Ask HN: How did you fund your early stage hardware startup?
I'm making drones from scratch with a buddy, each one costs ~$2000+ to build and they incur damage from test flights. I hold down a 9-6 software gig to cover our costs, while my mate is on it full time. So far I've put ~$30k into machines, components, and his living costs, and I help him on evenings and weekends. We have good route-to-market plans and momentum with prototypes, but we need more time and cash to mature our flagship model - we crashed one of our latest builds and money is tight.
Seems like we're in a liminal space where we can't advance the RnD enough working part time with my spare change, but we're also far away enough from a mature product to be an easy sell to investors.
We're exploring avenues to raise ~$250k in exchange for ~5% equity. How do you get investors on board with projects where the MVP is months away and requires that kind of capital up front?
You will need to provide for info on what kind of drones you build for $2000 and their potential application. Otherwise the advice would be very generic. Potential investors would want to know the market size, existing players, your value proposition and their ROI.