We Design & Build Your Hardware

We design & manufacture
Industrial, medical, & consumer electronics
Small enough to fit in an oven

HQ in San Diego, CA. Manufacturing at our wholly-owned factories in Tijuana, Mexico and Dongguan, China.

Connor Bush

Post-CES Saturday. ✈️

Thoughts from the airport. 🛅

Every year CES shows us what’s new.
This year felt different. It showed us what’s back.

After years of pause, uncertainty, and “hurry up and wait,” the energy felt tangible. Hardware is back. People are moving. Projects are real. Deals are happening.

Yes, there was incredible technology on the expo floor. But what really stood out was where the most meaningful shifts were happening. In the hallways. Over meals. At happy hours. In the conversations between meetings.

Those in-between moments felt catalytic. Real problems, real timelines, real collaboration. The kind that actually turns ideas into products.

Software and AI are still everywhere, (and robot lawnmowers 🚜🤖) but this time hardware is leading the charge. The buzz wasn’t theoretical. It was practical, human, and fast-moving.

For the first time in quite a while, I’m walking away from #CES feeling deeply optimistic about the year ahead for all of us.

Connor Bush 🔋🖥📟

We Manufacture Your Hardware at Scale (USA, Mexico, & China) | Ecosystem, Pipeline & Partner Strategy

Happy #CES Week!

The goal this week is simple: overwhelm our industry with enthusiasm and optimism.

People don’t buy what we sell. They buy why we sell it, and who we are. You represent your company culture everywhere this week: in the airport, at happy hour, on the show floor, at the blackjack tables, and everywhere in between.

At the same time, the real work doesn’t pause. Open projects still need momentum. That may mean earlier mornings, a laptop in your backpack, or sneaking work in between meetings. CES is chaotic ... and chaos is where mistakes can happen.

Not for the faint of heart.
But for those up to the challenge, the rewards can be significant.

Grateful to work in this industry & with our peers. Let’s make it a great week in Vegas. 🎲✨

Behind every email, meeting, and deadline is a human life in motion.

Over the past month, I had to say goodbye to my dog on Christmas Eve and my cat just yesterday. It’s been heavy, but it’s also been a reminder I wanted to share here.

LinkedIn isn’t Facebook, and this isn’t about sympathy. It’s about perspective. Everyone you interact with is carrying something you can’t see.

So if someone is slow to respond, short on a call, or having an off day, try not to take it personally. Life is always happening in the background.

A little patience and grace go a long way, especially in professional settings.

Happy first Monday after CES.

The expo matters.

But in hardware and manufacturing, the pre-show and post-show matter even more.
#CES conversations are fun.

January and February decisions are what determine whether anything actually ships this year.

In our world, momentum is fragile. If we haven’t engaged by late January or early February, most “let’s ship in 2026” ideas quietly turn into “maybe next year.”

The recipe is simple:

Diligent pre-research

Clear, honest conversations during the show

Timely follow-up before momentum fades
Miss one ingredient and the whole dish falls apart.

If we talked at CES about shipping in 2026… now is the moment. For your own good 😅

I've NPI'd in places you couldn't even dream of DFM'ing from.

It’s Friday.

The flu is plaguing society.
Winter storms are looming.

Life is short.

Go outside and touch some grass.
Hug someone you care about.
Watch a show you’ve already seen twice.

Before all the deadlines, decks, and deliverables, remember:

We’re humans first.

Hustle culture has a time and place.
Tonight probably isn’t it.

Your project will still be there Monday.

I'm not ignoring anyone.

The CES flu-pocolypse struck me down yesterday. 

Take your vitamins!

co-founder & CEO @ Beacons AI | helping 8m+ creators build smarter businesses | Stanford AI PhD

my top takeaway from CES this year was...




the flu 🫠

I am registered for the 2026 AHR Expo! Learn more about HVACR's main event and join me in Vegas! https://lnkd.in/gTd8ZC33
#2026AHREXPO #AHREXPO2026 #AHREXPO

Choosing an electronics contract manufacturer isn’t about “best.”

It’s about best for your stage.

If you came from Google, Meta, or Microsoft, it can feel natural to go straight to a Tier 1 CM.

But many Tier 1s now require $25M+ annual spend and even then, you may not get the A-team.

That can mean slower responses, less prioritization, and limited access to leadership.

On the other end, choosing a small, fast, low-volume partner can be perfect early on but painful if you need to scale quickly. Not every agile shop can grow with you.

