I've hired a concept designer through Fiverr, and I like my current design for an electronic hiking gadget. I plan to take the concept design and hire an industrial designer, probably through Fiverr, to take the concept design and turn it into a design for manufacture schematic and provide me an estimate on cost to manufacture.
All of this so far is with my own money. There's some unknowns for me before I even think of seeking investors to take manufacture and marketing costs. I need to know the cost to product and an estimated how much I need to spend on marketing. I plan on initially buying social media and search engine ads and seeing if I can sell direct to consumer from a website rather than go with retail. But I don't know how to find manufacturers or test the market to gauge interest - why spend money if I can't sell the product. I'm thinking of obtaining early estimate for costs and then creating a website requesting pre-orders or at least emails for product updates.
Are these the right considerations right now? I could use any advice about next steps after I obtain the design for manufacture schematic. Where to I go to learn about how to manufacture something and how to take my idea and bring it to the shelf? HALP!
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