In this week's newsletter, Aaron Moncur has a conversation with Brogan Miller, PE, Founder of Doula Studios, where he guides early stage hardware startups through product development and manufacturing.
If you're not embarrassed of v1 then you didn't ship early enough.
In this episode:
Why perfect becomes the enemy of good enough when founders treat products like personal brands instead of iterative launches
How Vietnamese and Chinese manufacturing cultures differ fundamentally - from "customer is God" signs in China to Vietnamese solidarity creating harder but stickier partnerships
Why career choices driven by curiosity and learning instead of compensation lead to professional actualization despite unconventional paths
How bringing contractors into schedule and budget planning at the start creates intrinsic motivation that survives when projects hit inevitable problems
Bonus Content:
Deliberate Execution: The 6 Principles SEAL teams use to execute quickly.
S6E47 Brogan Miller | Being a Doula for Hardware Startups, Manufacturing in Asia, and How to Start Networking
Brogan Miller didn't choose jobs for money. He chose them for what he could learn, taking pay cuts to work on electromechanical systems he'd never touched before. That insatiable curiosity - the kind that led a 12-year-old to melt pewter and pour it into wood molds - eventually brought him to early stage hardware startups where he wore every hat available. Now, as founder of Doula Studios, he's turned that generalist background into a specialty: guiding hardware founders through the messy, uncomfortable, essential work of bringing products to life. From holding ±2°F on a charcoal barbecue for eight hours to navigating the cultural differences between Vietnamese and Chinese manufacturing on his own dime, Miller has learned that shipping something imperfect beats perfecting something that never ships. His approach combines technical expertise with hard-won manufacturing relationships across Asia and an understanding that structure, even in fast-moving startups, prevents expensive mistakes two months before launch caused by decisions made in the first two months of development.
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Quick! When your automation fails, what gets protected first? Humans, the machine, or the product?
Most teams design backwards. They optimize for product quality, then machine uptime, then (maybe) add safety guards.
Pipeline Design & Engineering's order of protection:
Humans first. Always.
Machine second.
Product last.
Why? No humans = can't run machine. No machine = can't make product. Your responsibility is handing operators a system they trust won't hurt them.
We follow ANSI B11.0 standards and conduct risk assessments before finalizing any design.
Designing safe automation systems? Pipeline Design & Engineering follows safety-first protocols on every project.
Vietnam vs China Manufacturing: Why History Shapes Production Capability
Miller spent his own money to visit 10 Vietnamese factories, seeking firsthand knowledge that logistics spreadsheets couldn't provide. What he found revealed how a country's history shapes its manufacturing DNA.
Everyone thinks that they’re gonna be next China.
The Chinese-owned factories in Vietnam could handle sophisticated assembly and testing. But Vietnamese-owned facilities told a different story. Miller noticed the equipment first like Japanese and German SMT machines instead of Chinese ones. The implications went beyond supplier preference.
When I visited Vietnamese owned SMT factories, the machines were none of them were Chinese. Most of them were Japanese or German. So all of a sudden line goes down. Not only is it a longer flight, supports a longer flight away, but it's also a disparate culture away and just more expensive.
The historical tension between China and Vietnam - a thousand years of occupation starting around zero AD - still affects factory operations today. Chinese-owned factories in Vietnam struggled with retention. Vietnamese workers would get trained, then leave for Vietnamese-owned facilities. The one exception proved the rule.
The one Chinese factory that did not have retention issues actively encouraged Vietnamese folks into leadership positions within the factory.
The cultural divide extends to customer relationships. Miller saw it in the physical environment of Chinese factories, where success depends on treating customers as supreme.
You go to China, they treat customers like God. In fact, like I've walked up stairwells, and on the front face of the stair, it says customer is God. Big signs to say customer is God because you're bringing money, right? Money's God in Vietnam, nobody's God.
Vietnamese solidarity creates a different dynamic. Breaking in takes longer, requires more patience, demands respect for the space Vietnamese suppliers need to decide if they want the relationship. But once you're in, you're in. Miller's assessment of Vietnamese capabilities reflects this nuance: components and machined parts come out great. Assembly requires more careful evaluation of actual capability versus stated ambition.
Deliberate Execution
Early in my career, I believed efficiency meant speed. Every project where I rushed through planning took longer. The fixtures I designed quickly created technical debt that consumed weeks of rework. Around that time, I started reading military fiction - think "The Terminal List" - which led me to study military leaders like Mark Divine and Jocko Willink. Divine, a retired SEAL commander, wrote: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." During helicopter insertions, operators who sprint create cascading failures when one person trips. SEALs practice drills slowly until movements become automatic. During Hell Week, candidates who panic and try to do everything simultaneously fail. Those who identify the single next task succeed. Divine explains: "When faced with chaos, slow down and figure out the one thing you can actually get your hands around and do it." I have the utmost respect for military leaders and use their framework leading engineering teams through six principles. The projects where I planned properly finished faster.
Read the full article on The Wave.
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