My 2¢ worth:
Building a pedal is easy. Building two pedals is easy. Building 50 pedals is harder. One thing that you really need to look at when you're scaling up for production is manufacturability. Most pedals can be built fairly cheaply, so the most expensive part of the pedal is going to be your time. When a layout is being done, it's important to design it in such a way that it can be assembled as quickly and easily as possible so you aren't spending hours doing offboard wiring for every single unit. Things like PCB-mounted pots, short wire runs, and grouping pads for tidier offboard wiring may take an extra few minutes during layout, but spread across 50-100 builds the time savings is going to be huge.
When I first started selling pedals I did the math and figured out I was making an average of $5 an hour. Part of that was because my prices were low, but the main factor was that it was taking me too long to build each pedal. Now between a well-laid out PCB, pre-assembled boards from JLC, and pre-finished enclosures from Tayda, it takes me less than an hour to build a pedal from start to finish. My day job shuts down the office between christmas and new year so I ended up with about 10 days off total, and in that time I was able to build 112 pedals. Obviously it took a lot of planning and a large investment in materials, but it all comes down to planning.
I always spend the most time talking about having a well-designed PCB because in my opinion that's the most critical step, but there are of course other considerations as well. Some things I recommend you think about before taking the leap:
- Who is going to be building these? Some small builders contract out the labor to companies like Cusack (@StompBoxParts) and I know they are able to do full turnkey service, i.e. you send them the design and they send you finished pedals.
- If you're going to build them yourself, make sure you budget EVERY PART. PCB, enclosure, jacks, switches, pots, knobs, LED, wire. You need to know the cost of every single part that goes in the pedal, and you'll need to keep enough stock of everything.
- On that note, you'll need to have a place to put everything. A computer desk in a corner of a room is plenty for building an occasional box, but 50-100 pedals' worth of parts take up a fair amount of room.
- PACKAGING. This one is huge because it gets overlooked so often. How are the pedals going to be packaged? What will the boxes look like, and where will you get them? How much will that cost?
- Sales: where are they going to be sold? Are you going to try to go through a distributor, or go direct? If you're going direct you'll need to have some form of eCommerce site set up. Reverb/Etsy and eBay are of course options, but that will eat into a big chunk of your profits because of their fees. If you're going through a distributor it will save you a lot of logistical headaches, but that will of course also eat into your profits because they will get a wholesale price so they can make a profit selling your pedals.
- Logistics. If you sell 50-100 pedals, you have to be able to ship 50-100 pedals. I recommend everyone get a shipping label printer ($100 or so). I live half a mile from the local post office, and everyone there knows me by name (Dylan is my main dude though) and knows they will see me 2-4 times a week.
Anyway, lots to consider, sorry to blast you with a mess of information. I started really slow and accidentally went straight off the deep end with my "business" so I've learned a lot from others and the rest I've learned the hard way. I hope there was at least something valuable in there, and feel free to hit me up if you have any specific questions.
