Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E28 Paul Vizzio | Engineering Naval Submarines, Pet Products, & Elite Sports Training Machines
In today’s episode, Paul will explore how he scales hardware teams, builds for manufacturability, navigates supply chain complexity, mentors engineers, and embraces community‑driven innovation. Get ready for insights on leadership, prototyping, and bringing hardware to life from idea to market.
Main Topics:
- Proteus Motion's V1 and V2 machine development
- Engineering career progression
- Hardware product design and manufacturing
- Consulting and entrepreneurship
- New York Hardware Meetup community building
About the guest: Paul Vizzio is a seasoned mechanical engineer and hardware leader with a diverse background spanning consumer electronics, cleantech, and defense. Starting as a product management intern at SolidWorks, he later managed undersea vehicle projects at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. As the first mechanical engineer at goTenna, he developed both consumer and military-spec products from concept to production in under a year.
In 2017, he founded Vizeng, providing end-to-end mechanical and supply-chain consulting to NYC hardware startups. He also led product development for RoadPower’s regenerative road systems.
Since 2019, Paul has led hardware efforts at Proteus Motion, overseeing team growth, R&D, and supply chain. His work includes redesigning the V1 system and launching the V2 within a year—contributing to Proteus’s adoption by 400+ pro sports teams and clinics. He also co-organizes the NY Hardware Meetup and founded the D2C pet brand RemieDog, reflecting his passion for innovation and community-building.
Links:
Aaron Moncur, host
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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Just having everybody together in the rooms, and, you know, working hard and aligning on the on the mission, and just getting it done. And that was the biggest thing for us that helped us launch this thing so quickly. You
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Hello all you wonderful engineers out there, and thank you for everything that you do. You are the unsung heroes of our world. And keep it up today, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to bring Paul Vizio to the show. To the show. Paul is the director of hardware engineering at Proteus motion, where for over six years he's led the charge from redesigning their groundbreaking v1 machine to launching the v2 on the market. We'll talk about those in a few minutes, now installed in nearly 400 elite sports fitness and rehab centers across North America. A licensed mechanical engineer with a master's from Boston University Hall also co organizes the New York hardware meetup, founded engineering consultancy vis Eng and built a direct to consumer pet product business. Today, he'll share first hand insights on scaling hardware, r, d teams, navigating manufacturability and bridging precision engineering with commercial success. Paul, thank you so much for being with us on the show today.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited for this.
Aaron Moncur:All right, so what made you decide to become an engineer?
Paul Vizzio:I think it's it's kind of the same story as every kind of kid growing up that becomes an engineer. Just always tinkering with things, always building things, taking things apart, sometimes putting them back together, figuring out what to do with those extra screws on your next project. But yeah, just always been playing with things, and I was always interested in science and math. So when college time came around to kind of think of what I'm going to do in my life, I kind of just naturally gravitated towards engineering.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, all right, so you're, you're working at Proteus right now. Tell us a little bit about the company, and also the the v1 machine and and subsequently, the v2 machine that you helped develop.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, so Proteus motion. We are a, essentially a hardware fitness company. We make fitness machines that do three dimensional resistance, so we essentially market it as a sports science lab in a box. So within within five minutes, you get what takes 20 other pieces of equipment, about three hours of work to do. And the way we do that with our hardware is it's like I mentioned, the resistance machine. So it's a big robotic arm that you grab onto, and you can manipulate it in three dimensions and it out it resists your motion in three dimensions, at whatever resistance you want to set. So the it's really hard to explain on video and even harder in podcast form, but if you go to our website, you kind of see what it's about, but it's basically like training underwater, where you can control the viscosity. And the neat thing about it is, there's the training aspect to it, but there's also the data collection. So in addition to us training in three dimensions, we're also getting three dimensional data. And the two of those things, there's no other machines or other technology out there that you can do this with. You can get you can get some motion stuff with camera based systems. But if you think about anything about like free weights and cable machines, and even like connected fitness devices that are using that are basically just strapping sensors onto existing machines, those only give you one or two dimensional loading. So the free weight, it's always pulling down on you with a cable machine. It's always pulling wherever that cable is coming out of so if you're doing rotational motions, or you're doing working on your pitching motion or golf swing or things like that, you really can't do that with one or two dimensional systems. So that's where the three dimensional resistance comes in. So a lot of our clientele are professional athletes, wanting to come professional athletes, then also physical rehabilitation aspects, yeah, so we're in medical and also athletic facilities,
