I have been wondering for a while about how much it costs to get a unicycling product off the ground and to the unicycling public- i.e not how much it costs to make custom parts but mass produce them.
I’d also be interested to know how much effort/money it takes to get already established companies such as Roach, Profile and Onza etc to invest in and produce unicycles and other unicycle products.
Does anybody have any idea??
For someone who is starting out to mass produce them, there would have to be ALOT of time and money involved (go to muniac.com to find out just how much). and it would be difficult, as you only have a vague idea of what works and what doesnt. for a bigger company like onza and profile, it would still cost alot of money, possibly more, because they are a trusted name and have more experience than the newcomer, therfore they would have a higher demand for products. It is just that with onza and profile, they have funds that are already attainable, and they have a better idea of what to do, and already have alot of the machinery needed to get the job done. Its hard to tell really, depends on what you want to make. frames dot have to be that expensive to make, if you know someone that has the proper material and is willing to weld it all together. there is just ALOT of measurements and math and stuff for that one. with hubs and cranks and stuff like that, you ahve to start from SCRATCH, sometimes meaning a solid block of metal. that is REALLY expensive then. I dont know what you want to do. if you were more specific and gave me an example, I could give you more info.
I don’t actually want to invest in anything I’m just curious how much it takes to get product ideas for a minority sport into production. I imagine it takes a lot of persuading larger companies to invest. I understand all the basic business concepts behind it, just the actual figures especially for top end products.
generaly stuff in many walks of like works like this:
person has idea,
person does lots of work for no monney,
person sell soul to funder to fund idea.
person gets scant reward for all their work and funder get all the credit\cash.
Yup, I had an idea for a toothbrush with built in toothpaste-like substance (like the foaming face wash, only tooth wash) for travel and such. I finally secured a meeting with people to figure out how it works and they told me the same thing, only in nicer terms.