Where can I get custom boxes at a reasonable price?

You have to be careful on selecting your co-founder. I know it's an already cliché to mention it, but selecting one is like selecting a spouse to marry. You need to know the person first, and even some investors and accelerators dismiss automatically startups because the founders didn't meet before working together in the startup. If you're doing a tech startup, the co-founder should have a technical background if you don't have it. That will save you a lot of money when you're bootstrapping as well as making sure you deploy a great product as soon as possible. Once you want to work with someone, my best advice is to hire them to do a project or a task inside the startup. More than words, you need to see them in action and that way you can evaluate your chemistry as a team. When you already worked the details and decided to create a startup together, you need to be smart about the plans. You need to sign a partnership agreement and put the equity in a vesting option. In Silicon Valley, the standard vesting period is 4 years with a one year cliff. After one year, the founders fully own of the 25% of their shares. That means if they leave the company before the first year, they will not have equity in the company. Having all that in mind, I think it will help you select the best co-founder possible and also be a better bet to investors if you ever decide to raise money. I hope it helps!

Here's what you need to do to recruit any cofounder: 1) Prove or at least instill *high* confidence that you can fund the business or raise the funds required; 2) Demonstrate that you are someone worth following. What have you done previously that clearly shows to others that you have what it takes to succeed? 3) Credibly demonstrate that your idea can create massive success. An idea by itself, no matter how interesting is woefully insufficient. 4) Spend every day making outreach (cold emails, LinkedIn, dribbble, etc) to people, meeting at least 3 a week. You will "kiss many frogs." It's likely you have to meet at least 100 people to find the right person and that assumes you have 1-3. By the way, in order to actually *meet* 100 good people, you'll have to make outbound to at least 400 people. 5) Negotiate equity and compensation (pre and post funding) and ensure written alignment on how decisions are made between the two of you. Cofounder relationships are as intense as marriages. And just like getting married, it requires a lot of dating to build the trust. I'm *totally* unconvinced that two people can find a person they haven't known previously, and become effective cofounders. I think you're better off finding the money to hire someone than actually find a cofounder. The main reason? You probably won't find someone as passionate as you are about what you're building. And keep in mind, I have no idea who you are or what you're building so that's no judgement on you or the idea, just the reality I've observed over 20 years of startups.

It varies and it's very very specific to what you want to develop. The concrete design of your circuit matters. Also prototype building costs are usually a factor 10-100 higher than series. If you already have your prototype then you can shop around various manufacturing companies. To do that, you need Gerber files (your PCB design) and a bill of materials. You also need to think about casing: designing it and creating the mold is expensive. If you don't have your prototype yet, I recommend having it engineered in eastern Europe. Custom engineering is cheap there and high quality. IP protection is a problem. One thing to do is to distribute the work to different manufacturers. For the design phase you are safer if you design your prototype in Europe or the US where international patent laws apply. I could give you more specific advise in a phone call, getting to know a bit better what you are trying to build.