Aaron Moncur:fantastic. I've used a fair amount of training equipment over the years, and usually with a piece of equipment at the gym, there's a very specific motion that it will allow you to do right, whether you're doing like bicep curls or, you know, bench press, or shoulder press, something like that. These machines, they, I mean, intentionally, kind of force you to move the weight in a very specific trajectory. Now what you're doing is different because it's, it's, are there? Are there? Like 3d trajectories that it kind of forces you into to have the good, correct, appropriate form. For example, if you're a golfer working on your your golf swing, or is that kind of left to the athlete to determine what the right motion is?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. So we've experimented a lot with this. Initially, early on, we thought that a lot of people would be intrigued by sticking to very specific mechanics, and like you mentioned, like doing golf swings or things like that, where you want to get more consistency down and get the feeling we've worked on that, but it never, it never actually turned out to be what the customers really wanted. So what we do is you can move the machine however you want, and we adapt to you. So if you think about it, for like, even bicep curls or rows or any type of rotational movement, if you're if you're not getting the consistency down right, which most people don't, we don't want to restrict you, because that could actually add more chances for injury. So if you reach, like a hard stop or something like that that's more jarring and it could injure you more than if you just let the user do what they want. And then at the end, we can review all their data and look at their point point cloud maps in three to space, and you can see like, oh, you weren't consistent here, you were slowing down here. You weren't doing too good here. But it allows them to use the machine how they feel comfortable, and especially with injuries and things like that. People might use it in a different manner. Or if you know somebody's rehabbing and can't really use it the way other people do, it's best. We found it best, at least right now, to focus on letting the athletes and the users control the machine how they want, as opposed to us prescribing or restricting their motion.
Aaron Moncur:Got it. Okay, that makes sense. I'm going to take a quick tangent here, and then I'm going to bring it right back to the v1 v2 Proteus machines. So I, I'm a huge fan of the company, rivian, right? The the automotive manufacturer. I love their brand. I love their vehicles. I own one, the R, 1t, it's, it's phenomenal. It's the best thing I've ever bought. And recently they came out with their their gen two. They haven't actually come out with it, but they've announced it, and there's a lot of hype around it. They've been talking about how they have made manufacturing a lot easier. They have reduced assembly costs and time. They've cut material costs. They've done all this improvement right to to the their infrastructure and the architecture of the vehicle. I've never had the opportunity in an engineering environment to do that. I've never been involved with like a gen one and a gen two that was mass produced where it made sense to go back and kind of re engineer things cut costs, things like that. Most everything we do at Pipeline, we're building one off custom machines, and so we, unfortunately, we never have the opportunity to go back and really say, Okay, if we're going to make, you know, 100,000 of these, how can we make it cheaper in gen two? But that's exactly what, what you've done at Proteus, between the v1 and the v2 what? What was the approach that you took to re architecting the v1 system to cut costs and simplify the assembly?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, so when I was first brought on to Proteus, the v1 system was in production at that point, I think there was maybe two or three of them made at the point where I got brought on, and I was initially brought on to help commercialize and manufacture the view one. So how can we take this system that is essentially just a nice ish prototype, and how do we commercialize this and make it manufacturable? And how do we get this to actually, you know, make sense for some people. The early users were very much beta users, but they're also extremely expensive machines. So it was finding people at the cutting edge who had a lot of money to spend on experimental products. So my job was, you know, take this exact thing, but just make it cheaper and build out the team to do so we started down that path, and there were ways to make it cheaper, especially with optimizing assembly and optimizing supply chains and things like that. But the more we dug in, there was definitely a plot. There was there was a cap for how much we can do. We could reduce probably about 30% of the cost was the best we were going to get, and that was not a commercially viable number. But in addition to that, in going through everything, we reanalyzed and re engineered the entire system, and we found a lot more weak points and a lot more areas of durability concerns that it was just going to take that 30% that we were going to say it was going to just be eaten up by making it more durable and stronger and less long last longer. So what we eventually decided was we're going to do the best we can on these V ones, keep them going out, because we still have clients that we're going to use them. We're going to tell them, give them the heads up that the v2 is coming out. The v1 is still the top of the line right now. But stay tuned for v2 so we did. We went back to the drawing board completely. So we knew we knew the basics of the system. We knew that we're definitely going to still use our electromagnetic particle breaks, and we're still going to do three dimensional resistance. We're still going to do the three stages. But outside of that, how can we design a system to be as economical as possible, from like a pure parts cost, but also from an assembly cost, and then also, how can we outsource some of this stuff? We were building all of the V ones in our office, in in Queens, in New York. So we're like, we can't have our engineers putting these together. We need to be able to, if we want to get to the scale we want to, we need to be able to outsource this work with outside contract manufacturers. Or if we do build up our own facilities, it can't be necessitated to be built by