What Most Founders Miss When Building Their First Product

Thirteen years ago, I was directing a video shoot for a classical orchestra. I needed one specific drone shot: a perspective from the first violinist, looking up the neck of the instrument from inside the orchestra itself.

The problem was that drones were too noisy. Most of that noise was coming from the vortices at the tips of the propeller blades. If I wanted to use a drone in a classical music performance, I needed to eliminate that noise entirely.

So I asked myself a question that would change my life: What would a tipless propeller look like, and how would it function?

At the time, I didn’t have a mechanical engineering degree, nor had I worked in aerospace or defense. I had a degree in classical composition and was in my fifteenth year as an executive producer and director, focusing on broadcasting live orchestra performances. But I grew up around engineers, and I understood how to test, iterate and challenge assumptions.

My first attempt at what would eventually become the Sharrow Propeller was built with duct tape and a drill.

Eventually, after more than 641 3D printed prototypes, I developed a design that outperformed the Wageningen B-series screw in my test tank. That breakthrough marked the beginning of five years of code development, hydrodynamic analysis and data collection.

Today, we’ve sold thousands of propellers around the world. We hold more than 200 patents globally, and our patented loop-blade design is now being adapted for recreational, commercial, government and defense applications.

But this isn’t a story about propellers. It’s a story about how to build your first product in a way that doesn’t limit your second, third or tenth.

Most startups focus on dominating a niche. We built our company to move far beyond one. Creating something groundbreaking is half the battle. The bigger challenge is building it in a way that doesn’t box you in later. From the beginning, I believed the underlying concepts behind the Sharrow Propeller had applications far beyond recreational boating.

If we made decisions based only on our first market, we would have been closing the door on defense, aviation, electric propulsion and commercial shipping before we even knocked.

So we approached the development of the core code and geometry that drives the Sharrow Propeller with long-term scalability in mind — not scale in volume, but scale in vision.

Invent for a category, not just a product

We started in marine, but the goal was always bigger than boats.

The Sharrow Propeller solved a rotary propulsion problem. Tip cavitation and vortices weren’t marine issues. They also exist in drones, pumps, turbines, HVAC systems, and many other forms of propulsion.

We recognized that early and made sure our technology stack and design philosophy could evolve into other applications. That shift in mindset was critical. We stopped thinking of the technology as a single product and started treating it as a platform.

If you build your product to solve a category-wide inefficiency, expansion becomes part of your origin story instead of a future pivot.

Build your patent strategy like a product roadmap

Today, we hold more than 200 patents across 14 countries. Many of those patents were filed before we had a single customer. That may sound aggressive, but it was intentional.

Our intellectual property strategy was never about protecting what we had already built. It was about creating future leverage for markets we knew we would eventually enter.

Filing patents early forced us to think more broadly about what we were inventing. It gave us a framework for exploring future use cases while creating defensible lanes in industries we had not yet entered.

Think carefully about every market where your invention could create value. Start protecting that territory before the world fully understands what you’ve built.

Design for modularity from day one

Our loop-blade geometry was intentionally designed to function across a wide range of operating conditions.

Whether we are producing a small propeller for a trolling motor or a larger version for a commercial vessel, the underlying principles remain the same.

That was not accidental. Modularity was an early design priority.

Thinking modularly enables faster scaling, more efficient manufacturing, and greater adaptability over time.

You do not need ten product versions at launch. You need to build the first one in a way that allows the next versions to emerge naturally.

Brand for the market you haven’t entered yet

I didn’t name the company Sharrow Marine. I named it Sharrow Engineering. That single decision gave us room to expand into defense, aerospace, electric propulsion and other advanced technology sectors.

Your first market should not define your company forever. Pick a name, mission and identity that leave room for growth.

If your technology has the potential to serve multiple industries, your brand should be able to move with that vision. Your company should grow at the pace of your ambition.

Solve a pain point that crosses industry lines

For more than a century, marine propulsion saw very little innovation in propeller design. In part, that was because people stopped questioning the limitations they had learned to accept.

Noise, lost efficiency, vibration, poor handling — these were treated as unavoidable tradeoffs instead of solvable engineering problems.

But those same issues appear in nearly every propulsion-dependent industry. When you solve a problem that entire industries have normalized, people pay attention.

Don’t just build to fit your market. Build to outgrow it.

From the beginning, our product was designed to become more than a marine propeller.

That meant thinking differently about patents, company structure, branding, software development and manufacturing long before the market fully understood where we were going.

At the time, we were still operating out of a small lab in Philadelphia. But the vision was always larger.

If you are building your first product, think carefully about what it unlocks. Your first market is not your finish line.

Do not build to fit your market. Build to outgrow it.

Thirteen years ago, I was directing a video shoot for a classical orchestra. I needed one specific drone shot: a perspective from the first violinist, looking up the neck of the instrument from inside the orchestra itself.

The problem was that drones were too noisy. Most of that noise was coming from the vortices at the tips of the propeller blades. If I wanted to use a drone in a classical music performance, I needed to eliminate that noise entirely.

So I asked myself a question that would change my life: What would a tipless propeller look like, and how would it function?