@deathbird said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Having two (I think) brilliant product ideas and having no clue how to get any ball rolling on it even after googling and reading some stuff about inventions, prototyping, etc. Clearly not entrepreneur material right here.
*puts on "hi, this is literally my day job" hat*
That depends a lot on what the product is, and how much prototyping you need.
Let's say it's an electronic device of some kind. You'll probably want to build an NFF version to start—NFF meaning Non Form Factor, i.e., something that's just bare electronics and enough mechanical pieces to cover any necessary bits of the system. Just enough to prove that your idea is technologically feasible at least in theory.
So you'd get a devkit from one of the SoC (System on Chip) manufacturers; a Nordic nRF52 or whatever. Or if you're planning to go with, say, embedded Linux, it's probably easiest to just go grab a Raspberry Pi 3 to start out with for your main processor, even if you might move to a different SoC for the final product. (Unless you need GPU acceleration for some kind of calculations, in which case, the Nvidia Jetson Nano is a frighteningly capable system.)
Then you'd want a good quality 3D printer to print any mechanical pieces you need, and do it yourself. Alternatively, find your local collective makerspace, get a membership, and go use their equipment; out here in Seattle we have Metrix Create:Space, for instance.
If it's something that's beyond your capabilities, find a techy business partner who can help realize it.
Once you have your NFF proof-of-concept, you can shop it around for funding from investors, or you can hit up crowdfunding sites. (Keeping in mind that a startling percentage of hardware Kickstarters vastly underestimate their needed funding and their timeline, especially when it comes to NPI—New Product Introduction, i.e. the whole manufacturing process.)
Once you have sufficient funding, you can either put together a company with employees to do come up with a form-factor test device as a next step, or you can hire a product development firm to do that for you. Product development firms will likely be pricier on an hourly basis than doing it yourself, but you'll get all the company's accumulated expertise, and it will likely go faster than spinning up your own team. And if you find one that's got a lot of NPI experience, it can save so much pain when it comes to actually going into manufacturing.
(Product development firms being places like Cambridge Consultants. Or Mindtribe, or Punch Through, or Tactile, or whatever. But Cambridge Consultants is the best. #notbiased #myemployer)
Obviously, if it's not an electronic device of some kind, the process will differ.