For anyone deciding whether this is worth backing

My name is Aslak David Schøyen. I live in Drøbak, an hour south of Oslo, and I work offshore in the North Sea as an ROV pilot — subsea inspection, maintenance and light construction, run from a control room with a wall of screens.

I did not get that job by applying for it. I built a small underwater vehicle at home, from scratch, and demonstrated it in a swimming pool. That demonstration is what got me hired. I mention it because it is the one thing on my record that somebody other than me has already tested: a machine I built, which worked well enough that a company took me on because of it.

The job taught me something that sits underneath everything I do now. You are looking through a camera and you feel nothing, so anything the arm has to grip must be built to be gripped — the right shape, enough clearance, tolerances that hold. And you learn to read a failure back to a geometry. A part can pass its test and break anyway, because it was built wrong rather than specified wrong.

The sequence is the same every time. Find the problem in my own use, measure, choose the material, print it, use the part where it is meant to be used, and write down what went wrong.

Testing happens at sea or in the mountains, not on the bench. Tag v2 spent eight months in the water before I called it tested. Rail holder v2 stayed outside all winter. The hook guard is on its third revision.

What failed is listed next to what worked. The first rail holder, printed in PETG, went soft in direct sun on deck and lost its clamping force within hours — which is why it is in ASA now. Recessed lettering on the tag turned out to be a trap in seawater: anything that is a recess becomes somewhere for something to lodge. The printed leaf spring in the rigging jig loses its tension when it is left bent, and that fault is not fixed yet.

I publish the failures because they are the only part of this that is hard to invent. If you want to check something, the prototype log is where to look: build date, test date, material, where it was tested and what changed. Four of the five prototypes have been field-tested. The fifth, the rigging jig from 11 June 2026, is listed as untested, because it has only been on the bench.

Thirty ideas are logged with a problem statement and a status. Fourteen have come far enough to have a catalogue entry. Five exist as physical prototypes with a dated revision history.

I want to be clear about what that is and is not. Most of the entries are small improvements on things that already exist — a hook guard that stays put, a gear tag that survives another season. They are decent products, and they are easy to copy. Four of the fourteen are on sale, priced between 249 and 1,200 kroner. Eleven of the fourteen have a price at all.

A few are something else. The rail holder is not really a holder. It is a measuring procedure and a parametric model that produces one holder for one boat, with no new tooling per variant. That is the part of the portfolio I think can carry a company, and the part I want to be judged on.

Alongside this I print to order for businesses: signage, trade-show pieces, technical parts. That is craft work, not innovation. It brings in money and is meant to fund the equity, but it is not a project and it is not mixed in here.

The commercial assumption is simple. Boat rails do not come in one standard diameter, so mass-produced holders fit approximately. A measuring procedure and a parametric model can deliver a part that fits exactly, with no new tooling for each variant. That is an economy injection moulding does not have, and the same mechanism applies to the rod, the sounder, the VHF and the light on the same customer's boat.

Underneath that sits a question I cannot answer yet, and one I have not found answered publicly in a form a manufacturer could build product claims on: which FDM materials and print parameters actually carry mechanical load in Norwegian seawater over time. UV, hydrolysis, cold embrittlement, delamination between layers, fouling. I have experience from my own parts over one or two seasons. I do not have measurements.

What is unusual here is not the printer. Everyone has one of those. It is that I handle equipment that fails in seawater under load for a living, and that I am used to reading the failure back to the geometry. That does not make the products better on its own. It means I know which question is worth measuring, and that I will recognise the answer when it comes.

I have no registered company. That is the first blocker, and it rules out everything except advice and an incubator place — the public schemes fund companies, not private individuals. I am going for a limited company rather than a sole proprietorship, partly because the schemes require it, partly because I sell parts that can fail at sea and I do not want to be personally liable for that. The cost is around 37,000 kroner, of which 30,000 stays in the company as its own share capital.

I have no customers of record. Some sales, some commissions, no steady base and no reference customer I can point to. That is not something I can write my way out of; it has to be done, which is why fifteen to twenty structured customer conversations sit early in the plan.

I have no capital beyond what the offshore salary can be set aside for. The equity has to be built from there over some months, and it is also what would have to cover the up-front spending in any grant-funded project.

And the part that is not a formality: Innovation Norway does not prioritise businesses that create one job for the founder, or spare-time activity. My goal, the way I normally put it — stop going offshore and live off what I make — matches that description word for word. I do not intend to solve that with better phrasing. I have chosen to build the case around one product with volume potential rather than around a catalogue of fourteen items and a single job for myself.

I hold no patent and I have filed no application. The ideas sit openly on this site, and I know what that costs: Norway and the EPO have no grace period, so anything published cannot be patented afterwards. For most of the ideas that is a deliberate choice — feedback is worth more to me than secrecy. Anything meant to be protected is kept off the public site from day one.

What I think can actually be protected in the case I have chosen is not the mechanism. It is the name, the geometry as a registered design, and the procedure itself — from measurement to validated print — as a trade secret. The rights are to be owned by the company once it exists, not by me personally.

And here is the thing I would rather state than be asked about: I am an employee, and my employer works in subsea technology. Norwegian law on employee inventions gives an employer the right to negotiate over inventions that fall within its field of business, including ones made in your own time. Anything close to subsea — the cable bend restrictor, the light arm, the camera sled — is set aside until I have read the contract properly and have a written clarification. Fishing and boat gear is a different matter, but I want the line written down before I build anything on it. All development work has been done in my own time, on my own equipment, and the prototype log is dated for exactly that reason.

Design registration, unlike a patent, has a twelve-month grace period from my own first disclosure. That clock starts when this page goes live, and it runs per product. It is the one date I have to keep track of.

The order is chosen so that the cheapest and most clarifying steps come first. My employment contract, first: read it properly, and have the clauses on rights and outside work reviewed. Then pick one case to lead with and set the other 29 aside — the advice I have been given, and agree with, is the measured-to-fit rail holder as the way into a system of boat fittings made for the individual boat.

Then two conversations that cost nothing: a free assessment from Innovation Norway on whether the case falls inside their criteria at all, and contact with an incubator in Akershus. Aggrator at Ås is twenty minutes from Drøbak.

After that the company gets registered, with a bookkeeper from the first receipt rather than after the fact. With a company number in place I can ask to be connected to a research group on the materials question — NMBU at Ås, NIVA's research station in Drøbak and SINTEF are all within reach.

Then the part that actually takes time: fifteen to twenty structured conversations with people who have the problem, an honest comparison against the companies already selling into it, and one external board member. Only once that exists do I write an application — for one product, not for the catalogue. Realistically six to nine months out, planned around the offshore rotation. Nothing has been applied for, and nothing has been granted.

I am not asking for money first. Three things matter more right now, and none of them is capital.

An incubator place, because it is the one step I can take without a company number, and because I need people who have seen a hundred of these before. One external board member with a background in marine manufacturing, the sport fishing trade or materials engineering — preferably someone who disagrees with me now and then, and not a friend. And a way in to a research group that can measure what I only have field experience of.

Money becomes relevant after that, and at the size these schemes actually operate at: a start-up grant of up to 150,000 kroner to buy external testing and market validation for one product. Not a loan, not investment, not yet.

If you are a bank, I will say it plainly: today I cannot demonstrate debt service capacity in a company with no revenue. I will come back when there are accounts to show you.