The Ultimate Startup Guide to Product Development
Build, scale, and launch with the 3DEXPERIENCE for Startups
Every startup begins with an idea. An idea that could disrupt industries and redefine experiences we took for granted. But there’s nothing simple about taking that idea and growing it into a successful business.
Developing a successful product means solving design issues, building a team, prototyping and testing. But there’s also so much more: getting investors on board, keeping them excited about your product’s potential and finding your first clients. And sometimes there are the bumps in the road that threaten to derail the whole process—unexpected failures, prototypes that don’t work the way they should, or friction with teams working in different places on complex design challenges.
What can you do to boost your chances of success?
One decisive advantage is facing these challenges head-on with technologies that speed up and improve your design process—as well as helping you secure funding at every stage. You can vastly reduce your reliance on expensive physical tests to get to market faster, and create gorgeous, persuasive investor presentations to get the money rolling in from those very first trade shows. And you can adopt the tools to work seamlessly with global talent on sophisticated designs. Getting to a launch, and beyond, starts with setting yourself up for success.
Agile product development
Lean and agile product development is vital for startups who want to deliver truly innovative products and experiences. You need a product innovation process that balances the layers of complexity involved in developing a new experience with your need to minimize risks and maximize resources. To get it to market successfully, on time, the first time.
Without a unified system to seamlessly move a concept from design to engineering and beyond, unnecessary friction is introduced at each stage of the development lifecycle. Sometimes all it takes is a small bit of resistance — an omission of input, a versioning error, or a manual hurdle — to stop even the best idea in its tracks.
The platform approach
The new industry gold standard is a platform approach that lets you build and customize your product development ecosystem. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud lets you easily connect your team, your clients, and any external collaborators like suppliers, marketing or design agencies.
A key benefit of the platform approach is the ability to integrate design, engineering, PLM and data management in a single ecosystem. Digital continuity saves time and eliminates costly mistakes.
Team members can work on the same CAD model in parallel or one after another, no hand-offs required. Keep your data up-to-the-minute and ensure usability across applications without file conversions or versioning errors.
Going beyond simulation-driven design with ModSim
Integrated modeling and simulation (MODSIM) is a critical competitive advantage of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud approach. ModSim allows engineers to fully experience the product and its behavior in the early design phases, relying on technologies that can accurately predict, compare and simulate multiple product behaviors.
Instead of relying on extensive physical prototyping and testing, designs can be optimized virtually, before the first prototype. Cross-disciplinary teams can work together more efficiently to contribute their expertise to each aspect of the design. Conditions of operation, manufacturing materials and processes are taken into account from the beginning. It’s a paradigm shift in design optimization, allowing startups to shave months to years off their time-to-market.
Scale your processes
Get stronger as you grow
You already know scalability is key—creating processes and structures that can grow with you. Doing more means hiring more people, building new servers, buying new software licenses. All steps that can cause bumps in the road at critical stages of growth.
- Set up scalable processes to stay on top of each phase of business development. Build in project management, schedules, and end-to-end visibility.
- Add seats and licenses quickly for new team members.
- Start small, think big. Adopt a solution that grows with your business, with scalable industry-leading tools and applications for every aspect of product development
Stay in control of your budget
- Cut down on early hardware expenses. Shift resources to cloud computing clusters and add more when you need them.
- Hire only the people you can’t do without. Shift a big part of the burden of server maintenance, upgrades, platform operation and cybersecurity off your shoulders.
- Choose a subscription model to keep overheads low and pay only for what you need.
Source global talent
These days we’re not all working in the same office. Your design team might be in California, your engineering team in Korea and your web design team in Finland.
The new normal is the flexibility to work from anywhere without skipping a beat. You can’t afford downtime if you’re working remotely, and you can access mission-critical data securely in an investor meeting or on the factory floor.
Enhance team efficiency and collaboration
- Hire the best people for the job. Remove barriers to collaboration.
- Keep designers, engineers, marketing, sales, and management on the same page. Keep all project data and models up to date with a single source of truth.
- Take presentations and CAD models with you. Show clients and investors up-to-date content on a tablet or mobile device.
- Add freelancers and external suppliers to your team with global cloud access. Stay in control of access rights so you can securely share content with internal and external collaborators.
Getting to MVP
The Minimum Viable Product—or first mock-up—is an essential step in lean product development, but the initial design and engineering steps can take months or sometimes years.