Too big and you lose agility.
Too small and you hit a ceiling.
Wrong fit and you risk delays or even getting “fired” by your manufacturer.

Often the healthiest path looks like:

⚪ Quick-turn / low-volume CM early
⚪ Overlap with a mass-production CM as you scale
⚪ Graduate to Tier 1 when volume truly justifies it

At scale, diversification matters too. Multiple geographies, multiple partners, and shared volume can reduce risk and increase resilience.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

And the most dangerous mindset in manufacturing is black-and-white thinking.

This is a multi-year (sometimes multi-decade) partnership.

🤝 Choose accordingly.

The EMS ecosystem in Mexico is alive and well. 

AND 

Thrilled to see all of the crazy growth from orgs in-region. 

Curious about nearshoring your production in 2026 and beyond? 

DMs are open!

#EMS #CM #ElectronicsManufacturing #nearshoring

Strategic Business Development Director | Driving Growth & Partnerships

In our Mexico factory today.
Assemblies moving out. Machines humming. Teams locked in.

The photo attached is just Building 1 of 3. All connected. Nearly 80,000 square feet moving in sync.

This is the part people don’t always see. The coordination. The discipline. The repetition done right. Boxes stacked because schedules were hit and quality held.

There’s something timeless about a shop floor that’s running the way it should. Materials flowing. People executing. Work leaving the building on time.

This is what excites me.
Real manufacturing. Real output. Real momentum.

AI notetakers. 

Which one is elite? 

tysm in advance <3

Must work across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, etc.

Planning 2026 event travel.

Where do I need to go? What do I need to see? Who do I need to meet?

Historically, I have done: CES, CEDIA, AHR, TechConSoCal, LA Tech Week, Seattle Tech Week, and SF Tech Week. 

What am I missing?

What are the best shows to mix and mingle with all folks doing great things in consumer, medical, and industrial electronic devices? 

TYSMIA <3

Thinking about heading to #NAMM on the 23rd w/ the homie Scott Cole .

I’ve never attended, so I’m curious to hear from the network.

From the perspective of a mass-production EMS/CM supporting consumer, medical, and industrial electronic devices with factories in China and Mexico, is NAMM a show worth attending?

Is there meaningful overlap with teams thinking about scaling hardware, supply chain, or next-gen product launches?

Would love any firsthand takes. TYSM

I'm renting a car and driving out to #AHR2026 on Sunday. 

Anyone else going to be in Vegas for the expo?

I am bringing the good word of mass production #electronics #manufacturing in China and Mexico. 

Also, going to be playing some Padel at P1 Padel Las Vegas on Sunday.

If you work in the electronics industry, and find yourself in Vegas on Sunday, and want to play some friendly competition with other folks in the hardware space, please drop a comment or send a DM!

I'll be walking the floor all day Monday and Tuesday. 

This is my first time back at #AHR in a few years. I am excited to see what is new and trending.

Sales Expert + Industrial Engineer + MBA

Jorge here from Puerto Rico. I'm an industrial engineer who transitioned to sales. It's funny because my grandfather and dad worked in sales, and I studied industrial engineering to get away from sales, but sales didn't get away from me. 

A few years ago, I grew sales for a startup here in PR from 0 to 3M in ARR (the first Puerto Rican startup in Y-Combinator). Transitioned to working at two venture-backed startups, Reprise and Offsite. 

I just finished my MBA + doing some sales consultancy work for startups in Puerto Rico. 

Happy to talk about how companies' culture affects productivity, Sales, PLG Strategies, GTM Engineering, Team Retreats, SaaS, and LATAM's growing sector for VC.

Right now, I'm happy with my role ias founder of The GTM Engineering Company, which mixes my background in industrial engineering and my 8+ years of experience in tech and sales. 

Looking to connect with startups looking for help with their GTM processes, Clay or CRM work.

Jorge B. Macías 🇵🇷

Having a child created an existential shift in how I think about work and what I'm building.

As a father who keeps finding ways to tie everything back to my son, I wanted to be honest about what's changed since he was born. Becoming a parent has rewired me in two fundamental ways.

1. Legacy thinking

I think about legacy differently now, and I mean that in the most tangible sense possible. Everything I do passes through a different filter. I catch myself asking whether I'd want my son to see me doing this work, whether I'd be proud to explain this decision to him when he's older, whether I'm building something that earns his respect fifteen years from now. I ask myself if this move gets me closer to being the person I want him to see when he thinks about what his dad did with his life, and whether this reflects the kind of focus and commitment I hope he learns from watching me work.