engineers. So with that idea, we just went from scratch, like, what is the cheap what is the best way to build these? How can we combine I think there was like 800 parts on the first one. How can we combine those into a much smaller number? So going at it from that lens, and then also having the analytics, or at least the structural analysis, in from the beginning, we were able to do, we were able to make it like design, in the durability and all of the all the long, lasting life that we needed out of it. So combining that all in from the beginning really helped save us time, but it also helped optimize, optimize the structure and optimize how much we were spending on each component. So that took probably four or five, six months, something like that, until we're at a place where we're like, Okay, let's start prototyping this. Let's start prototyping it in scale, like full scale. Before we were just doing, like, sub assemblies and things like that, and all the things that you would do. But yeah, once we got into seeing the parts in real life and working with the manufacturers and figuring out how much things actually cost, things started getting, you know, as you start working with manufacturers, it's like, oh, well, we didn't do this. We didn't do this. Looking back at it, these welds are taking longer than we thought. So costs started rising. But then we kept optimizing and adding in more design for Mac manufacturing throughout all our different prototypes. And eventually, yeah, we were just every time we built something, we were finding new sources, quoting things out, finding where it made sense to make things. And eventually we settled on making everything at a contract manufacturer down in Dallas, with a supply chain through China and other parts of Southeast Asia for some of the smaller parts. But it was a really long iterative process of every time we design something, quote it out, build it, test it. How can we make it cheaper? Work with the manufacturers to figure out, if we take out one bend, is that better if we make this out of three eighths instead of half inch? Is that going to increase cost that much? What about with structural tubing. Is it more economical to bend it? Or is it more economical to is more economic to like bend the actual tubes? Or is it more economical to start with sheet metal, bend it over, and then weld it, and then to have a welded seam in a non cosmetic area? So a lot of conversations, a lot of iteration, but we were always everything we did was always working with manufacturers from the beginning to make sure that any changes we did make were going to impact us positively, and then also working on assembly stuff in the meantime as well. So kind of a long way of saying doing everything in conjunction all at the same time through, it was nice having a small team, because everybody was thinking about these things at all moments. It wasn't like, All right, well, the structure team is working on the structure, and the manufacturing team is working on manufacturing, and then, like, nobody's talking to each other. We're a small team. So it's always like, every change we make, we're like, how's this going to impact manufacturing, how's it going to impact structure, how's this going to impact assembly? So factoring all those things in together, it was a, it was a complicated process, but ultimately a pretty rewarding one.
Aaron Moncur:For reference, roughly how big is the team right now?
Paul Vizzio:On the engineering side, there's, there's there's five of us total on the
Aaron Moncur:engineering. Okay, so yeah, that to me, seems like about the the right size for a team that wants to move really fast, right? Like you said, you don't have different departments doing different things. You have enough, enough people there that they can really push a lot of work forward quickly, but not so many that logistics and communication start to become an issue. That's what I've found, somewhere in that four to six range is like a really great size for a team that wants to move very quickly. Yeah, I agree with that. What is like? Can you think of maybe one really tactical thing that. Your team did that allowed you to move so quickly, iterate so fast, and ultimately, I think it was under 12 months that you guys kind of re engineered v2 but for the listeners here, who maybe they want to try and implement something, maybe they're going through a similar situation right now, and they want, like, a tactical approach that they can take. What's one thing that you learned during that 12 months to help you guys really execute quickly and efficiently,
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Paul Vizzio:Yes, I would say the biggest thing, I mean, I'm going to break this into multiple things, but the biggest thing is really just having the right team together, and specifically for us, and I find this for hardware in general, is really getting people that all have the right mindset to want to build the thing that you guys are striving for, and being able to take on everybody's nobody has an ego, and everybody's willing to take on whatever role possible. So there's no like, Oh, that's not my job. That's not my department. Or I don't know what. I don't know how to do this. I don't know what you're asking me to do. It's if you're given a job, you just figure out how to do it and you go about it. And then also, really, in hardware, it's just being together in like, physical space and putting things together. If we had to spend time, like taking pictures and sending it somewhere, or describing something and sending it, that would have put such a hindrance, when you could just hand somebody apart, and it's like, oh, yeah, this no, this isn't right. This is, this is way too weak. This is way too small, just having everybody together in the rooms and, you know, working hard and really aligning on the on the mission, and just getting it, getting it done, and all working together towards that goal. That's, that's the that was the biggest thing for us that helped us, you know, launch this thing so quickly.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's huge. So let's see, let, let's go into your background, just just a little bit. At one point you were a naval undersea team lead. Do I have that right?
