Sayonara 2024. Hello 2025!
2024 was a year of growth and learning, for both us and the greater hardware community. The positives (like our epic Hardware House Party at CES, internal process improvements, and community expansion) were offset by the rough hardware landscape and anxiety/anticipation for 2025. But overall, 2024 was a year of growth, and perhaps most importantly, it was the year we grew up as a company and community. That includes our two sibling projects, Hardware Meetup and Studio 45.
Our Hardware House Party at CES in 2024 was epic!
informal by the numbers
We added 121 hardware professionals to the informal community in 2024 and now have members in over 20 countries around the world and in nearly all 50 states in the US.
We have informal members in 20 countries
120 informal members logged just shy of 20k hours working with 100 hardware companies across 13 industries ranging from consumer goods to aerospace. They earned over $3 million for their efforts.
Among the 275 projects informal members engaged in, five included successful crowdfunding campaigns that raised $2 million for our clients. Shout out to Inku, Boppo, and Mola Structural Engineering Kits in particular!
Inku Calendar was one of our breakout go-to-market projects in 2024
2024 was a really rough year for hardware agencies (as informal member and client Sean McBeath found in his excellent Hardware Agency Report), so a big focus for us this year was on supporting that community. 10% of hours logged by informal members in 2024 were spent supporting hardware engineering and product design firms.
informal clients in the news
It was a buzzy year for informal clients. From viral videos to TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2024, products informal members helped bring to life were all over the internet.
Burrito Pop went viral on Youtube not once but twice, first with Sorted Foods then with Good Mythical Morning. They racked up over 1 million views and nearly sold out all of their inventory!
One of our EV charging clients, Voltpost, was featured in both Forbes and The Verge for their recent partnership with AT&T to bring their lamppost chargers to Michigan. Clip was on the late show with Seth Meyers, and our longtime client Tomorrow’s launch got picked up by The Verge, Green Queen, The Spoon, and GeekWire. Stakt (the only yoga mat you’ll ever need) was even featured in Good Morning America’s 2024 gift guide!
We even had two clients on the TIME Magazine Best Inventions of 2024 list! Harbor was recognized for their failsafe baby monitor (Wired also said it is the best baby monitor for peace of mind), and Aescape was honored for their robotic massage experience.
informal systems
Sam built an incredible platform that allowed us to stay lean while supporting a huge number of members and clients at once.
It helped us achieve a 60% win rate in 2024, with an average time from first conversation to project kickoff in just 2 weeks. We move quickly!
We see lot of potential for large language models and AI agents
Technology like this has allowed us to stay super lean, enabling us to achieve all of this with a full time team of just two (me and Sam) and a handful of collective members (especially Lindsey, Diana, Suzanne, Goli, Jeff, Bernadette, and Bill). We see enormous opportunities to continue being lean and fast by incorporating the latest large language model technology.
Our goal is to keep growing our number of clients, members, and projects without simultaneously growing our internal headcount to support them.
Building our content engine
We’ve always published blog posts and email updates, but we found our voice in 2024 thanks to Lindsey Gideon (marketing genius) and Goli Mohammadi (editor and world class copywriter). In addition to the client and member spotlights we’ve been publishing for years, the team has been cranking out awesome guides, thought pieces about building hardware, and product teardowns with informal members and friends that are resonating with the community.
Reaction to our Wyze doorbell camera teardown proved the appetite for this type of analysis.
To expand the scope and focus of our content, we’ve partnered with other brands and informal members on weekly pieces. Sam had a blast tearing down the Wyze doorbell camera with informal member Jim Griszbacher, and our friends at Retail Bound dropped some knowledge on selling hardware to big-box stores ahead of the holidays. We even launched a podcast about tradeoffs inherent in hardware development with informal member Chris Rill.
Our favorite releases this year were the handful of free resources we built for the hardware engineering ecosystem, like the Hardware Handbook, CMF Database, and Amortization Calculator. These tools have helped our team and members work faster and smarter, and we hope they help other hardware teams too. 
We have a lot planned on the content front for 2025 and can’t wait to share them with you. There’s a real thirst for hardware knowledge and content in the world right now, and we aim to quench it. If you’d like to contribute to the informal blog, newsletter, or growing library of free tools and resources, email hello@informal.cc. We’d love to hear from you!
Hardware Meetup
Core to the mission of informal is to foster a strong and thriving hardware community. A key way we do that is with Hardware Meetup, a global community of hardware professionals that meet in cities around the world.
Hardware Meetups are happening all over the US and the world.
We started 2024 with 20 cities and less than 20k people in the Hardware Meetup network. As we close out the year, we’ve grown to 35 cities and over 35k members.
We hosted over 150 events this year in major metropolitan cities like San Francisco, New York, and London, as well as in up-and-coming hardware cities like Portland and Munich, Germany. Local organizers are hardware founders, agency owners, and other leaders with a vested interest in building a thriving hardware ecosystem in their communities.
We recently celebrated the end of 2024 with coast-to-coast Hardware Holiday parties
Shout out to Michael Raspuzzi, David Anderson, Christina Perla, Paul Vizzio, Anthony Dzaba, Sera Evcimen, Victoria Dower, Nathan Nalevanko, Anatoliy Dzhuga, Jennifer Buehler and the 60+ other organizers who helped bring the hardware community together in their cities.
Studio 45
While informal has perfected remote hardware development, there are times when it’s most efficient for a hardware team to meet in person for a build, hardware bring up, or testing in real life. That’s why we started Studio 45 in 2022: to give hardware founders, teams, and professionals physical space and access to the tools and other physical resources hardware requires.
Studio 45 is the home of hardware professionals in San Francisco.
Traditional coworking spaces aren’t built with people who build real things in mind, and makerspaces aren’t built for professionals. Studio 45 solves for both with a physical workspace, cutting edge tools, and a thriving in-person community in San Francisco, the white hot center of hardware in the US.
What started as a single location in the Mission District grew to 2 locations in San Francisco in 2024. Our second location, Studio 55, is in the South of Market (SoMa) district, near tons of hardware development agencies and startups, and a short walk from Hayes Valley, the epicenter of the AI boom in the SF.
Studio 55 has become a buzzing hub for the hardware community.
Today, Studio 45’s two locations give 150 hardware professionals and 40 companies access to ample shop and office space to build; state-of-the-art tools for 3D printing, machining, electrical prototyping, and more; and warehouse space for light fulfillment of initial customer orders. Studio 45 members also get exclusive discounts on informal services, and the spaces have become focal points for the hardware community in the SF Bay Area.
Here’s to a new year
As we close out 2024 and look forward to 2025, we’re energized by all of the momentum and learnings from the previous year. 2024 was the year we strengthened our collective foundation across all of our initiatives, all in service of building a thriving hardware ecosystem that will shape the future of technology. We couldn’t have done it without our members, clients and community at large, so THANK YOU for believing in us and helping to support our mission.
Here’s to 2025 and building on the momentum of 2024! We’ll be at CES again in January, so if you’re reading this and would like to meet up, shoot us a note: hello@informal.cc
We may have a few secret events to invite you to 😉
informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware and hardtech. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market, informal has the perfect collection of people for the job.