What startups are doing with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud is speeding up these early development phases to provide early proof-of-concept. Steps that typically take months can be accomplished in weeks. You can test concepts earlier on and get early feedback with capabilities like integrated design and simulation. It also allows you to show investors something persuasive with credible, compelling simulations and visual mock-ups with more advanced styling and engineering.
For startups in the automotive industry, for instance, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud makes it possible create a computer-aided engineering (CAE) model without CAD data. It’s possible to get a full vehicle model up and running within 2 weeks, then sync the CAE with the CAD to refine it further. This can save a lot of time compared to the traditional model of the CAD leading the CAE.
Tackle any design challenge
CATIA is the industry-standard design and styling solution trusted by industry giants. It’s known for tackling any design challenge with grace and confidence. Now CATIA is giving a new generation of disruptors what they need to efficiently engineer products from the ground up.
In the 3DEXPERIENCE for Startups offer, the remarkable design capabilities of CATIA are available on the cloud. Work on the same models alongside other team members anywhere in the world. Take your designs with you on a tablet or mobile device. Design on the go and easily share models with investors and clients.
With 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA you are sure to get the best geometry accuracy for part and tooling surfaces. It also guarantees the highest level of performance even if you work on very heavy models with thousands of features or parts.
3DEXPERIENCE CATIA’s simple and knowledgeware language lets you automate repetitive tasks. Capture and reuse your best practices to make your work faster and easier. You can also create templates to store your intelligence and expertise within specific 3D models that can be reused in different contexts.
Connect your whole team in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to speed through design phases and work collaboratively at every step of the way.
Feature highlights
- Advanced styling and shape designing
- Design guidance and automated design exploration
- Intuitive sketching and modeling on mobile devices
- Generative design for lightweighting
- Class A surface modeling
- Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
- Seamless collaboration across engineering domains
- High performance for any size assembly
- Design for manufacturability
Get to market faster
Simulation IS design. When you work with fully integrated modeling and simulation from the beginning of the design and validation process, the result is greater product insight and reduced uncertainty about the performance of the final product.
This is because you can quickly explore more design alternatives and produce accurate simulations of the product’s behavior to guarantee that manufacturing constraints are respected and the design is optimized to meet requirements. The simulation capabilities in the 3DEXPERIENCE for Startups Offer are fully integrated with design capabilities to help startups develop better products and dramatically reduce their reliance on expensive and time-consuming physical testing. Instead of building physical prototypes, startups are performing simulations and automating design exploration for a much faster process that can handle even complex physics couplings.
Connect multi-physics, multi-scale simulation to your 3D model data to run scenarios and optimize designs quickly and accurately, and set up high-fidelity simulation and analysis even with little to no simulation expertise thanks to built-in user guidance.
Feature highlights
- Multi-physics, multi-scale simulation and analysis
- User guidance and fast simulation setup
- Broad physics coverage for mainstream CFD applications
- Instantly update CAD with analysis results
- Boost computing capabilities with high-performance computing (HPC) & cloud computing clusters
- Works with cost-effective cloud computing credits
- Validated for mechatronics and other systems engineering
Get investors and customers on your side
3DEXPERIENCE solutions include a suite of rendering applications that are fully integrated with your CAD.
These are a simple way to create stunning visuals for events and investor presentations, including detailed digital mock-ups and photorealistic product views.
Feature highlights
- Photorealistic mock-ups
- Interactive storytelling and 360° views
- Explosions to display product layers
- Detailed technical illustrations
- Persuasive product staging
Contact us
Find out if the 3DEXPERIENCE for Startup Offer is available for your business, tell us more about your startup.
For other offers, please visit https://www.3ds.com/cloud/how-to-buy.
Frequently asked questions
To get started with 3DEXPERIENCE for Startups, apply through the form here. One of our experts will then contact you to provide personalized guidance on exploring the platform's various features and benefits. Discover how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can support your startup's specific needs in product development and scaling.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform offers industry-leading CAD software for startups, including CATIA, which is known for its advanced design and engineering capabilities. This software allows startups to efficiently engineer products from the ground up, ensuring high geometry accuracy and performance, even for complex models.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform offers four key types of capabilities for startups:
- Design and Engineering
- Simulation
- Project Management
- Collaboration
These capabilities ensure that startups can efficiently develop, test, manage, and collaborate on their products, speeding up their time-to-market and enhancing overall productivity.