I have a half-baked product in the making for 4 years but never had enough time (and skill) to fully make it, every time I asked potential customers all of them wanted it right away except I could not finish it. Tried to apply for HN to no avail. I just need some investment(500K should do it in one year) to hire one or two developers to help to ship the product really, but I don't know how, which is why I'm back to work full time these days.
Do it in your spare time without burning so much capital. As much as YC wants you to think otherwise, VC money isn't some magical gatekeeper to innovation. Just build.
I'm fairly technical myself, mostly I need someone good at frontend(vuejs), where I need help to design nice UI for the (embedded device) product. I spent my own time learning vuejs but, not as fast as I wanted so far, I am a low level developer coding in c/c++ basically. I have been thinking about hiring a (cheaper) overseas vuejs3 developer for a while using my own money, the reality is that, hiring is more challenging than learning vuejs, so I stuck with the latter, but, it's slow.
Hardware is an order of magnitude (or nine, twelve) more difficult than a software startup. Expensive rev'ing, long turn arounds, supply chain mayhem, overseas production, profits thinner than the paper they are printed on.
The hardware graveyard of kickstarter is chock full of dreamy eyed hardware guys for good reason.
Understood, my model is to buy existing solid hardware in volume based on orders received and load them with my own software(and UI) for certain vertical markets. Making hardware is a totally different market where cash burning is real and fast, small players simply can not afford.
