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In this week’s newsletter Aaron Moncur has a conversation with Patrick Jreijiri, an accomplished entrepreneurial and engineering professional with extensive experience in business development, mechanical engineering and product design.
The more I advertise and market myself, the less clients I get. The less I advertise, the more clients I get.
In this episode:
Jreijiri’s approach to early-stage physical prototyping
Contractor-based engineering models
International freelance rate dynamics
Remote work sustainability concerns
Bonus Content:
Legos and how their 0.002mm tolerance specification drives their manufacturing strategy
S5E26 Patrick Jreijiri | How To Build A Product Development Freelance Company
Patrick Jreijiri saved his employer $2.4 million annually through process improvements and design standardization, then walked away when they refused to pay him an engineering-level salary. His journey from Lebanon to building a profitable freelance product development business reveals counterintuitive lessons about remote work sustainability, international rate competition, and why physical prototypes matter more than CAD models. After struggling with professional isolation and price wars against $5/hour engineers, he built a contractor-based model that turns engineering from overhead into profit and discovered that the less he markets himself, the more clients he attracts.
>If YouTube isn’t your thing, check out this episode and all of our past episodes on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.
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Early Testing Prevents Expensive Late-Stage Failures
Physical Prototypes Expose What CAD Models Hide: Engineers waste months perfecting CAD models that fail immediately when manufactured. Material tolerances, assembly constraints, and component interactions behave differently in physical reality than digital simulations predict. Testing early catches these mismatches when fixes cost hundreds instead of thousands.
You can design as much as you want on your CAD software or electronic software, and when you get the physical parts, it's going to mess up and not behave how you thought it's going to be. No matter what you do, no matter how many times you revise it or how many times you show it to people, it's gonna give you issues.
Late-Stage Prototyping Multiplies Redesign Costs: Design decisions made early cascade through entire product architectures. Discovering fundamental flaws during final prototyping means backtracking through months of dependent design work. Early physical testing prevents this compounding problem.
Prototype as much as you can early on, because if you get towards the end and that's when you start your prototypes, you're too late because you'll have to go back and change a lot of stuff.
Real-World Example - Magnetic Shoes: Patrick's magnetic cushioning shoe project looked flawless in CAD - six millimeter gaps between opposing magnets positioned at high-pressure foot zones based on pressure mapping. Physical prototypes revealed the magnets were so strong that Chinese factory workers needed men to pull the shoe assemblies apart from work tables. No FEA analysis flags that problem.
The magnets were a little bit too strong for the Chinese women trying to build the prototype in China. They were telling us we needed to have men come and pull off the shoes off of the work tables.
Seven Months of Wasted Design Work: His automated house-building robot spent seven months in detailed design before discovering the requirements had shifted. Physical prototyping of critical mechanisms early would have exposed the misalignment between design direction and actual needs before burning thousands of engineering hours.
We designed the whole thing. When we were ready to start building it, what was needed had changed. We had to scrap part of the whole project. We had spent around seven or eight months working on it.
LEGO's 0.002mm Specification and It's Implications for Manufacturing
A 2x4 LEGO brick manufactured in 1958 will snap perfectly onto a brick molded this morning in Denmark, China, Hungary, Mexico, or the Czech Republic. The 66-year-old brick will have the exact same interference fit, the same clutch power, the same 4.8mm stud diameter. This is the result of maintaining mold tolerances to 0.01mm (10 microns) across billions of parts annually.
For hardware engineers developing products with tight-fit mechanical interfaces, LEGO represents an extreme case study in what's possible when you can't compromise on dimensional consistency. A brick that's 0.02mm oversize won't fit into existing structures. A brick that's 0.02mm undersize falls apart when you pick it up. There is no acceptable tolerance range for functional failure. This creates engineering constraints that most consumer products never face. Understanding how LEGO achieves this - and more importantly, where they make deliberate trade-offs - provides practical frameworks for tolerance analysis, mold design, and manufacturing process control.
For more, visit the full article on The Wave.
This week’s discussion revolves around useful hands on skills for design engineers. Care to join the conversation? Add your comments on The Wave.
We can pretty much do anything with CAD but the issue can be is that what works beautifully in CAD either is too expensive to make or can't be made using current equipment. Would having some manufacturing experience (CNC, Molding etc.) be helpful in design?