Unruggable is a San Francisco startup that makes a smart wallet. It’s a small box with a screen that connects to your phone through a USB port and authorizes money transfer transactions. We talked to the founders, Bill and Adam, about their experience with MicroFactory.
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We rebuilt our entire strategy around MicroFactory. (Adam, co-founder of Unruggable)
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What challenges did you have with assembling your gadget?
We have 1,000+ preorders for our first batch, and we spent 2 months out of 6 just sitting there and assembling wallets full-time by hand. The worst part is that you have to do this instead of working on product development. Even with simple operations, like folding an instruction sheet. Have you ever tried folding 1,000 pieces of paper in half? By the time you get to 50, you’re already sick of it.
Why not just hire someone to do it?
At this volume, it’s not really enough work to hire someone full-time. Our assembly happens in waves. For example, right now we have an order for 200 units as prizes for a hackathon. We’ll make those, and then wait for the next wave in November.
Also, imagine someone doing the same repetitive operation for six hours straight. They get tired, and because the product is still at an early stage and you need to keep a lot of things in your head, there’s a pretty high chance of making a mistake. And for us, consistency in quality is really important.
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The volume is too small to justify outsourcing, but already large enough to make manual assembly a burden.
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What about outsourcing to China?
The big problem with China, and really with any outsourced manufacturing, is that you don’t really know what’s happening there. You can’t fully control which components are being used.
For example, we have a competitor, a much bigger company. They make a great device in China, but recently they got hacked, and the personal data of hundreds of thousands of people leaked online. It was only personal information like emails and names, no money was stolen, but it seriously damaged trust in the wallet.
So building everything ourselves is part of our identity. Even as we scale, we’re not considering outsourcing assembly. We want to keep everything in-house.
Author: We also know a pretty scary story from friends of ours, where a Chinese factory decided to switch the brand of glue they were using, and the whole batch had to be redone.
What’s the most important problem it solves for you?
We were sold on the combination of factors. The main thing is that I don’t need to do the assembly myself as a founder, so I can focus on developing the product. With MicroFactory, I can hire someone part-time who just reloads the materials every couple of hours, and the production can basically run 24/7. And importantly, instead of needing a skilled person, this can be done by someone without special skills. Then I can just add more boxes and scale production pretty easily.
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With MicroFactory, I can hire someone part-time who just reloads the materials every couple of hours, and the production can basically run 24/7
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The new agent you showed me also means that now even the reconfiguration can be done by a non-technical person. For example, I’m (Adam) not a very technical person. I can’t do CAD or programming, but I can still use prompts to change how the system works or add a new task.
Isn’t $22k expensive?
When we were walking to your office, I said, “Fuck, Bill, are you sure about this? You are going to spend $22k”. But after you showed me the first video of it working, I realized it was a great investment.
Reaction to our demo video
For me, the price is justified. That’s basically one month’s salary for a good engineer in San Francisco. It might be cheaper in other places, but for us, this solves a lot of problems at once.
What other problems did it solve for you?
Besides automating production, for us it’s also about marketing and building trust with users.
I showed the video to around 10 people, and everyone was super impressed. In San Francisco, people live in a bubble and everyone is used to seeing robotics demos. In London, where we are now, people have never seen anything like this. So we use it for marketing as well.
Also, if you show a customer a video of how you’re actually assembling their product, that’s the highest level of transparency. Before, we told users that we wanted to build an autonomous factory like Tesla, and they didn’t understand how it is possible. But when we show them the assembly video, they say, “Yeah, this makes sense,” and they trust that we really assemble everything in-house.
Did you have any doubts that it would work?
I can see that you have really good control of the robot arm. I built my own arm for automation and talked to several startups, but they’re not even close to being as good as your arms. So I can connect Claude Code myself and make an arm move left and right, but when it can actually assemble a product with precise movements and work 24/7, that’s what you need for production.
Also, in our assembly, most of the tasks can be solved with programming and modern computer vision algorithms. But it just wasn’t justified to spend a lot of resources on the integration before. With Claude Code, it’ll be much easier. The important thing is to give it the right control stack, which is what you’ve built. I don’t think anyone doubts that Claude can program well. And computer vision has been working in factories for decades, so there’s not much risk around its reliability either.
What changed for your company after you started working with MicroFactory?
It's a massive help on the product side. It's a massive help with marketing. It's a massive help with user trust. We basically built our strategy around assembling with MicroFactory. People love it. For us, it's perfect.
We completely changed our marketing strategy.
We're going to a trade show in November, and at our booth we'll be assembling the gadgets live and selling them to customers. We expect it to be one of the most popular booths there and hopefully go viral on Twitter as well.
It also sounds much more attractive to our investors that instead of just spending money on a Twitter campaign, we spent that money on a robot.
We redesigned the device for automated assembly.
We changed the design of our gadget to make it easier to assemble automatically. We made the enclosure as simple as possible, using snap fits. We also switched to screws that are easy for the robot to pick from an automatic feeder.
And now we also have a clear way to scale production.
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As demand grows, we can increase manufacturing capacity by adding another arm.
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We built our competitive edge around in-house assembly.
One of the ways we differentiate from competitors is that we assemble the device with a robotic arm and make the process as transparent as possible. We can even show customers a video of their own device being assembled, like when you order a pizza, get an order number, and can follow the progress of your order. You can do the same here.