[AdamH12113]

Where are you located? 3-4 weeks seems very slow for JLCPCB. Are you shipping to South America or something?

If you can afford the time, effort, and expense needed to move to China, maybe you should look into working with a local board shop that could provide more rapid turnaround.

The best way to improve your development time is by doing fewer iterations. Often easier said than done, but you should be designing for test and rework and thoroughly reviewing your designs before submission. You said you're making flex PCBs -- have you considered doing fast-turnaround prototypes on rigid PCB to make sure your electrical design is good? What kind of problems are you having that are forcing you to do extra prototyping runs?

[RohKo]

We've avoided local shops due to cost until now, but when put like that, we should consider them now.

Yep we've been optimising to reduce reruns, but the time spent doing so + the lead time is super frustrating. Standard engineering woes I suppose...

[bsder]

If the difference between $200 and $2000 prototypes is material to you, you probably shouldn't be doing hardware.

Hardware has an enormous set of things that cost money to surmount. Packaging, testing, certifications, etc. If chunks of $2K matter, you're never getting over the next hurdles.

Hardware isn't software. It isn't cheap.

[TaylorAlexander]

I strongly disagree that people discerning at this price point shouldn’t be doing hardware. If we’re encouraging people to write software apps on the weekend with the hope they gain some traction, we can encourage pre-funding hardware entrepreneurs to prototype and try to get a kickstarter-ready product on the weekends too.

I do a LOT of hardware and the difference between $200 and $2000 matters a lot to me.

[bsder]

I stand by my statement.

Look at the BeatBuddy. It's one of the most successful projects to come out of the whole crowdfunded hardware thing.

Look at how much money he raised and then how much more money he needed in order to get it finished and how long it took.

If $2K vs $200 prototypes matter to you when building a hardware product, you're in deep, deep trouble.

[TaylorAlexander]

In 2013 I raised $150k on kickstarter, went through development hell and extreme burnout, borrowed an extra $80k from friends, family, and banks, went through more development hell and more burnout, and still failed.

This kind of situation is burned in to my psyche. [1]

One thing I learned is how one might bootstrap hardware on the cheap properly. You can’t launch until your product is perfect and you are actually ready to scale and you have to be willing to charge the right amount on your kickstarter.

So you have to know what you are doing, but I believe a cheap bootstrapped hardware product can be built and launched pre-funding and lead to success. Of course it’s difficult but we all know hardware is hard.

There’s a lot of creative people out there who can’t afford $2000 prototype batches and I want to see what they’re building. The point is, don’t panic-launch early. That’s an excellent way to fail in a very painful way. But that’s orthogonal to how much budget you have. Even a well funded project can launch too soon.

[1] http://www.tlalexander.com/business/