Why I built Fractional Forge.
The full version. Twenty-six years of building hardware startups, and the wish list that became this product.
Fractional Forge is essentially my wish list of all the things I could have had as a hardware startup founder over the last 26 years.
One of the main issues I have had is that I have spent so much time and energy building, and spending money on, the infrastructure rather than focusing on the product. This is completely different to what it is like being a software startup, where you can focus on the product and let companies like AWS deal with the infrastructure issue. A software founder builds one thing. A hardware founder builds two.
The factory itself is the biggest of those time sinks. Finding a location takes months. Then come the lease negotiations, and as a startup you can easily be asked to pay one, two, or three years of rent up front, which raises the obvious question of where that money is meant to come from. After that comes procuring the equipment, installing it, and hiring the people to run it. You can easily be twelve or eighteen months in before you have built anything at all.
Hardware has never had an AWS equivalent. Every founder ends up reinventing the same wheels: finding engineers, finding investors, sorting out intellectual property, building a finance team, all pre-revenue, all without the budget for any of it.
Fractional Forge is my attempt at that equivalent. Rather than building your own factory from scratch, we connect you to a curated network of Europe's best manufacturers and design partners who already have the building, the machinery, and the expertise. We work alongside you to build an auditable, engineer-checked Design Dossier, so you get real advice on how your product actually gets made.
Alongside the manufacturing network, Fractional Forge brings specialist support across thirteen disciplines, a fractional bench of senior engineers, and introductions to the investors most likely to back it, on an introducer / success-fee basis. We do the connecting and the checking, so the rest of the hardware founder's job becomes manageable.
One of the less obvious things about running a hardware startup is just how distributed the team ends up being: a designer here, a fractional engineer there, a manufacturer in another country, a finance advisor in a third. Keeping everyone moving in the same direction becomes its own full-time job. A lot of what we do is exactly that — holding the thread across the specialists, the partners and the raise, so the whole thing keeps moving in one direction.
It is also a genuine home for fractional executives. I know so many people who are real domain experts in manufacturing, engineering, finance, and operations who would be great for startup companies to have access to. Startups cannot afford a full range of critical full-time employees. Some experienced people just want to give their expertise on an ad hoc basis. Fractional Forge works for both.
And if you have been thinking about building your own company, Fractional Forge is designed to take you from "I have an idea" to "I know exactly what the next step is".
Have a look and let me know how you get on.
— Tristan Fischer, Founder