Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E39 Sam Holland | Informal Engineering Collective, the Hardware Handbook, & Donut Hole-Der
Sam Holland is a mechanical and product design engineer whose journey threads through influential design labs and breakthrough products—from MakerBot’s pioneering 3D printers to livestream hardware at Vimeo, and now forging his own path through Informal.cc. At MakerBot, he served as Technical Lead on the Method 3D printer and spearheaded subsystems for the Replicator Z18, work that included patent‑winning innovations in gantry mechanics and extruder design. His move to Livestream and Vimeo saw him shaping products like Mevo Plus and Studio One, integrating sleek form and functionality for the live‑streaming era.
In late 2018, Sam co‑founded Informal.cc in Brooklyn—a freelance collective dedicated to helping startups design, manufacture, and market hardware effectively. There, he blends expertise in CAD (OnShape, SolidWorks), design for manufacturing and assembly, vendor sourcing, and team staffing. Under his leadership, Informal has also launched the Informal Hardware Handbook, a community‑driven guide that chronicles best practices across ideation, manufacturing, and go‑to‑market strategy—rooted in real‑world experience navigating constraints like chip shortages and shifting product timelines.
Beyond the drafting table, Sam brings products to life—some have reached audiences through QVC, CVS, Best Buy, and even Shark Tank. He couples doing with teaching, from presenting hands‑on hardware workshops at schools like Rock Point in Vermont to authoring product teardowns and insights on Informal’s blog—most recently a teardown of a SimpliSafe Keypad and a love letter to OnShape as his “ride‑or‑die” CAD tool. Outside of engineering, he balances his design drive with drumming, cooking, and Vermont explorations.
Here’s a conversation with Sam Holland, where we’ll dive into accelerating hardware careers, cracking the design‑to‑manufacturing code, and even that hilarious “Donut Hole‑Der” open letter to Dunkin’—because sometimes even frameworks for product engineering aren’t spared a sense of humor.
LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samholland-engineering/
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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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Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today we welcome Sam Holland, co founder and product design engineer at informal where he empowers startups to bring hardware ideas to life through CAD modeling design for manufacturing and assembly. With a background at MakerBot and Vimeo, Sam has led engineering teams, guided product launches and holds patents in 3d printing innovation, a passionate collaborator. He's also the mind behind the informal hardware handbook and a fixture in the New York City hardware community. Sam, thanks so much for being with us today.
Sam Holland:Thanks for having me. That's a great summary. Appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur:Well, you've got such an interesting and varied background. You've done some really cool things, and I'm super excited to dig into all of this and share your wealth of knowledge and engineering insights with all the listeners. So let's start with the standard question I always ask, what made you decide to become an engineer?
Sam Holland:It's on my arm, Lego. I grew up playing with Lego. I grew up taking apart things. My parents had a cardboard box of old electronics, and I love just like unscrewing them, seeing what's inside. I never put them back together, but I just had this pile. And, you know, learning how things were made was really fun, and building things as well. And so I got into Legos, into mind storms, building what was on the instructions, and then taking it apart and building whatever my mind came up with. So that was definitely the, like, physical learning tour that got me into Legos, that got me into engineering, and just, yeah, fell in love from
Aaron Moncur:there. Nice. Once you got to, you know, senior year in high school or so, were you already convinced you knew for sure that engineering, that's what I want to do.
Sam Holland:Yeah, I was in I was that super cool kid in engineering club in high school, in middle school, we built a robotic chair with, like a Buick car seat on top of a robot base. It was like an old wheelchair. So I was working on the integration of that, like the hardware in middle school, and then in high school, was like a science counselor, and I had some summer internships that my technology teacher lined me up with with a local engineering firm. So before I graduated, I already knew what it was like to be in an engineering company, designing robots and working with them, and I actually did my first internship in electrical engineering, and I hated it. I was like, I don't understand this. I can't see when things aren't working. And so I switched over to mechanical engineering, and immediately was like, this is this is exactly the thing I wanted. So when I graduated, I went to UVM, and immediately knew mechanical engineering. This is the degree for me.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome that you started so early. I can't claim the same was true for me. I spent my high school days surfing and hanging out with friends, and I didn't really even understand what engineering was until I started taking classes in college. How do you think such an early discipleship within engineering helped you, you know, start your career?
Sam Holland:Well, I think the other side of it is, I've been working. I'm 34 I've been working since I was 16, like non stop. So there's probably some some mental health in there that I should look into. But from the the learning side, it's awesome. It was really cool to see the process, the the team stand ups. Everyone has different roles, knowing that. You know, there's a spectrum of mechanical engineering. Some people are hardcore, like robot people, and some people are CNC machining blocks of metal, and other people are integrators. That wasn't really taught to me in school, and that's something you learn when you're working. And so getting that just firsthand knowledge was amazing. I had a second internship on a CNC machine manufacturing line, and we worked on this fly fishing reel here, and being able to actually design parts and then run down the hallway and get yelled at by machinists for doing it wrong, was like, this amazing feedback loop that you don't really get from, you know, sending parts overseas and getting a DFM report, like getting to see how things are made and helping tweak them was huge. And that was that was really fun to do as a kid. Invaluable.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. It's funny that you mentioned electrical engineering. I didn't start in electrical engineering, but I had to take, you know, an electrical engineering class as part of the me degree, and I hated it. I did not get it like I didn't understand electrons, what I don't know, and definitely to this day, I'm so bad with anything electrical, my team knows this. I'm not allowed within 20 feet of anything that's electrical. It's just hands off totally for me. But mechanical, it just makes sense, right? I can hold it, I can touch it, I can feel it. I get it,
Sam Holland:yep, and it's that intuition, right? There is awesome. And, you know, people make analogies. It's like moving liquids through pipes or whatever. It's lost on me. I have a great friend up here who's an electrician, which has been very helpful. So I don't even touch electrical work, but I found in college I really liked firmware, and playing with programming Arduinos was another like, fun avenue for keeping myself busy and playing with toys. I could never do it professionally, but it definitely scratched that itch of like, the software side is so much fun because you can make things quickly and iterate, and the hardware side is so much slower and purposeful. So having, I don't know, I'm sometimes jealous that I should have done more software firmware work where you don't have to wait for a part to show up in the mail or something like that.
