How would you get into the biz?

Celebrating my 25th anniversary on April 1st of founding PBN Audio.  

Marketing, Marketing,  Marketing the equivalent of  Location, Location, Location for real estate :-), you can have the best engineered product in the world but if no one knows about it no one will buy it.  

As with anything it can be done but requires Focus, Determination and  Hard work, be prepared to work 7 days a week.   

Good Listening

Peter

I'm still not understanding your approach.  Do you mean you want to start a speaker business as the owner and hire others to design the speakers?

If so, you should start with a large fortune, then move to China - near their best engineering school.

Eventually, you will end up with a small fortune.

Hi @erik_squires 

Last year I read 'Schiit Happened,' the memoir by Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat that describes the startup years of Schiit Audio. It's an easy read and it can fool the reader into thinking that starting up an audio manufacturing business isn't too hard. 

What I gathered from reading it was how it stressed the importance of 21st century marketing and customer engagement through use of social media, user forums, and regional shows/meets.

The founders efforts were laser-like. Focussing on on the product they wanted to develop; they didn't get sidetracked spending time on the next product until the current product was exactly what was wanted and they could fulfill the demand for it. The writers are most helpful in describing the mistakes made along the way. 

They don't go into much detail in terms of how they spent their startup capital other than describing how scary it was doing it while not using other people's money. 

They found a niche and exploited it. I imagine doing that as a speaker designer/manufacturer is possible. As long as one guesses correctly.

;)

@erik_squires 

Erik,  If you ever want to get started at something feed me a pm... I've never shared my daytime job on a forum. Looking at the comments above are things that I take for granted... when I truly left the audio world,  I followed my degree (broadcast journalism).... today I am Vice President of a full service advertising agency....  The above folks speak the truth, but I don't think that 99% of anyone has an idea of where digital marketing is going and/or what its going to take to use it in our ever changing online world... Just a peak.... If you want to start a web business today, right now,  If your website does not have Artificial Intelligence, very soon, you won't be able to properly gather data.  We drive thousands of leads to websites through social media. SEM on its on is tough, So,  just some food for thought... Overall,  our audiophile community is fairly small.  I still believe that you get your product in a decent publication,  show it as a couple of well attended shows.  Make the product accessible and affordable,  then get any type of decent distribution and you'll take off. (of course,  you need a great product that can make it on its own merit)  
 Good luck,  I hope this helps,  Tim