Founder/CEO Nick Frank is Interviewed for the Predictable Designs Podcast
Founder / CEO Nick Frank joins John Teel on the Predictable Designs Podcast where they discuss the origins of Knectiv, recent projects, China, and all things electronics product development and manufacturing.
Podcast Transcript Preview:
John Teel: Welcome to the Predictable Designs podcast, where we discuss all things related to developing, manufacturing, marketing and selling successful new electronic hardware products. I am your host John Teel. This is episode six. Today, I would like ton welcome Nick Frank, who is the founder of a company located in Austin, Texas, that does design and manufacturing for electronic products, and the name of the company is Knectiv. Welcome to the show, Nick.
Nick Frank: Yes, thanks for having me on.
John: Let’s go on and get started. Can you maybe just tell everyone a bit about yourself and the background and about Knectiv?
Nick: Yes, sure. My name is Nick Frank, and I’m the founder and C.E.O of Knectiv, I’m recently from Texas, but got my start in hardware in Switzerland when I co-founded a contract manufacturing company in 2005. It so happened that my co-founder’s father owned a very large electronics manufacturing group in China, which afforded certain access and resources that weren’t available to everyone.
Over the years, through that company, we manufactured millions of hardware products for Swiss and European companies with Austin managing over 100 product-lines at any given time. Then in 2017, I fully divested from the company there and relocated to Austin, Texas, where I founded Knectiv.
Knectiv is a full service design, development and contract manufacturing company. We help everyone from hardware startups to more established enterprises develop and manufacture their electronic products through a combination of local engineering and strategic offshore manufacturing. We offer turn key solutions which basically means, you can essentially explain your product concept to us, and we can design it, make a prototype of it and then manufacture it.
John: You guys do all the different steps or you do the electronics design, firmware programming, mobile apps or 3D modelling as well also, or?
Nick: We work with partners that help with things like mobile apps, but typically, we stick to the hardware design and the firmware.
John: Got you. Do you specialize in the electronic products or do you do other hardware products that aren’t necessarily electronics?
Nick: We stick mostly to electronic products, but if there’s a mechanical design that we can help with, sometimes we will help out with that because we’re also able to source different types of mechanical parts, we can do machine tooling and stuff like that, so if it’s something that is in our wheelhouse, we’ll definitely take a look at it.
John: Got you. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit about the team at Knectiv. What type of engineers– You’ve kind of mentioned the areas that you focus on, which is obvioussly electronics design and not necessarily the mobile app or 3D modelling, but maybe just tell us a bit the team you have at Knectiv.
Nick: Yes, sure. We’ve assembled just amazing group of really smart people both here and in China that make it possible to do what we do at a high level. Our product development team is based here in the US, and that group is spearheaded by Scott, who’s just really talented and accomplished product development expert, who’s got more than 30 years of experience and worked with a wide range of companies from Apple to At&T and a lot of startups. He’s got tons of experience with everything from IT devises, to consumer products, industrial control, robotics. He oversees our core team of electrical and mechanical engineers here and he also sometimes liaise directly with the client early stages of product development.
On the Chinese side, our office in Beijing is managed by a colleague who I’ve known and worked with since 2004. Before he worked with us, he oversaw quality control systems through the Hoang Dong Group in China, was a very prestigious company that had printed circuit board assembly, classic injection molding. He oversaw quality control for us nearly 1,000 employees. He kind of make sure all the manufacturing partners are living up to our strict quality standards that we expect and he manages team over there that oversees logistics, account management, especially sourcing and partner management.
CONTINUE READING HERE