Aaron Moncur:I sometimes think that when I retire, quote, unquote, I'll start learning software and some electronics, and that would be fun. Several years ago, I'm here in my home office right now, and there's a mini split AC up overhead, and it broke. And I'm here in Arizona, and it gets really hot during the summer, so I need this mini split AC. It broke, and I couldn't get a AC technician to come out soon enough, right there, like three days or whatever. And I was not willing to wait three days in this sweat box. And so I got a voltmeter, and it was one of the great accomplishments of my life that I was able to use a voltmeter and figure out, you know, where the the voltage wasn't flowing, and replace a breaker. I had to strip out the what, what's it called the main bus bar in the electrical panel, you know, out on the side of the home. And I was so pleased with myself that I was able to do something that was electrical related. It was, it was a great, great win for me.
Sam Holland:I distinctly remember taking my multimeter out to check something last year and short circuiting, and it popped and it like burned the wire. And I was like, I did something wrong. So I'm glad it went well. There was a
Aaron Moncur:solid 5050, chance that would have happened to me as well. I just got lucky, I guess. But it's great to hear that that you also are not Sparky, it makes me feel better about myself. So thanks for sharing that. I wish I could be Yeah, someday, right? Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about informal. So you are a co founder. You, along with Nate Padgett, founded informal. Tell us a little bit about informal. What it is, why you started it? Sure.
Sam Holland:Yeah, it's, it's an eight year old company now. So we started it back pre covid. Nate and I both lived in New York City. I was working full time at a job, and kind of getting a little bored with the slow work cycle that I had, and fell in love with moonlighting and freelancing, and also fell in love with CAD program called onshape, and I wanted to start doing classes at a local Makerspace on how to use this CAD program. Called up a local makerspace. Nate was on the other side. He and I spoke about freelance, Moonlighting, our love for this. We never spoke about this cat program. Then we met up that night. It was our first time chatting, and he actually founded the company that night. So Nate is sales and marketing go to market strategy. He can run a mean Kickstarter campaign. I'm the guy in the shadows doing the engineering work and building the teams. And it's a really perfect combination of like left and right brain. And we had overlapping folks that we knew in the hardware space. But the beauty is, like he knows these marketing people and creatives, and I know these electrical engineers, and then there's that crossover, and we built this network from referrals. So my favorite example, I have a good friend who's an electrical engineer, and he said, You got to talk to this firmware developer I worked with my startup, brought him into the network, and that's how we've grown up to 450 contractors now, wow, predominantly word of mouth referrals, and that keeps like quality super high, and it's always hard to add new people. But like you know that that referral system has been really powerful for us.
Aaron Moncur:So how does that work? I'm fascinated by the concept of informal. It's a collective, right? So you don't have a whole bunch of w2 salary employees. Everyone's 1099, if I understand correctly, how does, how does the business model work? Yeah.
Sam Holland:So there's three of us full time, myself and Nate and our CMO Lindsay. She was a new a new person. We brought on. She was doing some contract work, and we converted her, so she's our first, like, full time hire, and it's awesome, but it's really the three of us and a few sales folks and contractors we work with building the plane as we fly it. But we have this network of these 450, subcontractors that we leverage, and our job is the middle, the middle work of client and Freelancer relationships. So scoping work, matchmaking and finding the right person, time, tracking, invoicing, payroll, legal, Docs, all the stuff that nobody wants to do and that I hated doing as a contractor I now do for everybody. So there was a pain point. In there, and we accidentally have, like, figured out, like, you know, nobody wants to get a contractor on boarded, a contractor doesn't want to do a Statement of Work. Everyone just wants to go back to doing what they are good at. And we fill that gap. So primary, primarily, we're just, like a we connect dots, we handle all the stuff that sucks. And then I built custom software over the last five or so years that allows us to streamline this process so lots of automations, lots of tying off the shelf, tools together, software tools, and allowing this team of three to manage, you know, hundreds of projects and hundreds of clients and hundreds of freelancers working simultaneously without too many errors. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but we're learning every month, and we fix things, and we have very patient freelancers and clients with us.
Aaron Moncur:That's amazing. Well, congratulations on what you and Nate have built. I think that's so awesome. When you first started informal what what was the vision for the future, and has that come to fruition, or have you ended up somewhere very different than what you expected?
