This is what I wrote to my doctor friend about his butterfly pen product idea:
I think there's a deeper message there in the
@biophase thread. Yes, he's not the right demographic. But he's an expert at determining what will be profitable on Amazon and what won't.
You probably noticed that my query to him was leaning toward a conclusion already, before his response. On reading through the thread, I began to develop a sense of what he was looking for in a promising Amazon product. First and foremost, a product needs to solve a problem for which customers are actively seeking a solution. Your butterfly pen, as neat as it may be, doesn't qualify. As I said--and as you acknowledge--it's a novelty item. That's fine. But knowing that going into a potential path towards the market changes the approach.
Getting a product to market is always going to be a slog. It can be especially stressful if you have to lay out a lot of cash to accomplish it. Since your product is a novelty item, this concern is particularly relevant. The key counter to the essential gamble that is a business venture is how effectively your offering solves a real problem. On the other hand, marketing a novelty item only increases the uncertainty. It's hard to know what catches on and what doesn't. Given the essential unpredictability of fads, it's in your interest, I believe, to mitigate financial risk as much as possible. That means developing your prototype as cheaply as possible, without necessarily comprising the degree to which the prototype approximates the finished product.
That fundamental uncertainty about the product's likelihood of success is compounded by what we can glean from your competitor's similar product. It ranks low in its category (around 20,000), and it's relatively cheap (11 dollars). This means low volume and low margins. If, as
@biophase figures, with a comparable asking price, you can get 6 dollars from Amazon for each sale, you then have to subtract your unit cost and incidentals to arrive at your net revenue. Let's say, roughly estimating, that you can get the pen manufactured overseas at $2 a piece. We've gotten a few ballpark estimates from several industrial designers already. The bids range from 15 grand to 15 hundred bucks (not including prototype manufacture). If you're making $4 per sale, you'd have to sell a lot of pens to recover 15 grand in development costs.
This could be offset, somewhat, if your intention was to build a brand and not just sell a one-off novelty item. That's probably what makes SpyderCo's butterfly pen feasible. It's one of many models they sell. Are you committed to building a brand? Do you want to be in the knife business or the novelty item business? I use the word "committed" for a reason. It's a big commitment of time and energy.
On the other hand, if you treat this more as a hobby, with no expectation of making money from it--you're just bringing your product market for the fun and challenge of the process itself, you could take a more leisurely approach and be content to spend cash on it as you would any other hobby.
You could probably hire an overseas industrial designer on a freelancing marketplace like Upwork.com to produce the 3D renders and 3D CADs you need for a half or a third of the cadcrowd.com bid. You could then use those 3D CADs to contract with a 3D printing company (through 3dhubs.com). They could probably do what Brennon from PRG Prototyping recommended: use a heavy, dense plastic to print the prototype, then spray it with a metallic coating to approximate the finished product. So we're looking at 2 grand or so to build a prototype.
Then, to keep costs down, you could launch a Kickstarter campaign to see if you can kill two birds with one stone: validate demand for your pen, while also crowdfunding your initial production run with pre-orders. But, as you can probably anticipate, running a Kickstarter campaign is a skill in and of itself. If you're going to do it yourself, you have to be committed to learn the process and do the work.
As a hobby, you have to be really passionate about your idea to pull this all off! But by going this route, at least you won't be throwing money into a sinkhole--and you won't be motivated by unrealistic dreams of world conquest.
I still think your invention is a cool idea. But having done a little investigating over the past week, it's become apparent to me that you may well be better off letting it go...
Sorry if I sound like a wet blanket. I feel I ought to give you my honest opinion. I'm happy to discuss it further with you, though, if you like.