That said, these 3 years have felt like the trenches. I hand assemble everything. It takes forever. I work full time at a successful SAAS company and it makes me ache when I see how little effort it takes to just rake in money. Everything I sell has a fixed amount of time and effort associated with it. My advice when people pitch me random hardware ideas is that hardware is hard and if it doesn't already exist you need to think long and hard about why.
But the point of my comment is that is _is_ technically possible to build a profitable hardware business without a significant amount of capital. I borrowed $50 from my checking account to order those first boards and components and since then it's been bootstrapped and profitable. I signed up for their mailing list because I'm at the point where I think this could be my full time thing, but I don't know exactly how to get there. I truly feel that 1 year runway would give me the time I need to really see how far I can take this. Additionally the mentorship and community would be absolutely critical as I have none of that now.
Totally open to answer any questions!