Sam Holland:I think the core vision was, we love freelance and moonlighting and contract work. We don't want to be beholden to a certain employer and stuck in this loop of working on the same types of products. So, you know, there's traditional engineering and design firms, but we're like, what if we did it a little different? Did it a little differently? People reference Upwork or Fiverr as this talent marketplace, and we were thinking of a more high quality and handheld process than that, but it's somewhere in between working with a firm and a talent marketplace. And these existed for the software world, but nothing for hardware. So this was our goal. Was like, Let's build this amazing community, and let's get as many folks on amazing projects as possible. And the other stuff that we're doing around here is also very cool, like the hardware meetup events that we run in 50 cities, I want to say across the world, these are opportunities to meet new clients, freelancers, connect folks to each other, new founders, VCs. Nate runs the studio in in San Francisco, which is a physical location for building hardware. So we have different models that we're playing with and testing. They all kind of connect back to each other and help everything grow and move forward. It's really cool. I had to give Nate all the credit for, like, all these other things, and how He's tying them together. He's the visionary there. I'm really focused on informal, growing informal, building these tools and platforms and being kind of the voice of the freelancer, almost.
Aaron Moncur:What's the benefit for customers, right? So I don't know, device manufacturer, product manufacturer, they they come to informal. Why? Why go to informal? As opposed to going to Fiverr or going to, you know, a big engineering firm, yeah,
Sam Holland:I think part of it is our target customer currently are early stage hardware folks. So these are people who are first time founders. We're seeing a lot of software developers who are building hardware. So when we do new product design and development, we're typically working with somebody who's bootstrapped, who doesn't have $500,000 laying around, where they could tap five firms and have them go right so we tend to be less expensive because we don't have formalized processes and ways that we have to work. So we can put an individual on a project. We can be very scrappy, and we custom tailor what we're doing for each application, which I'm sure you all do as well, right? Like it's not a one size fits all thing. We really see it as how do we stretch the customer's money so that we can then get them a Kickstarter, raise that money, use it for engineering, and there's this kind of timeline in planning that we do. So I mentioned entrepreneurs, first time founders. We work with them a lot, but what we can also do is augment existing firms and agencies. And we do that often as well, where a design firm may say, Look, we're awesome. In industrial design, we do a little bit of R and D. We occasionally need a firmware developer, and it's not worth me hiring them full time, but when I land that gig, I need somebody for three months, and we are behind the scenes, kind of supplementing a lot of these design firms and agencies with that talent so we don't compete, we augment, is kind of how I like to phrase it. And when we talk to different clients, depending on who they are, I have to shift kind of how we pitch ourselves, right? Because we can do so much. But it's never trying to compete. It's just trying to fill in that the cracks between what people might need.
Aaron Moncur:You know, I just realized a great way to think about informal which isn't going to help anyone but me, because they don't know the other side of the analogy, there's a company here locally that they do for manufacturing what you guys do for product design. They don't have a machine shop. They don't run Mills or lays or anything like that, but they have relationships with hundreds of different machine shops, both here locally in Arizona and. And, you know, out of state, overseas, and they know what shops are best at what kind of work. And so when those jobs come in, they say, Okay, we're going to send this to shop a. We know that they're going to kick butt on this project, and we're going to send these ones to shop B and C and D all the way through, through triple Z or whatever. And it's a cool model. And you guys, I just that just clicked for me. That's you're doing the same thing for for product design, yeah, another question I have for you is, I'm pretty sure that there are listeners right now, right they're listening to this conversation thinking, Man, I would love to do some some freelance work on the side. How do I become part of the informal collective,
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Sam Holland:Yeah, so first to like, highlight your analogy there. We call ourselves matchmakers. That's what Nate and I do pretty much full time, is we're not looking at scrolling through a list of 400 mechanical engineers and saying, Here you go. You guys choose, we say, based on your needs. You need a mechanical engineer with onshape experience in the New England area who's worked on wearables. Here are the three folks I recommend, and why. And then from there, we can say this person's also worked with this electrical engineer. So we're going to put them back together. And those links and that kind of matchmaking is, I think, what makes this stand apart. And like we can get hyper specific, we did a wearable product where everyone has worked on smart glasses, and that's really hard to do as a agency or a firm. Either you get too specialized near the wearable firm, or you have a couple of engineers sitting around that you need to keep busy, and you just put the next person on right. So we have this interesting blend where we can tap the specific need and the specific people and build them up. So this project is, like, hyper focused. Everyone's worked on the right thing before, and those are the ones that get me really, like, jazzed. If people are looking to work with us, we recommend going to a hardware meetup first. And that's kind of been our way in, is become part of the hardware scene where you live, make some connections, chat with the organizers. We have a contact us page as well. We've been slow to add new folks, and part of that is just time. Part of that is quality control. Nate's on paternity leave, so I'm kind of running with one arm, kind of behind my back right now as well. So it's just, you know, we try and move everything forward when we can.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the the informal hardware handbook. This is something that you created. It's helpful starting to understand the roles between you and Nate now, because I didn't really understand it before. So it sounds like Nate's more like business development, sales, marketing, and you're more like operations, right? The taking care of the engineering and building the systems internally that facilitate the work, which now makes total sense that I think correct me, if I'm wrong here, but you are the author of this hardware handbook, is that right?
