Remote Controls: From Napkin to Production

Solving problems is what my company does for a living. 95% of the time we solve problems by building software. Over the last few years, hardware solutions have entered our solutions tool box more and more. This is largely due to the fact that you can now hook a bluetooth module to some larger device like a printer. You then handle the data processing on some mobile device. Or, we are write software to live on some small-board machine like a Raspberry PI that monitors water temperature or something. These hardware solutions are however, largely integrations, and not actual hardware development.

So when a client asked us to build them a remote control for their interactive TV system, I thought: how hard can it be? This post tries to lay out some of the lessons I have learned while designing, programming, manufacturing, and shipping a custom-built hardware project from soup to nuts.

Like with any new venture, I didn’t know where to start. I know what a remote control is (I use one every day to watch Youtube videos about bad movies) but I’d never really thought about them. Iterative design works in software… so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to just start with something very simple.

Lesson: Just start with something. Anything. Inertia is the enemy.

Humble Beginnings

I sketched the thing out on a piece of scrap paper. In my infinite creativity I took a generation one Apple TV remote control (which at the time I thought was very cool) and traced it on some scrap piece of paper. As Picasso said, good artists borrow, great artists steal. I then used dime to trace the d-pad, and a pen lid to outline the function buttons. You never think about regrets when you start something, but documenting your first steps will make you more mindful of the process. I wish I still had that napkin, or receipt, or whatever I first drew it on.

Lesson: Keep baby photos and napkin sketches. Looking back gives your perspective.

Fortunately, I did keep the first digital rendering that I translated into Balsamiq (totally the wrong tool for the job.)

Surprisingly, this very basic initial start was good enough to get some general client feedback and approvals. Now the real work began. We had to actually build a remote control. We had a few connections in the set-top-box manufacturing world and knew engineers and account managers at two of the big TV brands. So we reached out and asked for some recommendations.

Contract Manufacturers

We evaluated a few manufactures in Texas, China, and Taiwan. Most of them were up for the task, but none clicked for us. We were looking for a partner who talked to us about the future, about innovation, and brought their own ideas to the table. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but we knew that we would want to push the limits eventually, and having a manufacturing team who got excited about remote control technology was a must.

Lesson: Find partners who share your values.

The process was slow. This was not our wheelhouse, but it was a fun, tangible project, with a single, definite measure of success – something that is often elusive in software development. So we pushed on. In the end, one of our DRM encoding partners introduced us to a manufacture in Hong Kong. They were responsive, helpful, and had US-based project managers.

Lesson: Ask EVERYONE for help. The more people you speak to the more likely you are to get valuable signal from the noise.

Learn About Everything

Our new vendor gave us a ton of options. Did we know that there are a huge number of molds already out there? Ones that look almost identical to our sketches? And that we could easily customize them? No, no we didn’t. So they went to work sourcing three or four demo units from other manufacturing firms they were familiar with. This way we could send our client actual samples to touch and feel without spending tens of thousands of dollars in manufacturing prototypes.

They also began educating us on IR codes, button mapping, and materials design. While the learning curve was steep, it was rewarding and edifying experience. It is so satisfying to be able to design software systems in concert with hardware. When your code jumps into the tactile world it is just so cool. Working hand-in-hand with the manufacturers, we threw ourselves into their processes, language, legal ramifications, and communication patterns.

Lesson: Learn how to communicate with your partners from their perspective. Even if you are a client, you will benefit from speaking their language.

Test, Test, and Test Again

We tested a bunch of the molds, shipping them around the world for client feedback. We also spent a lot of time hallway testing (asking random people walking by to give us feedback). We gave them to our parents and grandparents, friends and children, and basically anyone who would listen. I actually met one of our client’s customers in an airport (identified by a sticker on her luggage) and dragged the poor woman into user test. I had one of the test remotes in my pocket, and the prototype TV system on my laptop’s local server. We didn’t give her any instructions. She absolutely loved it. The customer felt special getting to play with something before the public do. I learnt more in those 15 minutes with her than anything I had read online about remote design and TV interactions.

Lesson: If you are not showing your product to clients along the line, you are not doing your job well.

We evaluated everything: feel, weight, button squishiness, response time, everything. This was a little easier now that we had a few comparison prototypes, but our clients were very particular group of people. The company’s owner was to give final approval; he oversees much of final the public-facing products. We sent two finalists to him, that we could barely tell the difference between. After he made his selection, I asked for his team to ask him the following day if he could tell the difference, and he made the same choice. They were extremely pleased with the design and functionality – the owner said:

This is so good it makes everything else look embarrassing
Our Client

Which might be the highest compliment anyone has ever paid me.

Lesson: If you want to do something well, take every part of it seriously.