I'm building with clarity I've never had before, and it's grounding in a way I didn't expect.

2. Energy levels

The second thing is harder to explain, but it's about energy and how it's changed since he was born.

Most of my close friends don't have kids yet, so they ask me what it's like. I always tell them the same thing: I thought I was already maxed out. For years, I've been the workaholic in the group, the guy running on what felt like fifth gear with no room left.

Then we had our son, and I realized there was another gear I didn't even know existed. I'm moving faster than I ever have, but it's focused, almost like the stakes being higher made everything clearer about where to aim.

I don't know if that's normal for new dads or if it's just how I'm wired, but having him here makes me want to be sharper, faster, more intentional about what I spend time on.

All of these forces, my clarity about legacy and the surge in energy, feel like they're coming from the same place. It's exciting to be building into 2026 as a father, knowing that what I'm working on now isn't just for me anymore. I'm grateful for that weight because it's made everything feel more worthwhile.

PS: Hope everyone had some nice holidays, back to the grind.

Sales Expert + Industrial Engineer + MBA = GTM Engineer 🤓

I sat down with Sönke to talk about web scraping for go-to-market and how it's become essential for B2B sales. We absolutely loved diving into the nitty-gritties and honestly, it really is not the "dark art" it is assumed to be today.

And yeah, people ask me about websites getting more restrictive. My answer, almost always is: "We'll find a way. We always have. We always will."

In the podcast, we also got into:
(1) The way I use Apify for heavy-duty scraping and how I met their COO randomly at a bar in SF. 

(2) How I use Google Maps reviews. I scrape the worst reviews (1-2 stars), use them to validate pain points, and include screenshots in outreach. It's different from typical cold emails and actually grabs attention

(3) Never trust your scraper on the first try. I manually check rows 1-10, write down what I should be getting, then validate before scaling to thousands. This saves you from embarrassing yourself with bad data

(4) Why sellers make the best GTM engineers. By the way, if you've never done the manual grind (staying late to tier accounts, scraping yellow pages like we did 10 years ago) you won't know what to scrape or why. I tell software engineers who want to break into this space to go be an SDR first.

Always love showing up to nerd out on scraping plays and GTM engineering! I'll link the podcast below so you can dive right in!

Practicing anything new is filled with broken code and humbling realizations about how little you actually know. And GTM orchestration via agents, especially when you're learning it through Claude Code at 2am with more coffee than sleep, is something I'm deeply committed to embarrassing myself with until it clicks.

Took a little inspiration from Matteo to document everything I’ve done in the past couple of weeks. It's not perfect but here's how I've gotten my hands dirty, using Claude Code and clawd.bot as the foundation:

Day 1: I met up with my friend Christian Rodríguez and he showed me a "cool bot" that he built. 
Day 2 and 3 : This was the day I decided to setup clawd.bot for myself. It took me almost 6 hours, and I gave him a name: Batubot (”Batu” is what my friends call me!)
Day 4 and 5 : Tragedy struck. I hit my usage limits both days. 
Day 6 : Met up with Nalin from the Octave team to setup their MCP server.
Day 7 : I got into a Claude Code learning session from the Clay Bootcamp 🥾 and Tanay on how to go from 0 to building (10/10 session, thanks again)
Day 10 : I created a evergreen learning system that takes all case studies from Notion (connected via MCP), as well as my calls from my CRM/note-taker Day AI (also connected via MCP). It analyzed my personas, segments, reference customers, proof points, competitor talking points, and to do a monthly refresh to my Octave platform (my sales context engineering brain) that feeds into my GTM motion.

I feel like my mind is oscillating between complete confusion and sudden clarity, but this is exactly the validation I needed that the direction is right. No turning back now, i am going all in. Feels like the start of the software armageddon, looking forward to seeing what other people build with this technology. Specially in the GTM world. Leaving a screenshot from "batubot" explaining who he is and how can he help me in my day to day. 😅

Today, people constantly tell me "this is your thing". It's one of the most gratifying things to hear during a conversation because GTM Engineering doesn't exactly align with the degree I held right after college.