Sam Holland:I wrote, I would say 70% and they did. And we have, like other folks contributing anything about go to market strategy, product, market fit, anything on that side was definitely Nate, anything really nerdy, is probably me, our methodology was. These were articles we had online, and I got tired of repeating myself to a client or different clients over and over. Of like, injection molding takes six to eight weeks minimum. Here's why, right? If I keep saying it over and over, I made up a rule to myself, if I said it three times, I'd write an article, and that way I can shoot them over. Here's prototyping methods. Here's what tooling is, here's the different roles you might need. Here's all the acronyms that people accidentally use in hardware that can be gatekeeping. So we started building these articles out and realizing there's kind of a theme here of educating folks who are new to hardware with this terminology the process. Why is it so slow and so. It's just grown from there. We came up with the hard book, The Handbook, about a year and a half ago, and we have so much more stuff we could add into it. We may do a new revision, or, like, a new chapter. We've been talking about, like, printing one out and making a physical thing again, which is always fun, yeah, and we're always growing resources that we offer as well.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. Is the handbook more focused on, like, a customer's needs and educating the customer about the process? Or is there a lot in there that's that's useful for engineers who are themselves, product development engineers and need to understand some of the technical info, like, don't put chart internal corners on a part that's going to be CNC, you know, that type of thing.
Sam Holland:I would say there's a lot of resources out there for like CNC, DFM guides. So we're not really touching that. I'm trying to touch the the messy stuff in between, which is, why do I need an industrial designer here? Or what is an industrial designer? Can a mechanical engineer do that? And what's an industrial engineer? Like these worlds and roles get confusing, so it's almost like a peek behind the curtain of the process. Things like, how do we apply logos to a product? You can maybe find this online, but you know, one might be a pad printing guide that's way too technical, and the other one's locked behind the paywall. So we're just trying to expose this information. I would say folks who want to develop their skills further, take a look. If you're new to hardware, take a look. If you're hardware curious, take a look. We're trying not to be too advanced in these guides so that anyone can kind of pick it up and learn and find it fun, hopefully nice. And our writing style tries to convey that too. We're not trying to be too like textbook. It's fun to like, you know, make jokes when you can, or be a little self deprecating on things, things like that.
Aaron Moncur:Well, that goes back to the name of the company, right? Informal with the lowercase i,
Sam Holland:yes, which has been an autocorrect nightmare, but still fun.
Aaron Moncur:I actually have a silly question about this. I've noticed this trend. I see it with Michael a lot as well, who I know. You guys work with a lot on the hardware meetups, but not just with him. I've noticed it from younger engineers, generally not capitalizing anything like very little punctuation. I'm old. I'm 46 so I'm it's cemented in my brain that I have to have a capital the first letter of the sentence, and there needs to be a sentence at the end and a comma here and a semicolon there. What tell me about is this a trend that, like you guys, are intentionally perpetuating.
Sam Holland:My guess is it's the phone's fault. I blame everything on a phone. My guess is, like quick chatting slack. I am kind of conversation with languages is seeped into day to day. I'm I try and use my punctuation correctly lowercase. I was definitely intentional. But I do apologize for for my generation, just in general,
Aaron Moncur:no apologies necessary. That's funny. I had another thought. This is a total random thought that just came to me. You talked, we talked about the the hardware handbook, right? Great resource, both for engineers and especially for customers who want to learn about the hardware development process. I've had this idea, and I've been collecting notes for, I don't know, a couple of years now, to write a book that is specifically focused on how to accelerate the speed of engineering within a product development environment. I think that would be, you don't have to answer this right now. I think that would be a cool collaboration that we could all work on. And there are probably some other people in the industry that we could pull in as well and just collaboratively put this, this book, together,
Sam Holland:absolutely like we should. We should absolutely chat. So I mentioned I'm writing a lot of our articles. I do it when I get angry or repeat myself, and I really want other people's feedback and perspectives here, right? And especially hot takes. You know, there's the standard practice on how to do a Gantt chart and few charts, but then there's also shortcuts, and here's when you can take a shortcut, here's when you can't, and people's opinions and feedback and experience on that is really cool. I just spoke with a technical project manager this morning, and he said, I'd love to write an article about the different ways of choosing timelines and delivery dates, because engineers will sniff out if you make up a date, right? Like, if you just say I need it by December 1, they're going to say, why? But if you say CES is on this date, it's three weeks before I need this in hand, there's actual fire lit underneath people's butts, and they get things done. And so just an article about, how do you choose these dates? How do you convey them? What's the importance of them, and how do you prevent slippage? It's similar to like accelerating teams, right? How do you keep everything moving at once and prevent blockages? These are things you can learn, but you learn by doing them more than read. A book, right? Yeah. But then I think the benefit is if somebody like you, who's learned it the hard way, can help other people step up when they don't make those mistakes again. So it's this combination of like, learn best practices, mess up a bunch, learn new lessons, help other people avoid it. The goal is we all get better.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, doing is better than learning about doing.
Sam Holland:That's kind of the name of the game for me. I cut my teeth at MakerBot. It threw me in the deep end for DFM, and I learned about plastic injection molding by making parts that were going to be used, and 10 times better than reading a book or guide or doing a school project about it. It's just Yep,
Aaron Moncur:no substance support, no, not at all. Yeah, that brings to mind another thought here. This is something that we touched on earlier when you started your engineering career at 16. So you've been doing this for like 20 years already, which just points to the correlation between this is going to sound like duh, but I think it's worth stating explicitly the correlation between time spent and capability developed. I had a young engineer ask me, years ago, how do I accelerate the the pace of the speed of my learning becoming a talented engineer? And I think there's really no substitute for just time spending time, you know, you started really early. Another way that people can do that is just putting in more than the standard 40 hours a week, right? Even if it's personal projects, nights and weekends, like spending more time is probably one of the most effective. As I said, having a mentor is maybe another one. But just truly spending more time developing your craft is is almost unbeatable in terms of tools that can help you develop quicker.
