[NOPANTS68]

BBshark has it dead on. I'm just entering the pre-production stages of an invention I created and it's been a huge education. My product was born out of necessity and I just started doing research from there. I bounced my concepts off of my brother and my closest friends that I would trust with my life.

I used some of the already mentioned sites as well as legalzoom.com for NDAs while I was gathering materials costs and options. I found people to be very open to signing them and the transactions weren't inhibited by them. Wading into the vast materials world was pretty scary since most folks were talking in "spools" and "pallets". I didn't have the capital for experimenting on that level of volume so I had to really search out what I needed at more realistic minimum order numbers. I eventually found what I needed.

After some lucky breaks and some help from another auto enthusiast, a very rough prototype was born. It was destroyed an hour later during testing. The learning curve was massive but 11 revisions later we have a product that kicks serious butt. I seeked out an intellectual property attorney.

I found him in the next city over from me and we met over coffee. I showed him our latest and greatest and four hours later I had a list of all of the required info he needed as well as a pretty good grasp on how it works. Three weeks later I had all of my technical artwork done and we filed for my first patent date. I chose not to do a provisional as it just didn't fit my program. The whole deal ran me $1500 for tech artwork and $7500 for the attorney fees, filing, etc.

Once I had a filing date I had protection. I've since done extensive field testing with the product and have scheduled minor tweaks at the most. Field testing has gone on for 7 months and the response has been over the top. I've had some serious tech help from some pretty savvy friends but the real world numbers are about $10K in design time and revisions and $15K for the custom mold, materials, tooling etc.

It's exciting but you gotta stay grounded. Everyone has an opinion and your friends won't always give it to you straight. Be aggressive and diligent and I think you'll get where you wanna be. If we hit the market and just hear crickets- oh well, at least I went out swinging. PM me if I can help you in any way. Dave