Ask HN: How does one go about bringing a hardware product to market?
Step 1: have capital. Almost everything related to hardware has either a minimum order quantity or is uneconomic at small volumes. So you need to plan to make 1,000 units and pay for them before you receive any customer money.<p>Don&#x27;t forget this is the supply chain crisis era, so you need to make sure you can get 1,000 units of all your parts that are actually in stock and not on 24 month back order.<p>The other comment that says &quot;Scaling a hardware product is probably 10-100x harder than scaling a software product&quot; is absolutely correct.<p>Once you have a prototype you can Kickstarter, but a <i>lot</i> of hardware kickstarter projects fail. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kickstarter.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;115005134554-What-are-the-rules-for-hardware-and-product-design-projects-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kickstarter.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;115005134554-...</a><p>Step 2: you need to be either a very fast learner across a lot of subjects, while spending your own money, or hire some consultants who know what they are doing. I used to work for a product development consultancy, but it&#x27;s a pretty niche market.<p>This includes minefields like UL and CE certification.<p>Step 3: you need to either pick &quot;local&quot; manufacturing, where you can build up a working relationship and they will genuinely help you, or &quot;remote&quot; manufacturing which costs less but you have to diagnose all the problems over the phone or get on a plane to them. The latter is much harder in the COVID era.<p>Step 4: assembly, shipping, taxes, payment, etc; some of the local firms will also handle this for you (and take a cut).