A presenter giving a talk to an audience in a conference room with concrete walls. The presenter is gesturing with hands, standing in front of a large screen displaying a slide titled 'Example 2: Competitive Pressures'. The audience is seated and listening, some taking notes or using laptops. The room has industrial lighting and exposed ductwork.

Hardware Workshop

Founded in 2012, Hardware Workshop was a side project that grew into the largest workshop series for hardware founders. In building Contour, I learned there was no source to learn from real operators—the kind of operators who had gotten their faces smashed in trying to build hardware during a software era.

Mission

Help hardware startups get their start

Story

It started out of my own struggles to build Contour Cameras. When I started, I had no idea that building underwater action cameras was so incredibly hard and without any resource to help, I wanted to create an in-person workshop series that could actually help founders.

The Project

We held 5x annual stops around the country, bringing experienced operators in each city to teach 6-8 highly relevant subjects. This was hands-on learning along with local peers you could connect with.

  • Grew to 5 annual stops.

  • Annual > 500 students and 3K lifetime students.

  • All presentations and materials published to attendees.

  • All speakers donated their time to really help founders.

  • Kept the event at cost to give back to the startup community.

Go To Market - Events, Community, Word of Mouth

Hardware Workshop was built entirely on community. No paid marketing, no sales team. Just founders helping founders.

  • Local Hosts: We partnered with maker spaces, incubators, and hardware companies in each city to host events. They brought their networks, we brought the curriculum.

  • Speaker-Led Growth: Every workshop featured 6-8 operators who had actually built and shipped hardware. Their networks became our marketing engine.

  • Founder Referrals: The best marketing was founders who attended telling other founders. We kept ticket prices at $75 (including meals, snacks, and beverages) so cost wasn't a barrier.

  • Email + Blog: We documented every workshop with takeaways, speaker bios, and photos. This became our content engine that drove registrations for the next city.

Learnings

I learned a lot about building community events. It became the basis for events and film festivals we built at Moment.

  • Founder Is The Business. These work if the person founding and running it has a deep knowledge of the subject. Their network matters a lot.

  • Make It Super High Value. Give people a wow level of depth at an affordable price. We ended up having repeat attendees because the $cost to ROI was inredibly high.

  • Keep It Simple. The more complexity the more you need to invest the higher the ticket prices need to be. There is a magic to keeping it simple that made these events sustainable.

  • Operators > Consultants. People wanted to learn from founders who had actually shipped products, not people who talked about shipping products.