Paul Vizzio:Somewhat? Yeah. So I was at the I was working for the Department of Defense at the Naval undersea warfare center, so we were designing nuclear submarines, and I was team lead on a few different projects there.
Aaron Moncur:Wow. Okay, what was that like? I'm not sure. We've talked about naval, you know, war submarines at all on this show.
Paul Vizzio:Nice. So I'll say what I can say then. But yeah, it was. I really enjoy government work, and I really enjoy the work I was doing there, the processes to do the work I did not enjoy everything. Is very bureaucratic there, and also for security reasons. So I was working on like a secure base, so we weren't allowed, I mean, this was, I was there less than 10 years ago, and we weren't allowed to have smartphones on base. We weren't allowed to have cameras, like I had to have a Blackberry 10 years ago, and I had to, like, get the special one that didn't have a camera on it. So all my friends had, like, iPhones and all this. And I'm, like, trying to BBM them. Like, this is the best tech I got. We weren't allowed to have, like, Arduinos. We weren't allowed to use Raspberry Pis. Like, wow, anything that could connect to a network. We weren't allowed to have. And, like, that's all the fun stuff. It's like, even Bluetooth and Wi Fi and anything like that. So I eventually got to a point where I was feeling like, technologically, I was getting kind of left behind. And I was like, we were still using, I think, like, Windows seven or, I think we were on XP even, but like, everything was really, yeah, and I just, I, I would come home and I would, like, build these really cool things and do it quickly, and then I'd go to work, and I'd be like, Why can't I do that here? Why can't I engineer things the way I want? Why? Why there's so many barriers, and why is it so difficult, so loved what I did. I just, I, I just couldn't deal with, um. The Tech, technology bureaucracy,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. I mean, on one hand, you need to balance safety and security right with with technology and innovation. If, if you had been in charge during that time, do you think there would be changes that you would have made to some of those technology limitations.
Paul Vizzio:It's a good question, because I very much understand why those were in place. And to their credit, they were trying to bring them in. They were opening up different areas, like, off base of like, here's where you guys can work on stuff. Don't connect it to a network. So I think I would push for a lot more of that stuff, of getting this new age of technology, especially like the whole maker movement, like a lot of kids nowadays are brought up on that, and they, like, Arduinos are second nature to them. So I would like to, I would have liked to push for that more, and find more safe spaces, and maybe enclose everything in a Faraday cage. And like, Whatever you do in here, you just don't bring it outside, but have at it. So yeah, I probably would have pushed a lot more for that.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. All right. All right. Coming back to Proteus, can you think of one of the tests that you did for this machine, whether it was like a quality test or some kind of design validation and walk us through, like the framework that you used to perform and execute that test,
Paul Vizzio:the biggest testing we did, I mean, we did, like structural stuff and things like that. But the biggest thing for us, and like the non starter for us, was as a three dimensional resistance machine, you had to make sure that things in three dimensions felt right. So having three stages operate all kind of in sync is kind of like the bread and butter. And if there's any issues there, it doesn't matter how strong or how weak it is, nobody's going to use it. So if you're like trying to do a diagonal motion, but you get locked into something to the side. If you get locked in up, up and down, you get locked in forward and out. Those are really things where it's like, nobody's going to buy this machine, even if it's like, super inexpensive, nobody's going to care. Because the people we're working with are high end athletes. They want to work on the best technology there is. And if it doesn't feel right, and if it doesn't output the right data, they're not going to so we most of our testing was around that. So one of the big changes we made from the version one system to the version two system, the version one system was extremely lightweight. It was made with, like all 6061 aluminum, but it was scalloped out everywhere it could, and then it used, it used cables to like steel cables. Yeah, they were still at that time, it used steel cables wrapped around drums and belt and half pulleys and things like that. It was basically the lightest way we can do it, but it was also like a very easy way to move the machine around, but it was very complicated, very finicky and extremely not durable, and it took forever to put together. So we knew we wanted to move away from it, but we were very cautious about, like, what's going to happen when we move away from it. So we tested a lot of different systems. We tested like chain systems. We tested belt systems, we tested timing belt type systems. We tested like, gearing systems. But everything we came down to was like, everything we test needs to feel right, and there's no real the problem with that is there's no three dimensional sensor that you could actually test and be like, Okay, so this, this is plus or minus half a pound in this direction, and and half half pound in that direction. It's all really on feel. So early on, we designed all these different drive train systems, of all these different technologies, and we're like, we don't even really care which one's the strongest. We just need to figure out which one feel the best, and then factoring into the actual gear ratios that we were trying to get to. So we were testing anywhere from like, what is a two to one gear ratio to 100 to one gear ratio feel like for all these different types of gear trains, and then that would dictate how big our brakes were. But anyway, we we laid out this entire plan of we're going to test this type, this type, this type, all these different gear ratios, and we're going to do testing, but it's going to have to be subjective, which isn't the best way to do things engineering, but I understand for a highly subjective feeling machine, that's the way to do it. But we laid out the test plans. And even though we laid out all these test plans and like, filling in data, just feeling the machines, you could be like, Okay, no, this is the right one. This is the wrong one. This is never going to work. We don't like this. So we went to we went about it really, in a engineering type of way, and then we settled on like, yeah, no, this is the only one that's going to work. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, that that's the biggest test we did.
