>>10261538I can tell you alot of what NOT to do.
Originally, I wanted to make something like custom dolls. You know, like how you buy a Phicen or Obitsu body, a head sculpt, and a set of clothes. The issues I hit were poor selection and non-communicative manufacturers. Every company makes the same stuff. Your character has bangs? Fuck you. You want a gun that's not the M16, fuck you. Don't think a cross-eyed sneer is the right expression? Fuck you.
And so on. I could even get anybody to commit to delivering 200 units of just the blank bodies.
So then I went a different angle and looked into making more Tonka GoBots. I figured low parts count and simpler design would help. Sadly, I can't sculpt and every indy place I inquired like Boss Fight "doesn't have the bandwidth" for commissions. Even if I did get a sculpt, the tooling costs were insane. But at least that was more of a monetary problem.
Where I screwed up was in trying to raise money. In retrospect, I should've just saved money from every paycheck for a few years. The year I two-timed, I made an extra hundred grand. But, no, I was stupid and wanted it sooner. So I turned to _selling_ toys. Legitimately, at first.
Don't. If you can't afford Hasbro's minimums, their distributors, like Embarrassment Earth, don't leave any meat on the bone. And if you could afford Hasbro's minimums, you're close enough to affording tooling that you should wait for that. I fucked up and it taken ten years just to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