The Trouble Begins

Once we had approved from the client, we gave the go-ahead for manufacturing. Then the Hong Kong problems started. The protests throughout the metro area brought manufacturing to a temporary halt. Workers could not even get to work. Suppliers couldn’t access roads. The whole city came to a halt.

Then the mold vendor disappeared. Our manufacturer had sourced a ready-made mold from another company. One day, our project manager called us in tears because the owner of the vendor’s company had not shown up to work. No one knew where he was. The political situation had made is so that asking questions was not encouraged. Say what you want about the American political system; you don’t have to worry about your business partners not showing up after a rally.

So the search began for a new mold manufacturer. Unfortunately this meant once again going through the approval process with our client. This time it was a little easier because we had learned so much from the first round. After a ton of time and a huge DHL bill, we finally had a new mold, and client approval. Eventually the factories started opening up again, and we were ready to go!

COVID-19

Then the factories shut down. COVID-19 hit China hard, and Hong Kong with it. Almost as soon as we had started printing boards, everything went into quarantine. At the beginning there was some pushback from suppliers, clients, contractors, and even our project managers. But as the scope of the pandemic become obvious, everyone became more tolerant and understanding. It still added almost three months of delays to the project. All while my developers got to move to the comfort of their homes and continue working. More perspective.

Lesson: Like everything in life, it came down to lots of failure followed by perseverance. Feeling frustrated every morning and swearing a lot are the steps in between. With enough failure, swearing, and pig-headedness, stuff works out somehow.

The two final versions — Down to two finalists

The Final Stretch

The day those first four remote controls arrived in our office felt like we had landed on the moon. We wiped them down with disinfectant wipes and went to work (no one really knew anything about COVID back then!) We did find a small manufacturing defect with the battery connection in two of the remotes, but it was easily remedied.

Then programming began. This went a little smoother due to the fact that my team had done this type of work many times before. We already had IR code programming tables, IoT systems for managing multiple receivers in close proximity and tools too complicated for me to understand that can change the TVs’ or set-top-boxes’ input expectations. It felt… easy, but in reality we had been working on those particular problems for over six years, so the perspective of a thousand small failures didn’t feel anywhere as monumental as the hardware production.

Lesson: Trying new things puts things you already know into perspective.

Where We Are Today

Today, there are tens of thousands of these remote controls out in the wild. People write reviews about them online, and my client mentions them in interviews with international news publications. As a software guy, it continues to be one of those things I’m proud of, and still shocked by the success we achieved from such humble beginnings.

Lessons

Just start with something. Anything. Inertia is the enemy
If you are not showing your product to clients along the line, you are not doing your job well
Keep baby photos and napkin sketches. Looking back gives your perspective
Learn how to communicate with your partners from their perspective. Even if you are a client, you will benefit from speaking their language
If you want to do something well, take every part of it seriously
Like everything in life, it comes down to lots of failure followed by perseverance. Feeling frustrated every morning and swearing a lot are the steps in between. With enough failure, swearing, and pig-headedness, stuff works out somehow. Why do I have to keep relearning this?
Trying new things puts things you already know into perspective

Previous ArticleGetting what you pay for in software developmentNext ArticleYour first week on a job

Greg

I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The Million-Line MVP

May 22, 2026 16:12May 22, 2026In Technology

A founder told me last week that his chatbot understands him better than most people he works with, and he wasn’t joking.

He had been alone in his house for the better part of a year building an app on one of the popular AI coding platforms, and he wanted me to take a look. Almost a million lines of code, one developer (him), no engineering co-founder, no senior reviewer, no nobody. The app had an ERP module, a CRM module, a custom AI agent with a name and a voice, built in mini-games (yes, really), dozens of character personas, a few landing pages, and a small army of social media accounts in multiple languages. He had not yet had a paying user, or even a free one.

He was, by the way, very excited.

(I’ve changed some details, since the pattern is what I want to talk about and not the founder. I see something close to this on roughly one out of every three sales calls now.)

What used to slow you down was the point

Building software used to be annoying for mostly good reasons. You had to hire developers, or learn to code yourself, or convince a co-founder to come along for the ride. Then, you would grind out every line, which would come at a cost (time, money, conversations, arguments, etc.)… basically friction. And that friction was not a bug, but it was like this ting that you are forced you to deal with, before adding any feature, whether the feature actually needed to exist.

Startup advice has been more or less the same for twenty years, maybe more:

Build something small
Show it to real people
Find out what they actually want
Don’t build a million things at once.

The Lean Startup came out in 2011 and we have all been quoting it at each other ever since (poorly, mostly).

This is what we talk about when we discuss “startup discipline”. It’s really not very complicated, but it can be really hard. It used to be hard because building was hard, and now it’s hard for a completely different reason.

How does one person build almost a million lines of code in a few months?