After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico in Industrial Engineering, I had a few logical paths I could walk: operations roles at manufacturing companies, supply chain optimization at logistics firms, and even lean six sigma consulting if I'd put my mind to it. I guess I'll never know now, but at the time, I knew I had two things pulling at me in equal measure: the energy of sales and the satisfaction of building creative systems.

GTM Engineering blends those two perfectly. I get to architect how companies acquire customers while designing the actual machinery that makes it repeatable. The role lets me sit with a revenue leader who's frustrated by pipeline unpredictability, then walk back to my desk and build the infrastructure that solves it. 

Every system I create gets validated immediately by whether or not it generates revenue, which means I'm constantly building things that matter (while staying close to the conversations that drive business forward!)

The alignment wasn't apparent to me straightaway, but I can now say it lies in what I call my "zone of genius."

So, if you're trying to locate that zone for yourself and don't want to spend years wandering through roles that drain you, focus on two things:

1. Identify the moments when you lose track of time because you're so absorbed in what you're doing. That feeling is your compass.

For me, it showed up when I'd spend hours designing a sales workflow that eliminated friction, then get energized rather than exhausted by the process. Those moments reveal what you're naturally wired to excel at.

2. Pay attention to which compliments feel most meaningful when you receive them. When someone says "you're really good at this," notice which praise makes you sit up straighter vs. which feels hollow.

The genuine ones point directly at your strengths, while the empty ones signal skills you've developed out of obligation rather than inclination.

As a non-neutral observer who's seen how this alignment can transform a career, I'm rooting for you.

PS: throwback pic to graduation day back in 2017 (don't do the math please)

Podcast appearances are becoming my favorite way to think out loud about the work I actually do. There's something clarifying about sitting down with someone who asks the right questions and forces you to articulate the decisions you make every day without even realizing it.

The latest one with Charles Brun on the GTM Hackers I talked through my entire journey, from:

(1) Scrapping yellow pages 7+ years ago to have a CRM-ready database to call into (no more manual inputs, plus ∞ leads)

(2) Finding my passion inside the GTM Engineering process and going all-in into building my own agency: The GTM Engineering Company

(3) Building cool projects like scrapping github repos as a strong firmo-graphic signal, leveraging bad reviews + introducing them into outreach for better reply rates and using clay to take a bunch of personal emails from inbounds and finding the appropriate work email & accounts to check if the sales team should reach out.

We spent time on the emotional side of closing deals and creating value from scratch, which still feels meaningful to me years later because every deal represents something you built that didn't exist before.

Most of the conversation centered on ROI, workflow design and the tradeoffs that come with building complex automation systems for GTM and ops use cases. I also shared a live client example for a Series A startup, where the core question became whether to plug new process into an existing enrichment workflow or build a separate parallel system! (Super insightful segment, I might add!).

Loved how Charles explained that "GTM Porn" you know, the super complicated workflows that are showed here on linkedin all the time, and how those processes create "single points of failures" in GTM orgs. If someone leaves, a whole "complicated" process goes out the door with them.

I've learned to slow down and ask questions about what's broken before designing anything, which sounds obvious but gets skipped more often than it should.

This was, probably, my most unfiltered appearance yet, and I loved getting to speak openly about the messy reality of this work instead of just highlighting the wins.

I'm fortunate to work in an industry where relationships can operate on what I call a Reciprocal Partnership Engine, where the person who hires you today might be the person you hire tomorrow, and both arrangements feel completely natural.

Six to nine months ago, Joe hired me as his go-to-market engineer. He led strategy while I handled execution across five different healthcare & health-tech projects.

We ended up working on multiple projects where Joe owned the client relationships and the strategic positioning. I built everything in the background, but the spotlight was his.

Then recently, I brought in a new client, and instead of handling everything myself, I hired Joe to lead the strategy while I focused on building. The hierarchy inverted completely. I'm now the one owning the client relationship, and Joe is coming in as my healthcare strategist.

The difference between transactional partnerships and reciprocal ones comes down to trust that's been built through repeated execution. Helping someone deliver great work costs nothing beyond your time and expertise, and when both people operate with that mindset, the question of who's in charge stops mattering.

If suing someone is on your 2026 bingo card, and you can't find a reliable Harvey Specter to file charges, this video is for you (with a little sprinkling of GTM Engineering wizardry)

I'm assuming the first place you'll look is either G2 or any other traditional review platform, which leads to nothing because customer feedback for law practices simply doesn't exist there.