Aaron Moncur:So at the end of the day, it did come down to kind of a human qualitative this feels right versus this does not feel right.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. And it kind of drove me nuts, because I wanted to add, like, engineering rigor behind it, yeah. What's the number we're trying to hit? Yeah? But there was no sensor that existed that could actually tell us that. So it was like, do we develop a sensor to then develop a product, or do we just go with the subjective for now and figure out the sensors
Aaron Moncur:later? Yeah, for now, the human is the sensor? Yeah, exactly. Well, let me take a short break here and share that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Learn more at Team pipeline.us The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers, you can learn more at the wave dot engineer, and we're speaking with Paul Vizio today. So Paul, in addition to heading up the hardware development at at Proteus, you also have your own consulting gig, kind of on the side, called vis Eng. Tell us a little bit about that. When did you start it? Why did you start it? Do you have any particular focus there? The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p, d, e, x, p, O, dot engineer,
Paul Vizzio:yes. So it came out of kind of a nice little chance on my part. So I've been working in startups for the last 10 years in New York City. When I left my first startup, they still needed, I was their only mechanical engineer. So when I left, they still needed, they were done with product developments. They everything was in continuous improvement and on shelves at that point. So they just needed, basically, time here and there for, like, when issues pop up, if something happens at the manufacturing line, or if there's issues that pop up over time, like, can we call on you to help us out with stuff? So out of that chance, I just, yeah, sure. I mean, this is new to me. I'll, I'll consult for you guys, and drew up the agreements and all that. And then kind of from there, I just, I just kept doing it, and kept having people I used to work with that are like, Oh, I'm at a new company. We're looking for some help. Or I just started my own company. I want to build this thing. Can you help with this? So it kind of just expanded from there, and it's kind of continued on for these last almost 10 years, where it's, it's nice that I do things on the side. It's basically anything to do with product development. For hardware, specifically, I like focusing on mechanical designs. I also have electrical engineers that I work with and firmware engineers that I work with. So if it's a, if it's like a consumer electronics, we can do kind of the whole thing, but then also working on, like, supply chain, finding your suppliers and all that. And I like to, I like, at by the end of it, to just, like, hand everything off to the company I'm working with. And, like, I don't want to keep getting commissioned to, like, talk to the factory and be like, Hey, can you place an order for 50 like, I want to just hand you guys the keys and say, Here's your products. Go on with it, and then you guys need me in the future. Contact me. Otherwise, you know, I have some other projects in the wing that I'm excited to get my teeth into.
Aaron Moncur:How do you balance working in a full time job as at a high level, right? You're directing engineering in a small team, so I'm sure you're, you know, you're wearing a lot of hats also, and there's a lot to be done. How do you balance that with a side consulting gig as well and a family?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. So it's definitely a juggling act, but early on, especially when, like when I was at the DOD, I was also getting my master's degree, full time, or, I shouldn't say full time, part time, but I was working like 100 hour weeks between, like, studying and doing homework and then going to work and commuting to work and all that. So I was kind of, I've always been used to working many hours a week, and. Yeah, it's certainly gone down since then, but it's still like, when I get home from work, I'll like, check slack and I'll answer emails and things like that, but it's always like, Okay, what else can I be doing right now? So I was kind of like, get the itch for like, I enjoy engineering and I enjoy building things, and if I wasn't doing it for somebody else, I'd be doing it for myself, and I'd have like, random things in my apartment. So why not figure out how to do it? Have fun and get paid at the same time? Awesome. I
Aaron Moncur:love it. You developed a product of your own too. The Remy dog is that? Ryan, yeah. Tell us a little bit about that.