Sam Holland:Oh, absolutely. And I think the conversion when I was full time, I was at, you know, Nikki and Vimeo. And in those let's see, seven years I worked on 1235, projects. When I converted to consulting and Moonlighting, I was working on five projects at once, and that is the difference too, is like that exposure to different industries and project types and speeds and requirements was just like a step change for me. Of my capabilities. I got really good at plastic injection molding by making 1000 parts, which you can't really do at a full time job all the time. You're very much like, slowly on a path. And there's huge benefits to working at a company and learning the full suite of engineering and what you have to do to go from concept to manufactured goods. And I think the benefit of like, doing that first and then going into consulting is, then you say, I'm really good at this. I want to do just this section. But folks ask me, like, you know, I talk to new college grads, and they say, I want to do consulting or freelance, and my feedback is, go to a real job, do that for five years, and, you know, get get your butt kicked for a few reasons. One, you won't get fired. That's how you learn. The other one is, like, you just get more exposure. Some people don't know all the different roles that are involved yet, and being a consultant or freelancer, I think you need experience in the industry first,
Aaron Moncur:definitely. Yeah, you mentioned onshape little bit ago. That's your go to CAD system. Of course, you're an expert in SolidWorks as well, and probably other CAD systems too. But you love onshape. Onshape is not paying me to say this, no formal affiliation with them, but I, too, am a fan of onshape, even though, honestly, I don't really use it much, except for our CAD club volunteer program, where we teach some high school and middle school kids CAD. And it's a great option there, because there's nothing to install. It's free, it's all cloud based, and it just, it works. It works great. And they also have really good training material out there for for onshape. But tell us a little bit. How did you get into onshape? Why? Why is it your, your ride or die? CAD tool.
Sam Holland:Yeah, we actually, I just wrote an article about it because I was like, I need to get my my ideas on paper. And then I sent it to them. Be like, do you want to publish this? So we didn't get paid for that at all. We just put it out there. Because I was like, this tool's sick. I talk about it all the time. I started using onshape right before informal was born. So nine ish years ago, we used it at the startup within Vimeo slash livestream. And at the time I was using Pro E, I got fed up with it. Before that, I was using SolidWorks. Was totally fine. Crashed on me all the time, playing with onshape. It was really early, and I just saw like this, this should work. It's cloud based. Two people can work on the same file all the like, weird stuff about CAD programs, isn't there? You don't have to save and, like, open weird files and check things in and out. It's just got rid of all the the friction points in CAD and, you know, it's grown a ton in those last eight years. It's actually feature complete. It's doing a lot more stuff. There's really cool collaborative work and parallel path processing stuff they're doing to, like, rank. Under cross sections faster. It's cool, but the biggest thing is, when I was a freelancer, I had to buy my own tools, and I wasn't going to spend multiple 1000s of dollars on a performance computer, multiple 1000s of dollars on a license to still have a crash on me, and I'm talking to you on a $600 desktop and no graphics card at all. It's just integrated graphics. I run multiple tabs of onshape at the same time. I have a $400 laptop and bring the customer visits like the hardware costs are nothing. I've been in the woods with my wife on a hike, and I exported a file from my phone and sent it over WeChat to China.
Aaron Moncur:That's amazing. That's cool. Yeah, wow, that's a cool story.
Sam Holland:Yeah, I shouldn't have been on my phone in the middle of the wood. That's the consulting Freelancer always on kind of problem
Aaron Moncur:as well. Business Owner, Yep, definitely. But, yeah, I'm seeing a
Sam Holland:trend. I'm seeing a trend with new mechanical engineers where, you know, for a while, it was SolidWorks all the time. And then NX, for anyone in the bay who worked at an apple related company, and then some of the like new folks using Fusion, those are the big ones. And now I'm seeing that market share really kind of widen, and a lot of the SolidWorks and fusion folks are going to onshape, and it's, it's cool to see. And there's companies up here that are using it. Now, a lot of our freelancers use it. I think it's the future. It's been really fun. There's obviously problems. There's problems with every CAD tool. But I think the problem to value ratio is, is small. It's It's the smallest I've seen.
Aaron Moncur:I echo everything you've said. I my prediction is that five to 10 years from now, onshape is going to be the dominant CAD platform. They've done a really great job introducing it at a very early age, right? We're talking high school age. My son is in 10th grade right now. He's taken an engineering class in high school, and onshape is what they use, right? So they're getting exposed to onshape really early, not not just college, but like, high school level, right? And I think, if I'm correct, they push out updates every three weeks, something like that. So it like, very frequently, yeah,
Sam Holland:right, not like, fixed a bug where blah, blah, blah, it's like, here's a brand new set of features and tools based on community requests. Yeah, it's,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, crazy. I have nothing against SolidWorks. In fact, I like SolidWorks. It's what I've used for most of my career. I think it's great. It's been a wonderful tool. I enjoyed using it. I just, I have a hard time seeing how SolidWorks, or, you know, fusion or NX, or any of these legacy CAD systems are going to keep up with the rate of the speed with which onshape is improving and adding new technology.