So you turn to Google Maps, where reviews do exist, only to get slapped in the face with another problem: the reviews are scattered across hundreds of individual location pages, and you can't find a scalable way to pull patterns from them or turn them into actual qualification criteria

That’s exactly what happened with a client of mine that sold into lawyer offices, and here’s how I tackled the issue:

I started by using Clay's business review enrichment tool. It took each law practice's company name and domain and returned their Google Maps location, which gave me the anchor point for the next step: review scraping.

I then headed over to Apify and fired up their scraper. To get it running, I needed my API key, some configuration, and the Google Maps links I got from Clay. I set a limit of 10 reviews per practice to keep things manageable, and I made sure to only collect English-language reviews to keep the results clean.

After the scraper did its thing, I ended up with the worst 10 reviews for each law practice, which I merged into one single text block. This consolidated feedback became the input for a special OpenAI prompt (using their API key to save on credits).

The prompt analyzed the reviews and flagged four common issues: poor customer service, communication problems regarding costs, inefficiencies in their operations, and other negative patterns that matched my client’s concerns.

After some tweaking here and there, I had a qualified list based on real customer pain points, and every insight came from the practices' own Google Reviews which we could use for email/linkedin campaigns.

If you want to set something similar up without getting your hands dirty with Clay or Apify, just send me a message. But if you’re up for figuring it out yourself, check out the full video breakdown, and don’t hesitate to reach out when you hit a snag!

PS; this video was recorded months ago, the beard thing didn't really fit my style 🧔🏻‍♂️

I tried two big marketing experiments this year, both with high hopes. One was AI SEO, and the other was sharing content on LinkedIn. I learned a ton from diving into both, and if you’re thinking about doing something similar next year, I'm sharing my 2¢ with you:

My biggest bet this year came from listening to the AI SEO hype cycle. I invested heavily in AI-generated content, built out topic clusters targeting long-tail keywords, optimized for featured snippets, created a blog website and spent weeks fine-tuning our domain authority strategy. Sadly, the leads never materialized with the quality our pipeline needed, right now. No biggie, I am playing the long game here. 

I realize now that I was building for 2026, when the ecosystem matures, while my business needed results in 2025.

Posting on LinkedIn has delivered something different. My content gets genuine engagement, people stop me at events to mention posts they remember, and the visibility has opened doors I didn't expect. What hasn't happened is the flood of inbound pipelines I'd convinced myself would follow naturally from consistent posting. The channel has proven far more valuable than SEO for building relationships, which is why I'm giving it more time to develop rather than cutting it entirely. I probably lean into this more because I genuinely enjoy the writing process!

I'll still be focusing on these channels, and it will be exciting to see how they evolve.

Pulled out one of my earliest videos from the vault for anyone who might find it useful to create a targeted outreach system for their LinkedIn connections.

This platform has been the most generous to me in terms of real engagement, and playing around with workflows like this has given me the most outsized returns in sales.

You can watch the whole video if you want the full breakdown, but here's the flow of what I built:

1. Downloaded all my LinkedIn connections data from LinkedIn's data and security section (exports as a CSV)
2. Imported that data into Clay
3. Segmented connections by job function (in this case, marketing roles: brand, content, social media, etc.)
4. Enriched each connection with real-time intelligence about whether their company is running LinkedIn ads
5. Personalized outreach based on that intelligence (adding a P.S. line if they're actively running ads)

The roadblock I hit was that I needed a personalization hook that would make my outreach feel researched and relevant. For marketing people specifically, knowing whether their company is actively running LinkedIn ads gives me the perfect opening for my message. If they're running ads, my offer around GTM systems and workflow automation immediately becomes more relevant to their day-to-day work.

I had to programmatically check if companies are running ads without doing it manually. LinkedIn has a public ads library where companies have to disclose their active ads.

Then, I reverse-engineered the URL structure and realized it follows a simple pattern: "link/companyname" The trick was that spaces in company names need to be replaced with a plus sign for the URL to actually work (figured this out after trial and error, of course). For example, "Acme Corporation" became “Acme+Corporation". I suddenly had a way to generate valid URLs for every company in my list at scale.

For anyone starting out in outbound, whether you're an SDR, a founder doing your own prospecting, or someone building GTM systems, this kind of workflow can change how fast you move.

If you want the Clay template to play around with it yourself, let me know!

PS; there are now some more powerful enrichments in clay to do this even more easy

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