I'm currently a Venture Partner & Product Advisor at Antler.co as well as an advisor at multiple leading accelerators in Stockholm. I also run The-Bakery.se who invests in and supports Hardware Enabled startups post-pre-seed in the Nordics.
My primary expertise is within new product development and international partnerships though I have an engineering background.
The products & businesses I’ve worked on have been ~50/50 B2B vs B2C. And ~50/50 pure digital services vs physical products. Physical products being mostly consumer electronics including industrial design & interaction, manufacturing & distribution.
If I were to name drop one company in the startup context, it would be Spotify where I was Product Manager & Program Road Manager on areas such as Home Hardware, Intro of Podcasts including Creator Analytics and Intro of Original Video Content/Shows.
I would first define the core value proposition of your business/offering to your users and then understand how dependant that is upon a custom device. Even if you plan to build it from scratch, you will want to learn as much as possible which probably means contacting device makers and even using other OTS (off the shelf) products that help you to test your value prop and iterate it with actual users in the right context.