Say you're bashing about in the garden shed, inhaling way too much solder smoke and occasionally letting the magic blue smoke escape from your ICs, and you've finally created the killer product that's going to make you a billionaire. But of course this is a prototype...and you want to get it into the hands of a few people to test.
In the world of corporations, you'd go talk to your friendly system integrator / system builder who would work with you to do a prototype run, they'd see you're "for real" because a programme budget of $50-100k is chump change in this sort of thing.
But you only have a meagre cash pile, and your friends and family have grown weary of your cap-passing, so you only have $1000 to throw at the prototype phase. You'd like at least 50 people to give you feedback, so you're looking at an all-in piece price of $20 (say the components themselves retail for $5).
How does the maker clear this hurdle (and feel free to adjust the $ / quantity figures to something more realistic in your response, but I think this budget is fairly realistic from a fail-fast/cheap-often agile process perspective).
Assuming a successful prototype, one imagines it would be easier to take the prototype into production since you have 50 people who were amazed...Kickstarter and/or VCs would probably be able to help you into production from that point...
But what about the prototype manufacturing run?
Thanks!