I've been in ecommerce for over a decade and have co-founded and helped start companies collectively driving over $10MM in ecommerce sales. I've consulted for Fortune 500 ecommerce stores. Here's my advice if you're just getting started without a big budget. Note: Some of this is copied from my answer to a similar question. #1) PROVE THE ASSUMPTION: Start with a dropshipper's existing products to figure out what sells best before you spend money on manufacturing and warehousing. Amazon is perfect for this - they will pay you 4%-10% to promote 253,000,000 products (http://bit.ly/1q2M85R) - you can sign up at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ Alternately, get very small amounts of the product (maybe even just buy some from a competitor) and try selling them on ebay and amazon. Nothing hurts more than having $50,000 of imported product gathering dust in your fulfillment warehouse while listening to a voicemail from a debt collector. #2) SOURCING There are several options here. Many people prefer Alibaba.com. Warning - if you use Alibaba, you are stepping into a tank of pirahnas. There are more scam "manufacturers" on Alibaba than real ones. Use Escrow or AliSecure Pay if you buy. If the supplier says they only take T/T, Western Union, Moneygram - just say no! I prefer American Made when possible. If you're like me, try Ariba's Discovery Service - http://bit.ly/1q2NFZu - which will allow you to find suppliers with a physical presence in the USA. Note: Many things can be made on demand (someone purchases, one gets made and shipped) instead of in 500+ manufacturing runs. Start there if you can - Books on CreateSpace.com, Clothes on CafePress.com, Playing Cards on MakePlayingCards.com, etc - to test out your exact product. If you decide to source by purchasing product in bulk, find a fulfillment company to store and fulfill (ship) your orders. Amazon does this - http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm - but they might decide to crush you like a bug if you're successful (http://bit.ly/1q2V7DX). Other fulfillment companies for e-commerce include http://www.shipwire.com/ and http://www.webgistix.com/ #3) LAUNCH YOUR SITE This is an entire topic in itself. One of the fastest ways I know for newbies to start in e-commerce is with a SquareSpace.com store. Other options include GoDaddy.com and BigCommerce.com. If you can stand to use the templates they provide instead of trying to customize them, you'll save yourself a lot of hassle and expense - customization usually looks terrible unless a designer/coder was hired to do the work. If you do customize, find someone on odesk.com or elance.com. If you're not hard up for money, just build a custom store from the start. If you can't do that, save up some money and then go for it. Focus on increasing conversion rate - for every 100 visitors, get 1 to buy. Then 2. Then 4. Then 8 (8%). #4) MARKET Figure out where your competition is advertising. Are they getting free, "organic" SEO results on Google? Using social media to drive billions of dollars of sales? (NOTE: That was a joke - don't count on social media as the nucleus of your marketing campaign. Please!) Are they paying for Google ads ("PPC"), buying email lists, using strategic partnerships for promotion, relying on shopping portals, using banner advertising, or something else entirely? There's probably a good reason - figure out what it will take to play in those waters. At the same time, try to find a small enough niche that you can win in it. #5) BEWARE Be careful about artsy things. If someone is attracted to something artistic, it's usually because there is a story behind the art for them, or because it's cheap. If you're going to try to sell artistic things, you may want to consider doing some serious research first about who has been successful in that area. Look at etsy.com to see handmade artsy items (very cool). #6) WORTH A LOOK Worth checking out as you start your journey: Art.com, yessy.com, Artfire.com, ArtPal.com #7) DEEP FOUNDATION If you need help, reach out for a 15 minute call and we'll discuss a go-to-market strategy specific to your goals.

Shipping components are expensive and unless you have the volume to buy in quantity vs small bundles is when you'll be able to shop around for a better deal. For example, Uline offers packaging in bundles of 8 or 25 as their minimum, this is stock item for which they order several thousands units of to keep the cost down. For you it fits because you can buy in small amounts at a time. However, if you have a need for 1000 at least or more units then buying from Uline is really expensive compared to what you could buy them for. Uline is a major distributor with a 45-50% markup on their items (give or take) as they have large warehousing and infrastructures. If you are ready to move to the next level, first find the correct material name for each packaging component, and look for suppliers of that particular item. Search websites likehttp://www.thomasnet.com/ for suppliers. Or go through a packaging broker instead of a distributor, like Landsberg Orora, or Ernest Packaging, and they can do all the leg work for you and still save money. Additionally, I know your drawing is not to scale, but there seems to be excess empty air space, if that is true then you can customize your packaging per exactly your needs, which will help to further bring the cost down. An engineer should take a look at your current situation because there is more at play than just shipping components - method of shipping, weight, weather condition, materials thickness etc all play a roll and can all contribute to cost saving while making the whole thing function better. This question is common enough that I've written tutorials on it http://howtobuypackaging.com/how-to-buy-packaging-part-1-determining-your-packaging-needs/.