AM: Especially at the low quantities. The machine setup, the fine tuning on the machine to get it just right. It's not worth it. If I'm making five of something, I can usually knock it out by hand a lot faster.
RD: The machine is for mass production, right?
AM: Yes. So often we have to teach the manual skillset and we have to teach the automated skillset, and that's always a little tricky.
RD: Is there a pathway for that that's repeatable? Can somebody automate the regrowth of these small cities that used to have a factory through your model?
AM: Can they automate it?
RD: [Laughter] Yeah. Or repeat it -
AM: Maybe. Like, I don't wanna hype myself up, but it takes a lot of skill to get these types of companies off the ground. Right. But you can't take these existing companies that have their 1950s / 1960s approach and slap an instant quoting tool onto them. Really need to build the infrastructure up from the ground with automation first. That really takes talented engineers. It takes interdisciplinary people, software engineers that understand the manufacturing or vice versa. That's a rare scale still.
BP: Can you break down for me, I know you mentioned that idea that your employees have to be 5-6x as productive in order for to be competitive to China, and you showed a chart at the demonstration that was kind of like, look, here's real wages for the US, for China, you know, converging. Especially if you take into account productivity, like they've already crossed over. So what is that calculation exactly?
AM: So if we take the kind of rising wages in China, which they've been accelerating like crazy, and we take productivity comparison between the US and China, all of this is a bit hand-wavy in the end. The average US worker is maybe five times more productive than the average Chinese. If we take that average Chinese labor cost, multiply productivity, well they're already more expensive just on virtue of the US being more productive.
RD: It's interesting, I know China has sort of traditionally had this 9-9-6 working style and it's shown some companies who don't use that can be more innovative, like I think DeepSeek had a different way of working. I've also heard of Chinese companies with a footprint of US just losing workers left and right. Do you think that productivity gain is sort of tied to that working less?
AM: Burnout is a thing. Burnout happens quickly, and you know when you're working with precision, when you're working with an annoying little parts, that frustration, that burnout gets amplified. Productivity just suffers for us on the assembly line, when we're working on those tough little things and we find ourselves getting emotionally attached, we take a break. That's often the best way to do it. We don't power through it. We don't add more hours. We walk away for 10 minutes and come back. That does the trick.
BP: Can you talk to us a little bit about the software side of it? I know you mentioned that you felt like that was a competitive advantage, that if you outsourced it to China, there was often a little bit of risk of not getting exactly what you wanted or not having full control over, you know, the product or the uncertainty of what would arrive. If you did it in the US again, you're working with some old line companies where you might get great quality, but they're a little bit limited in terms of their ability to customize and that you had a schematic.
AM: Yeah, so we have a configuration tool where people can go in and draw their wire harness. They can put in connectors on one end. We have full DigiKey integration, so they can pull in any part from DigiKey, which is one of the largest electronic supplier in the world, if not the largest. They can connect it however they want. They can set colors, they can set wire gauges, whatever they need. And that just gets forwarded into our automated system and makes it really easy for us to manufacture. That's compared to the traditional process where they would have to make a mechanical drawing, a technical drawing, which most electrical engineers don't do. You need to rope in a mechi or a drafter if those still exist to do that for you. You'd need to line up on specifications. You need to make sure your supplier understands those specifications, and the suppliers often don't, or it's inconsistent. Even now we're still working with drawings. That's the legacy system that we are slowly migrating into our system, and variation between drawings at different companies is insane. We spend most of our time just deciphering what the heck they meant.
RD: Those drawings that come from the companies, that's the sort of schematics, the prototypes, that's the thing they want built. Do you have an idea why those are so bad or hard to work with? Like is there no standardized process for this?
AM: I mean, there are standards but it's a bit of tribal knowledge at our company: we do it this way, we specify these things at other companies that specify different things. And it's far too easy to get tunnel vision and forget that maybe the person assembling this needs this extra piece of information that you might not. It's often easy to forget a tolerance. It's often easy to forget a dimension and the back and forth, that's super time consuming. Overseas, it's a day delay, to get any basic questions right. So it's like, did you really mean red here? Are you sure? Well, there's a day delay.
RD: There's no ISO standards for that? There's no -
AM: There is. But it's still easy to forget, right? It depends. There's so much variation that it's never gonna be perfect.
RD: You're dealing with this increased demand. What's the future of your prototyping business look like? One year, five years down the road?
Ben Popper: A) keep up with demand. Scale, scale, scale, automate. Honestly, we have to create our own equipment at this point. Most of the equipment we've been using is imported from China, and that's no longer gonna happen. So we're gonna have to design our own. Once, hopefully we get over that, it's gonna turn into prototyping and helping with mass customization for other products. We really like the industrial automation space and we think there's a lot of room for low volume, high complexity, high customization hardware. So I need this length of thing. I need this length of conveyor. I need this you know, this sort of gripper that we can kind of fill in the gap there with a lot of the same processes we're developing. And for me, I really want to take a green focus on most of what we do, as much as we can I wanna produce waste. This is a very wasteful field. We throw away a lot of things and it's painful. And one of the areas I, you know, it's a personal goal of mine is packaging. I want to make it easier to prototype packaging. That's also a very painful thing if you're an engineer. Packaging engineering is a thing and a lot of people don't wanna do it for some reason. So we wanna help with that.
BP: On the future looking part of it. Also, just curious, like, do you see this as a venture scale business? That's how you and I met at a thing, or do you think of it more as something where you hope it will become profitable, self-sustaining, and like you said, kind of stay within the zone of, you know, custom and boutique as opposed to trying to be mass market address everything.
AM: So right now we are fully bootstrapped. We've been profitable since day one. If you don't do anything that's not profitable, we've been having conversations about, ‘Hey, do we take investment and turn this into a really, really venture fueled growth path?’ And the question for us is always, what does that add? Does it let us do what we're not already doing? And it's tough to answer that question. Most investors haven't answered that for us, or we haven't, you know, we haven't really agreed on anything.
BP: They haven't given you a compelling reason to give away part of your company yet.
AM: Right. And we're seeing 20 - 30% growth month on month at this point. I don't think we need investment. I think that's healthy.
RD: Well, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us. That time of the show where we shout out somebody who came on to Stack Overflow, dropped some knowledge, shared some curiosity. Today we're not shouting out a question, we're shouting out a person for winning the unsung hero badge. Somebody who had more than 10 accepted answers that had a zero score. And it's 25% of their total. We're shouting out Hammed Jimmo for doing the work, man. And if you like his answers, go upvote. Upvote, please. It helps us all. I am Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog. Host the podcast here at Stack Overflow. If you have questions, concerns, complaints, email us at podcast@stackoverflow.com. And if you wanna reach out to me directly, you can find me on LinkedIn.
BP: Hey everybody. I am Ben Popper. I am one of the hosts of the podcast here, along with Ryan. You can always find me on LinkedIn at Ben Popper or shoot me a DM on X at Ben Popper.
AM: I'm Alex Malcoci. I'm CEO and founder of MiniProto. You could find us at miniproto.com or best on LinkedIn can reach out to me on DM there. And yeah, if you have any wires that need making, gimme a shout.
RD: Thank you very much everyone, and we'll talk to you next time.