Sam Holland:And I have to hats off to PTC that when they acquired onshape, I was actually commenting on the forum, being like, Do not screw this up. It was like, John Hurston made a post about it, and I think it was the first one being like, I'm very scared. They have not touched they've been very good about allowing it to continue to exist, and not trying to force things. And, you know, it is a legacy CAD company owning onshape, but they're doing a great job letting it still do its thing. And you and I were talking about bamboo lab printers for this, right? It's, there's a parallel there. You know, why would you buy a Stratasys beast of a machine that requires a technician and locks you into their like materials when you can get a bamboo that does 90% for 10 to the cost, right? It's that same like value trade off. It's, it's tipping pretty quickly into the onshape world. To me,
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, agreed. Alright,
Sam Holland:I think also pay us, sponsor us, great.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, listen up on shape, one of the things that I think you're probably very good at is from experience, not just your own, but from your collective of contractors out there is doing engineering projects on a budget. Are there any pro tips or insights that you can share with others about how to execute engineering projects, development projects for as little cost as possible.
Sam Holland:Yeah, we're getting good at this. We've created kind of our own like methodology, and I think it comes down to good people working efficiently, right? That's a big one is you can go to Fiverr and Upwork. You can get an engineer for 25 bucks an hour, but they're going to take eight times longer. So why not just get the good one who does it right for 170 Right? So there's, like, a quality, high quality folks who know what they're doing, who can roll with punches are kind of our secret weapon. We also, I would say, we're getting good at, like, I'm a big fan of one person per role on a project. Project. I have yet to see a project where I said, like, we need three mechanical engineers in this right now, and that's partially the types of projects we work on, but partially, just like a mentality of the onboarding time and the brain time of two people sometimes doesn't make you move two times faster. It can actually slow you down. And just being like, making lean, nimble teams that can work as fast as fast as possible and communicate asynchronously has reduced cost. We don't usually have project managers. We promote one person as like a team lead, as I said, not duplicating roles. We don't have management layers, so it's just very flat people who've done this for years working well together in communicating.
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Sam Holland:yeah, I think collaborate often, you know, like we we've created some processes that I'm sure other it's not unique to any agency, but like, Id starts Meki and engineering give feedback. Mickey breaks it up, DXF files for the PCB designer work together, like getting those workflows and, like, the order of operations locked into a process so that everyone knows. Okay, I'm doing this now. I'm doing this now and just making sure no one's just sitting around waiting helps speed things up a ton kind of time bounding things, especially on the upfront industrial design work, I think it's been really helpful. I love working with industrial designers. I kind of describe them as a gas. They take up the space you give them, and you want to give them room to explore and 98 but you need to also define that volume. And so defining that in terms of like time is helpful. You know, you have two months to come up with a design, or one month that's been crucial, parallel path work. So when we're doing big projects with agency, like, not agencies, but like crowdfunding campaigns, lining up our collateral early and making sure that it's not serial, it's parallel, right? We get a cosmetic prototype made the same time we're doing the functional prototypes that we can film our videos for the Kickstarter campaign and launch on time. It's just getting good at, like, strategizing timelines.
Aaron Moncur:Is the Kickstarter campaign? Is that kind of the like informal mo when it comes to launching a product is that
Sam Holland:there is no default path. It really depends on the project type, the client type. We've found consumer electronics can sell well on Kickstarter or Indiegogo more often. But I think, you know, Lindsay and Nate can speak further to they're in the sorting hat. You tell them your project, you tell them who you are, your funding. They're really good at saying, okay, build your own website and launch on, you know, Shopify, or let's do a pre launch campaign and go to Indiegogo. Or, this is a perfect Kickstarter project. They're really good at reading those like tea leaves, and I'm learning, but I'm not good at it. But we had a client who's like a professional athlete making a product that's a toy, and so he's got his own following, right? And so that's very different than a client who just has an idea and trying to sell it. We're going to want to leverage his network and his expertise and his background, whereas, just like a mom and pop designing something they might not have their following to use. So it's all conditional. I would say Kickstarters are really awesome and really scary, and we try and de risk it by getting tooling costs, bomb costs, timelines locked in before we launch the campaign, because anyone can say anything on those campaign sites, and it's hard to kind of sort through fact and fiction. And I'd say we did a really good job delivering everything we've done on Kickstarter so far by just being like locked in on timeline, budget expectations. Obviously, things will slip, and tariffs and covid slows things down, but we're getting good at rolling with the punches.
Aaron Moncur:Nice, nice. Okay, we have to talk about the Donut Holder. This is a passion project for you. Maybe more than a passion project, I don't know, but I would love to hear about the nexus of this project. Maybe you can give us a quick summary of what the Donut Holder is.