The honest answer is they don’t, the AI does, and the AI has no opinion on whether any of the code should exist.

This is the part I want to sit with for a minute, because I think it’s the heart of the problem. Imagine you’re building a startup that lets local news anchors rent out their unused toupees by the hour (try not to overthink this). You sit down with one of the AI coding tools and you say “build me a marketplace where toupees can be listed by the hour,” and the AI builds it. Then you say “actually, add a loyalty rewards program,” and the AI builds that too. Then you say “and also, add a Pokemon-style mini-game where users battle each other’s toupees,” and the AI starts coding.

It doesn’t pause or ask why, and it doesn’t say “dude, I love your enthusiasm but I am genuinely worried we are losing the plot here,” it just builds the toupee-battle-feature.

This removes the single most useful thing about a good engineering team, which is that engineers PUSH BACK. A senior developer, or a seasoned product manger, asked to add a toupee-battle mini-game to a B2B rental marketplace would slowly take off their glasses, set them on the desk, and ask one of those long quiet questions that means “we are not doing this.” The AI this is a sycophantic drone that has the eagerness of an underfed puppy to please you, and it has no glasses to take off. It also has unlimited keystrokes and believes that every single idea you’ve ever come up with is absolutely genius. At least it tells me that everything I’ve ever written or thought about is pretty clever.

A few months ago I ran into the perfect name for this, which is Slurm Coding. I used to call it AI crack coding, because the dopamine loop is very real, and I have really needed another hit of that good AI crack just one more time before I went to bed on more than one occasion. But Slurm is both more insidious in its combination of addictiveness and corporate outreach.

The MVP don’t change

Here’s what hasn’t moved in twenty years of startup thinking:

Build the smallest thing that solves one specific problem for one specific person.
Show it to that person (a real person, probably not your spouse, definitely not your mom, and DEFINITELY not my mom, and 100% not your chatbot).
Find out what they actually do with it (which is probably not what you thought).
Kill features, pivot, or double down based on what you learned.
Repeat.

What’s new is that step one is basically free, and while not perfect, free is very alluring. You can build the smallest thing in an afternoon, or the largest thing if there’s no one around to tell you not to. Steps two through five still require getting out of your house, talking to humans, accepting that most of your assumptions are wrong, and throwing real work away. None of that is faster than it was in 2005, none of it is fun, and none of it scratches the “I NEED MORE SLURM” build-a-thing itch the way an AI tool does.

So a certain kind of founder just skips it, staying in the build phase indefinitely, because the build phase now feels like winning at a casino while getting unlimited free martinis. The feature ship (how to get them onto a server is someone else’s problem) the codebase grows, the agent agrees with everything. Meanwhile the only thing that actually matters, which is whether anyone wants this, goes unanswered.

It’s the founder version of Wilson the volleyball. In your unwashed isolation, you’ve made a friend, you’ve named the friend, and the friend agrees with everything you say. The problem is that the friend is also the boat, the island, and the ocean, and you haven’t actually left the house yet.

To be fair, I am not above this myself, by the way. I have, in my time, built things that nobody asked for and gotten weirdly emotional about them, but the difference is that mine were three hundred lines of code over a weekend, not almost a million lines of code over the better part of a year, which is sort of the whole point. No one asked for my William S. Burroughs poetry writing twitter bot, but I loved it anyway.

Codebases don’t love you back

Code you wrote yourself CAN hard to let go of, and code you wrote with an AI, when you are not a trad-coder, seems to be way harder. Experienced engineers seem to be more than happy to throw away AI code or rebuild it in a heartbeat. But I can see how even if you didn’t actually write the lines, but the shape of the thing is yours (you named the characters, you picked the voice, you spent months in a chair with this thing as your only collaborator), and you have feelings about it.

But one day, if you’re lucky, and it does have SOME product market fit, a real engineering team is going to need to look at your masterpiece. And they are not going to share those feelings. They’re going to tell you, as gently as they can manage, that most of it has to go. Not because they’re mean (they might actually be mean), but because almost a million lines of AI-generated code, written by one person, in one tool, with no architectural review, is never maintainable, almost guaranteed to not be secure, and almost never going to scale past the “prototype” it currently is.

So what should you actually do?

I mean, I already told you… Build the smallest thing you can, then show it to ten strangers and actually listen to them. Throw away half of what you built and build a slightly different smallest thing, and repeat until one of those things is real. Keep your runway reserved for the moment you realize you were WAY off about something important, because, like, you will be, and that moment is what your runway is for.

Use AI tools, because they are legit amazing. But treat them like a coffee machine (fast, useful, no opinions of their own), not like a co-founder or worse, a slot machine. Co-founders are supposed to tell you no, slot machines whisper “just one more hit baby!”

Greg Ross-Munro