[raphman]

Actually, there are a number of online shops that you can ask to manufacture and/or sell your design, e.g. [1,2].

However, manufacturing electronics in low quantities is quite expensive. Additionally, in order to legally sell this stuff in the EU, you need to get a WEEE certificate (i.e. someone needs to take care of recycling or disposing of your product) and a CE certificate (compliance to all regulations). And you cannot easily fix a bug in your board design or even the firmware, once the product has been shipped to the customer. You have to get it right on the first try.

I agree that it has become relatively easy to start a hardware company. However, compared to a software startup, you need to invest a lot of money upfront. And so much more can go wrong that you have little control over.

I don't know a lot about startup economics but I have closely followed the fates of a number of hardware startups. For example, the Pandora guys got screwed over by different manufacturers, costing them a lot of time, money, and goodwill. WakeMate shipped dangerously defective USB chargers they had to replace. OpenMoko just did not find enough potential buyers for their phones (and screwed up in other ways).

Hardware startups do not fail because of a lack of prototyping tools.

[1] http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/ [2] http://www.sparkfun.com/