Sam Holland:Nice. Got the name, right? Okay, zooming back out during covid, things slowed down. We were doing consulting, freelance work. We were working on this excellent project called burrito pop. It's a device you put a burrito in. It's like a chopstick to twist it and you can eat it. I found projects because it's silly, but there's real engineering challenges. There's no metal in this. It's all ejection molded plastic that snaps together. It's beautiful. We spend, like, time on industrial design and branding. This is fun. It's silly, but fun. And that's I love it. So I built my first prototype of this Munchkin holder being like, this would be fun to kind of make one for Dunkin Donuts. I grew up in New England. There's a Dunkin Donuts like, every 300 feet up here. I built one. It kind of sucked. It was funny. My friends laughed about it, and I put it on my shelf back here for six, seven years. And then this year, I was talking to a friend about it, and he was like, You made this thing. And I showed it to him, and I realized it kind of sucked. And I was like, I gotta do this better. It used a rubber band. It wasn't injection moldable. And I was like, I can do better than this. So I started making a new one, and I made 26 iterations of it, and I got a patent on the mechanism. It looks like this. Now, actually just got a really nice cosmetic model made, so it's like the final material finish. Got this really cool deployment mechanism that also holds the donuts from falling. I spent too much time in engineering effort on this, but the Mo was to do this try and get the the attention of Dunkin Donuts, ideally, to license this, but also kind of use it as a Trojan horse to teach people about engineering, like I do silly blog posts, but they're also about, like, iterations. It took 26 iterations. Here's what I changed, or I got a patent. Here's the process for it. So I'm trying to build in public and, like, share this thing, even though it's really silly, it's still educational, I hope. And I would love to do this with other companies too. It's really fun.
Aaron Moncur:I love this project. I think it's, first of all, it's so charming. If you go to the website, what is it, dear duncan.com is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to go to the website and read it. It's It's hilarious. It's so endearing there, and it's funny. There are a couple of phrases on there. Just had me cracking up something about talking about the donut holes. It works with all the donut holes, even the garbage ones, like blueberry or something like that. And there's a quote from your family, is everything, okay?
Sam Holland:I'm calling it my, like, early midlife crisis, because, you know, there's, there's people like, unnecessary inventions where they do this for Instagram. They build four of them. They go to the right the next thing, they've made money off of it. They did the right thing. I'm doing the opposite way. I've made no money off of this. I'm, like, trying to take a product all the way to market with a fundamentally bad idea that I think is funny, and I just haven't learned to stop. But I taught myself how to make the website. So I built that Squarespace site. I'm actually today. I played with packaging designs and mock ups. I'm trying to like fully do the thing, even though no one seems to like it yet. But I put it on LinkedIn, and this is fun too. Like, I put it on LinkedIn because that's where I am for work. I don't really have a social media presence aside from it, and it went viral, which is a hilarious concept of like LinkedIn virality, but like, 160,000 people saw it. It got reshared. It's still getting hits and driving people to our website and my site, I don't know people, I think just want to laugh sometimes, instead of, like, pat themselves in the back on LinkedIn. And it worked.
Aaron Moncur:I think so. Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I mean, to your point, not only has it been a great like training and education for you and everyone who's followed you along that journey, but it's been a great marketing piece for for you and informal, right?
Sam Holland:It hasn't, I don't know if it's yielded anything yet, but I think it's gotten our like, people's people have looked at us from it, which is great. And people were like, Oh, you're that. You're that guy who did that thing, which is always fun. And you know, my dream is, if another ad agency was like, hey, we'd love to work with you on this silly product idea and make 1000 of them, please come talk to me. I would love to do that. I had one conversation with an agency, and they said, Can you do this with chicken nuggets? So there's some need there, which is great.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, you might not be able to say anything about this, but if you can, have you heard from Dunkin Donuts at all?
Sam Holland:I have many irons in the fire. I find it hard to believe they are not aware of this at this point, because I am the most annoying person on the. You did not like poking anyone with a marketing background on someone just accepted my connection, and I was just shaking my head, like, I'm so sorry you pressed that. Okay, I'm gonna flip that inbox. But I have a couple of, like, personal connections, a really weird one that's down and around and maybe to the CEO. So my new move is this beautiful cosmetic model. It's gonna get wrapped up and sent directly to him through a connection of his so it's a little serial killer II, like, I know you are, but that's not my intention. My intention is just to get your eyes on this thing. I promise. I promise you
Aaron Moncur:like it. Pure motives. I love it, yeah, that's great motives,
Sam Holland:slightly spooky approach for doing it.
Aaron Moncur:I don't know I like it a lot. I think it's the kind of move that gets noticed, right? I We had this project long time ago. I did not do this because it definitely crossed the line of that, like, spooky stalker ish vibe. But we had this customer who himself was a bit kooky, a bit is an understatement, and he had us design this, this. It was kind of a cool thing, like, I don't know whoever is going to use this, but it was this, this orb. It was this perfect sphere. And internally there are these mechanisms, and you'd hang it with wire rope from the ceiling, and then you could connect other things to it. Like his idea was, instead of putting a computer stand or speakers or a keyboard or whatever on a desk, on a stand, hang it from above, instead, he's really passionate about this. And again, I don't know that there's much market out there for but it was a lot of fun to develop. And so we had this, this little sphere, maybe five inches in diameter or something, and there was a spring mechanism internally where you could push a button and it would retract, or you could, you know, lift it up higher, and then let go of the spring. They would stay there. You could push it and pull it down, and it would stay there. And so this customer of ours, this is when Trump was first elected president, right? So it was a while ago. He says, I want you to make a gold plated version of this sphere, and I want you to hand deliver it to Trump Tower. Just go there and wait for the President to walk in or out and hand it over to him. And I'm like, Are you insane? Like, a, no and B, if I did that, I'd be arrested, like, on the spot, right? This, like, weird mechanical orb that I'm handing over to the President. Like, come on, yeah,
Sam Holland:that's not gonna
Aaron Moncur:happen. Not gonna happen, yes, yeah, the local
Sam Holland:Dunkin Donuts chains with these and show them off. And show them off. And people are like, that's super cool. The hard part is, like, the cashier likes it, but then you have to go through management, and then upper management, and then regional management, and then, like, marketing. So I'm trying to, like, go around the corner. We'll see if this works. It's like a friend of a friend's friend works for and knows the a person who knows the CEO. So it's this crazy path that, uh, yeah, I think it all lends into, like, the manic energy of this deer ducking campaign. It's like, slightly manic and slightly crazy, but like, still on a leash. And I think the way I'm approaching this delivery is also there.
