I know that to have any hope of getting a small business going, I have to make a bunch of failing products (that I learn from) before landing a viable one, so I need to make the failures as cheap as possible.
So I'm building this minimal version of this product so I can try it out. (I can't use all smoke and mirrors to find what I want to know here.) I think I'm about 50% of the way to something I can use in daily life. And it's taken 18 hours over two weeks?!
The thing is, 40 hours for a functional prototype is really cheap for an established company. But it just seems like way too much for a gamble when you also have an almost-full-time job. And yet, what else can you do? Try nothing because everything's too costly?