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. So that kind of started as there's a few few startings of that. So for viz, I've always been trying to figure out, like, how do I market this? Like I'm doing things, but like, the only people that, the only people that actually contact me are, like, friends or acquaintances or nobody's strolling onto my Google page and being like, Oh, you guys design things. Let's talk. So it started out as like, How can I expand into showing off, like, what I do a little bit more? So can I put these on Instagram? Can I put it on LinkedIn? Can I use like, Can I start doing some of these things and start using it for marketing? So I just kind of started developing my own products. And then this one kind of came out of necessity, where, in New York we we have a dog here, and every time she goes out, it's she goes to the bathroom once to three times, every time. So especially going like a long walk, or we go to the park or anything like that. And we were always running out of dog bags. So I started carrying around two dog bag holders, and just like, oh, when one one runs out, let me just, let me do another one. So then eventually, was like, why don't I just design something to fix this? I could, like, 3d print it, and it'll be fun. I could, like, drop ding and come up with the design and all that. So I went through that process, designed it. There was like, almost 40 iterations of it, and I finally came to the thing I liked. And I was like, throughout the process I was, like, designing it for manufacturing, designing it for injection molding, doing all these things as, like, case studies and like, writing papers and writing blogs and like, this is how you do it, because on my viz end website, I have a blog, but I can't write about, like, a customer that I just did a project for. I can't, like, reveal their IP. I can't say, like, what I did for them. So been using it as, how can I make more media that I'm able to use, and I had no IP restrictions, and I can do whatever I want with it. So it kind of came to that. And then at the end, when I had this thing that I was printing out, other people wanted to buy it. Like, I made a little Instagram where I was just putting these out, and people like, oh, I want to try it out. To try it out. And I was like, okay, yeah, it's 3d printed. It's not going to work that well. Like, it's made in a resin printer. It's going to break if you drop it. And then eventually I got to a point where I was like, why don't I just I already designed it for manufacturing. Let me see how much it's going to cost. Like, can I make this myself? So then I worked with, I mean, quoted out with a whole bunch of different factories I've worked with before, and eventually, I kind of was just like, You know what? I'm just gonna I'm just gonna bite the bullet. I'm just gonna pay for the tooling. I'm gonna pay for getting a number of these in. I'm gonna see if I could learn, how can I do marketing? How could I do sales? How could I like, how do you sell a product that nobody's ever heard of because I've always been involved in, like, the engineering and designing a product and getting a product to market, but then, like, what happens when it's in the market, who's looking at it, who's buying it? So, yeah, it kind of, it kind of came out of there, and it just kept going and going and going. And now we've got that product and some other products coming out soon, but I'm learning. I'm learning a lot about marketing and sales, and not really how to sell. But you know why people are always frustrated, and why people need sales? People,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, it's, it's amazing, and I don't know, in a way, it frustrates me. That's like, you've got these engineers who are so well educated, right? They spent years, maybe even decades, honing their craft, and they're so smart, and they're so technical, and they spend all this time designing the perfect widget. And then it's really, it's like, the sales people are the ones that make the most money at the end of the day, you know, like, a good sales people could just crush it in terms of salary and bonuses and and what's it called? What's it called, when the salesperson commission, commission, yeah, and it's hard for an engineer to match the earning potential of a really good salesperson. That's always been, like, I don't know, a battle in my mind. Like, is that justified? Is that just, does the universe think this is right? I don't know. But as you've gone through this journey with your own product, what, what is, what are two of the sales and marketing lessons that you've learned that perhaps would be useful to pass on? To those who are listening,
Paul Vizzio:I've learned that marketing is way, way more targeted and way more data driven than I thought it would be, like, I'm learning things that to me and just like, mind blowing to me. And then I talked to marketing people that, yeah, how do you not know that's how it works. So, like, under like, I've always thought, like, oh yeah, I get ads targeted to me. They know what I like. But then, like, actually getting into like, how do they know what you like? How do they know that you're like, in the same cohort? How do they target you at these certain times? How do they target you in these geographic regions? So, like, there's very intense targeting tools that you can target, like, I want to target this to a dog person that's 32 that's two blocks away from me, that they just went outside and their dog just pooped, like, I could, like, almost, look almost all of this up and just send, send an Instagram post to them, and they'll pop up like, Oh, Wow. Okay, interesting. So that has greatly surprised me. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:are you using Facebook ads for that?
Paul Vizzio:I was using Facebook ads, but now I'm using mostly Instagram ads. The Market on Facebook, they're not very nice there Instagram, there's a lot of for my product, at least on Facebook, seems to be like a lot of trolls and just a lot of negativity. At least on Instagram, there's the dog community on Instagram is a very nice community.
