I've been in the field for a while and can't think of anything intended specifically to answer questions related to bootstrapping manufacturing of an electronic

I've been in the field for a while and can't think of anything intended specifically to answer questions related to bootstrapping manufacturing of an electronic product. There are a few forums for automated assembly. Dragon Innovation has a bunch of shiny marketing stuff that might help a little. I'm assuming you aren't interested in info about how to build prototypes, but there are lots of examples scattered across sparkfun, adafruit, eevblog, hackaday, github, arduino and AVR forums, etc. with example designs and varying degrees of documentation and support. If you choose some dev platform like ESP8266/32, MBED, Arduino, etc. there is often a forum associated with it. https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ is nominally what you are looking for, but the content is almost all on the design side vs. manufacturing. There are probably a few people on there who can answer the questions you probably want to ask. I have no idea how friendly they are. I think the issue is compared to software, electronic goods are an incredibly expensive process to bring someone up to speed on, and there are orders of magnitude fewer english speakers doing it vs. programming. It pretty much requires producing multiple products in the real world before you are anywhere near ready to manufacture a product at any appreciable volume. Yes, that's a catch-22 for most people. Couple that with the needing to go overseas to make anything that's price sensitive, needing years to connect with a full array of reliable suppliers, and the guys who really do the work often speak a different language, and you don't end up with many people who can or want to sit online and gratis help out anyone who isn't already sending them purchase orders for thousands of units. Consumer goods generally aren't profitable to manufacture until you're making 10k units or so. So most people who truly know how to do this sort of thing don't have the inclination to help someone who just wants to play and learn, or even someone who doesn't already have 95% of the skills to pull of a successful product. The fastest way to bankrupt a manufacturing company is to take on a bunch of jobs with halfway thought out engineering done by noobs who don't know how to move from step A to step B. Seeedstudio offers a service where they will produce low volumes: https://www.seeedstudio.com/propagate/ https://www.seeedstudio.com/propagate/ Crowd Supply is sort of aligned with what you are after (they sell themselves as a crowdfunding platform who specializes in hardware projects and they vet your project for feasibility): https://www.crowdsupply.com/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/ If you just want a few pieces of something made, need this to be done in a finite amount of time, and you have some money to spend, I'd recommend hiring an experienced EE and make sure they can deliver some small quantity of tested-working boards as part of the contract.