What are you making? We went through the same process with the now-defunct-and-sued-by-patent-troll Comingle, trying to make open source sex toys. We'd get all those same questions over and over...
I'm a making a robot for physical testing of devices (phones, tablets, touchscreens, wearables, etc.). I learned tons of lessons and had success in the open source software world over the years (I started the Selenium project), and am now seeing how well those lessons transfer to the hardware world. For now, we make all our custom parts in-house with a bunch of 3D printers and CNC mills.
