It starts with a conversation. We’ll quickly determine if we’re a good fit for your business and your product. If we’re not, we’ll let you know, and try to make a referral to a better fit. If we are, we’ll get an engagement agreement in place and schedule a start date for working on your first project.

Product development and Industrial projects at RAY will typically range from $10k to $1Mn in design, development and prototyping costs. The cost is driven by many factors such as
1. Complexity/Intended Quality of the product/project
2. Target Number of Features Implemented
3. Number of iterations and optimizations in the product development process
4. Duration and the timeline requirements of the product/project
5. Regulatory requirements that needs to meet
6. Costs associated with Testing and Certification process

Yes. Businesses hire us for a few different reasons:
1. Their internal teams are already overburdened with the day-to-day sustaining engineering required for existing product lines.
2. They’re lacking the specific skills and expertise required for product development (as opposed to sustaining engineering or primary R&D).
3. Projects are behind schedule, and a fresh approach or perspective is needed to get things moving again.

We can be your team or we can extend your team. We need to fully understand your business goals and your constraints so that we can make development decisions that will work for you long term. We’ll be talking a lot about: Cost targets Target users Feature tradeoffs All of these factors impact not just the product, but also your business more broadly. You can expect regular collaboration with our team (e.g. weekly progress reviews). You can expect us to learn unexpected things along the way (e.g. that a feature needs to be excluded, or that a different material is better suited to a certain part). Many of the products we work on pivot from the original vision in some way during development based on findings from prototype testing.

There is a right time and wrong time to get a non-disclosure agreement in place. Typically, we’re able to get through an initial high level discussion without the need for an NDA. This allows us to make sure both parties feel that RAY is a fit for you prior to the administrative step of signing the NDA. Once both parties agree that a deeper exploration or engagement makes sense, we can get non-disclosures in place.