Aaron Moncur:Nice, yeah, I've toyed with Facebook ads slash Instagram. It's all kind of the same platform in the background now and there. It's amazing how targeted you can get with these, with these ads. I had another another thought, and it's escaping me now. It'll come back. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about the the hardware meetup. This is something that that you and I have kind of connected on a little bit, because you're already heading up a hardware meetup in New York, and I'm about to start one here in Phoenix. Yeah, and this is there is definitely some infrastructure to it. There's not really like a corporate entity behind this. It's mostly just a small group of volunteers, but there is some infrastructure behind starting up these, these hardware meetups, it's not like, you know, everyone in different cities is just starting this from scratch and doing whatever they feel like. We're following a fairly well defined process that has been put together by by these volunteers. Tell us a little bit about the the New York hardware meetup. How did you start it? What do you do there? And why? I mean, you already have so many things that you're doing. You're working full time. You've got viz ends, you got a family, apparently, you have a dog that poops, uh, What? What? What made you say to yourself, all right, I'm going to do yet one more thing and be in charge of this. Be an organizer for the New York hardware meetup.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. So it started. I've been going to meetups for a while, or hardware meetups, I should say, specifically the New York one, for a while. And as you're aware, it's basically like we're global at this point. So Nate, he runs basically all of the high end operations. So like with you, he's working to launch the Phoenix one, which we're pretty excited about. I saw a lot of saw a lot of commotion in the last week on Discord, about people excited about that Phoenix one. But yeah, I presented at New York cardboard meetup probably about four years ago, and I found it be, I mean, at that point, it was during COVID, so it was virtual. It wasn't like the in person thing it is now, which I value a lot more. But even then, when it was virtual, is pretty cool having, you know, like 100 or 200 people on a on a zoom call that are all, like, interested in hearing what you have to say, and all working on similar things, and all kind of like in your neighborhood. So that's how I got introduced to them. And then it was last year, last early, early last year, I was down at SolidWorks world for experience world, whatever you want to call it. I was actually presenting on stage for Proteus. But I was down there. Nate was supposed to be down there. And then we had our New York hardware co organizer down there, Christina as well. And they were launching the they were launching the Dallas one, I think was last year. So as part of it, they were launching this new Dallas hardware meetup. And I was just going to attend, and I was just going to go, but then Nate had to back out because he wasn't in town, and they needed an extra hand. So I was like, Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm around, like, I just happened to be here. I'll come. I'll help you guys set up. I'll help you guys do whatever you want. So I helped out with that, and then I got the invite probably, like, a couple months later, like, Hey, we're, we're a little short staffed on New York. Do you want to. Help us run up the New York one? And I was like, yeah, definitely. So it's that's kind of how I got brought onto there.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. Roughly, how many people do you see showing up at these meetups?
Paul Vizzio:So for New York, it's really venue limited at this point, but we a normal event will draw around like 200 ish people.
Aaron Moncur:It's a lot of people.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, it's a lot of it's a lot more people in New York hardware realm than I thought there would be, especially for monthly events. It's not like a yearly, like, big conference or something like that. It's like, every single month we have an event, and every single month we have that attendance, or we have to, like, Cap RSVPs and tell people sorry you can't get in this month.
Aaron Moncur:That's super cool. What's the format? So, like, if people are listening to this and they're in New York, or maybe they're interested in starting up chapter in their city where there isn't one currently, like, is the case for me here in Phoenix. What's the format that you follow for these meetings. There's
Paul Vizzio:a few different ones, but the most popular one, and the one that we try to do, like 80 90% of the time, is a speaker format. So what we do, it's usually a three and a half to four hour event. The first half hour to 45 minutes is everybody's coming in. It's mostly just networking time. And then the big bulk of the of the day is we usually have three speakers, so we'll pick a theme for that month's event. So for instance, like, August is going to be space tech. We're going to be at Adafruit. We're going to have Lamar freed speaking. She's going to be talking about, basically, how they use Adafruit products in space, and like, how they design for space. And, you know, I haven't gotten her slides yet, but she's gonna be talking about how their electronics get used in space. And then we have two other presenters also in the space industry, that are gonna be talking about their companies. So generally, three speakers, one theme. Each one gets 10 to 15 minutes to present, followed by five to 10 minutes of audience Q and A. And then after the conclusion of it, we have what we call community announcements. So all of the attendees, anybody who wants to talk about anything, can just get up there if they need help building something, if they're building something cool, and need testers, if they are looking for their next gig, if they're a VC and they're looking to invest in a company, basically, you have 30 Seconds to have the floor to yourself and figure out, you know, talk to this audience of 200 engineers and founders and VCs say what you're working on, what you need, and then the last hour or so is networking. And then, you know, people start piling out at that
Aaron Moncur:point. I love that. I love the idea of just bringing together the engineering community. That's been something that has been a labor of love for me over the years, developing the podcast and the wave, and we've got our PDX event coming up in October, that'll be an in person thing, and now starting the Phoenix hardware meetup, it's just a good time getting together with fellow nerds and sharing time with like minded people. Yeah,
Paul Vizzio:it doesn't help when there's like, fun demos and stuff like that there too. We have an upcoming one where we're going to be at a this company is developing, like, scooters and electronic bikes and some motorcycles and things like that that are all, like, EV related. So I'm pretty excited to get to them and, like, Get there early and try out some of their some of their bikes. Yeah, that's awesome.