Aaron Moncur:That's so great. All right. Well, good luck with that. I hope it works out, and I'll be following along to to hear what happens with that effort. All right, let's see. Let's just do one more question, and then we'll wrap things up here. How do you stay inspired? You know, you mentioned earlier that when you were freelancing before informal, you had to do kind of the boring stuff, right, the paperwork and like, the logistics and things like that. And it wasn't the most fun thing, but you did it, and now you're doing that as that's part of your core job. Okay, yeah, so, like, I have to imagine there are times when you're like, Oh man, I really just like, love to jump on, onshape and design something like a donut holder, right? So how do you keep yourself inspired and educated and up to date with latest trends in the industry?
Sam Holland:The Donut Holder is a great example. It's teaching me processes. I'm doing packaging design for the first time, like in depth and learning, like site design, doing my cat flexing my cab brain. I do some client facing work, try and take on one or two projects every quarter and really say no to others. We have much better people than me in the network for this, but I do get to work on client stuff. What I love, though, is chatting with people with ideas and then helping them figure out how to make it happen. Right? Like, I hear a million ideas a year. Some are terrible, some are great, but each time, like you mentioned the orb, I'm already thinking, like, Okay, how would you mount that? And how do you do that? Like, that spring loaded mechanism, sounds so cool. I'm a mercenary, is what I've realized. And I just enjoy the act of doing the thing, not necessarily, if it's a good idea. And there's really cool products out there. And people have amazing ideas. And helping them figure out, who do you need, who, who does what and when, is actually really fun for me. And then I've created all of our software, and that's because someone had to, and I guess I drew the short straw, but that's been really fun too, flexing a different muscle software development is really fun and interesting, different. Yeah, it's allowed me to kind of be creative and build things and iterate quickly, but I'm not 3d printing anymore, so it's a different it's a different use of my brain.
Aaron Moncur:I'm glad you mentioned that. I do want to ask you one more question, so you have spent a long time pulling together different back end processes and automation and and software tools. I'm sure there are people listening to this thinking, I'd love to hear more about that. What are some of the tools that you've used to automate these back end processes? Are there any, you know, a couple of of those tools that you'd be comfortable sharing that had been really impactful for for informal Yeah, we
Sam Holland:so we used, we have this amazing operations person named Ezra, and they helped me learn Zapier, which is an API tool. And then I learned eventually about another tool called mint.com and switched over there. So kudos to Ezra for teaching me this and opening up this world that they were like, be careful, you know, great power, great responsibility. And I kept going. But make.com is amazing. It's an automations tool you can connect, you know, harvest and air table and slack and all these things and format data and push it around. Super powerful. So that's our back end. Is air table, make.com slack and harvest and, you know, ancillary things like QuickBooks, gusto. But we everything's connected to this weird automations core, and it runs pretty well. It's pretty sweet. We are considered building it into its own software package. But every agency has their own needs and workflows management, and I'm sure you've seen it's hard to just like, standardize people on a single thing.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, definitely. Well, very cool. Sam, man, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you for for sharing some of your history and experience with with us here on the podcast. Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you'd like to say before we wrap things up? No.
Sam Holland:I mean, that was been really fun. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Please reach out to us if you ever curious about freelancing, consulting onshape automations, donuts like come find me. I'm perpetually online. For better or worse, I will probably reply to your message.
Aaron Moncur:What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Sam Holland:You can email me directly, sam@informal.cc or find us on our website, informal.cc, or hunt me down on LinkedIn. I'm the guy with the hot dog body profile picture. Okay?
Aaron Moncur:I remember seeing that picture and thinking, is that a bun around his neck? And thinking, No, it must be some kind of suit coat, jacket or something. But no, it's a hot dog bun.
Sam Holland:It's a hot dog. Three other people did it and sent them to me, and I was like, this is a great little micro trend. I recommend it. It helps, definitely helps turn down people who aren't too serious, like, I don't want to work with people too serious. So if you get past the hot dog body we're in,
Aaron Moncur:I love this trend I've seen where people are not being they're not taking themselves so seriously on LinkedIn, right, that instead of the title of like TED speaker and author and transformational leader, it's Tony's is, what was it? I can eat a Chipotle burrito without spilling anything
Sam Holland:like that. I met Tony because I said on one of these. I was like, Yo, can I? Oh, yeah, one of these. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. My friend has one that's like, Uber Eats, top 20 customer or something like that. It's LinkedIn is, is a weird spot. And if you don't embrace how strange it is, I think you're, you're doing it wrong.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to come up with mine right now. Mine's pretty vanilla and boring, so I need to have something that's just kind of fun and cheeky. So all right, well, we'll get there. We'll get there eventually. Yeah, Sam, thank you again. So much. What a fun conversation this was. And yeah, we appreciate you sharing all this with the listeners.
Sam Holland:Thank you. Thanks for having me. This has been awesome.
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 and 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.
