If this is unhelpful information, please let me know. Please take everything with a grain of salt. I found r/electronics and r/AskElectronics helpful for elect

If this is unhelpful information, please let me know. Please take everything with a grain of salt. I found r/electronics and r/AskElectronics helpful for electronics questions but the best help I got was from asking engineers directly, whether electrical/mechanical/industrial. If you're near a big city, I highly recommend hardware meetups or makerspaces. I also found Bunnie Huang's The Hardware Hacker great. Packaging if you mean the box should be easy once you're working with a Chinese factory. They usually have a relationship with packaging suppliers and can get great custom packaging for you with steep discounts with at least a 1000 MOQ (minimum order quantity). Electronics manufacturing is a lot harder depending on what you're trying to build. One of my clients sells millions of dollars worth of electronics without an engineer on his team though, so I'm guessing it's not rocket science. If he did have an engineer on his team, I'm sure he would save a lot when it comes to quality products and QC though. If I had to build an electronics product today I would get a working prototype. If I could build the working prototype myself, I would build the first 100 myself. If you can order all the parts and put it all together to test the market, I would. If I can confirm/prove demand, then I would talk to factories. Factories could help discuss what parts cost what and what manufacturing process might be best etc. In order to talk to factories, I would talk or find a sourcing agent. Or best might be an expensive consultant to hold your hand through it, a technical co-founder, or a mentor. I tried to build a hardware product 2 or 3 years ago, a wireless portable charger. I never went through with it because of feature creep and I was poor and stupid. I could easily build it today though because many of them already exist. It would be as simple as finding a factory and making an order. For the portable wireless chargers, it was just sticking two existing parts together with a new circuit board. I think anyway since I'm not an engineer. That's how I built my prototype- I took things apart and put them back together. If you're not building anything too innovative, you could see if you can build what you want with existing parts as well instead of custom. I'm sure I'm missing some things like expensive certifications ($10k?) or manufacturing problems but I think you can definitely test and there is a great hardware hacker community out there somewhere. Last but not least, I could be wrong but I would presume a 1000 MOQ for a hardware product. Some of my client's factories quoted him 10,000 MOQ. At a cheap price of $10/unit that is $10,000 to $100,000. These were for existing designs/products that the factory already made. Some of his other products had a $30+/unit cost. If you need a custom mold for your product, it might cost you $1k+. Last they may steal your intellectual property.