Aaron Moncur:What is one thing that you have done to accelerate the speed of engineering?
Paul Vizzio:That's a that's a large question. I would say probably, like, the hardware meetup stuff we're doing is probably the, the most impact I've had for accelerating, like, outside of a select few of, like, my team members and things like that, but getting the community together and building these connections, and getting, like, when I, when I started working in New York and hardware companies, I thought there was like three, and I thought there was like four mechanical engineers in the city. But then, like, going to these events, you see, like, there are all these companies you've never heard of in all these places, and finding these new offices, and finding these new people working on these cool things that you didn't know anybody was working on, really getting, really building that community and that network out, and trying to build out, like this ecosystem of really propping up the engineers and the ancillary people around them, So like marketing and sales and founders and VCs and all that, and just building up that ecosystem and community, and just like I think that's really helping to to grow new ideas, build new ideas, grow new companies and build new companies. So that's probably the best thing I've done for engineering. At a larger scale,
Aaron Moncur:that's great. Yeah, everything we do is is through and with people, so getting the right people together and facilitating those connections can be really impactful. Yeah, well, one more question, and then we'll wrap things up here for for the more junior engineers who are out there listening to this episode, what is, what's something that you suggest that they focus on in terms of their their early development? What skills or traits or behaviors would you suggest they work on to maximize their impact as an engineer?
Paul Vizzio:Yeah. I mean, there's certainly a lot of things they could do. I know me coming out of school, I was pretty hard headed, and I thought I was like, smarter than everybody else when I really wasn't. So I would say there's like, the personality aspect of just like other people, other people know a lot, and other people have been doing this for a long time. So just be open minded towards understanding that like you may be a really smart engineer, but there's a million other really smart engineers, especially in things that you don't even know about yet. But then, from a from like, a skill set standpoint, I would say, like, just get involved with as much as you can. If you have, like, a mechanical engineering background, that doesn't mean you're going to be a mechanical engineer your whole life. You can work on firmware. You can make stuff. You can build electric circuits. You build robots. But same for like electrical engineers, you you can pick up CAD you can learn how to design 3d models, especially with how accessible a lot of these technologies are becoming. You can get open source CAD programs, open source PCD programs, everything is moving towards open source and enabling a lot of things that 1015, years ago were really siloed. So I think just getting your hands dirty and figuring out, really casting a wide net and growing your entire engineering skillset, as opposed to focusing on something and hoping to land like a very specific I'm only going to be a 3d modeler type of job really try to broaden your skillset and make yourself more marketable.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I agree with that. Coming out of school, I was already very good with CAD, that was my thing. And throughout the time, I spent really doing engineering work, which was probably the first, I don't know, 10 to 15 years. 15 years of my career I was, I was great with mechanical design, very efficient with my time there. And as as as I started moving out of that role and into more of like managerial leadership, and, you know, heading at my company and growing my my business, I started to realize that, man, these younger engineers were coming out of school these days. They're, they know a lot more than I did, and they're picking things up a lot faster. They're not just mechanical design, right? They're like, they're mechanical design and some electrical and some software, and like having these multiple skill sets, and now I think, well, thank goodness I have my own company, because I almost feel threatened like I couldn't find a job as an engineer. I don't know enough anymore, right? I'm so limited in my niche what I do. But anyway, I just say all that to agree with you 100% that if you could pick up a few additional skills outside your core skill set, that's really powerful for you and your career.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, especially if you want to get onto the managerial and Leadership track. It helps if you're going to be leading a team of cross disciplinary engineers to understand like you need to understand what everybody's working on and how they accomplish their job. You can't just, you can't be leading electrical engineers and only knowing how to design and SolidWorks,
Aaron Moncur:Right? Yeah, all right, Paul, well, thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing some of your experiences and insights with the engineering community here. Anything, any questions I haven't asked you that you think would be interesting or useful to explore.
Paul Vizzio:No, I think you, I think you got this pretty well down at this point.
Aaron Moncur:All right, great. Well, how can people get in touch with you?
Paul Vizzio:Best way is probably just go to my LinkedIn, search my name. You'll find me.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome. Okay, all right, Paul, thank you again for being on the show.
Paul Vizzio:Yeah, of course. Thank you. I had a blast.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
