How to take my prototypes to the next level, if at all.

Last fall I had some downtime from my normal work and decided to make a weather display using an arduino. After about a month I came up with a working unit and I was very happy with it. The display uses LEDs to highlight weather conditions using icons and text.

I posted my build log to /r/DIY and it became a huge hit, made it to the front page, and I had over 250,000 album views in less than 24 hours. There were a lot of requests from others that wanted to buy one, so I thought I'd look into it.

A small business advisor recommended that I put up a landing page to gauge interest in the product and see how many pre-orders I could gather. They advised me to price the product fairly high, which I've never been too content with, but this was also built using consumer products at consumer prices and takes a while to build.

Anyhow, I can't decide if I should shit or get off the pot or how to go about the next step. I've contacted a patent lawyer and have a pending provisional patent pending. I've talked to a guy that is well connected in China and has offered to take me over to talk to manufacturers there. And I've considered doing a Kickstarter to take this idea from a fun home project to being commercially viable. The Internet of Things theme is huge right now and this use of art and functionality has a lot of promise, in my slightly biased mind.

To make this possible, I would need to get a PCB board designed for the electronics and add an app that would help with the setup. There are a couple of other things, but nothing insurmountable.

I'm not a marketer or businessman, and I have no idea what a good next step forward might be. At this point, it might be worth giving up some of my ownership to someone (or a team) that can take this forward, but I haven't seen a lot of positive comments on some of the online "idea tanks" and I don't really know anyone personally to do this.

Thanks for any advice on how to move forward!

TL:DR Built a weather display that became a "viral" hit here on reddit. Need advice on how to move forward from the prototype to a commercially viable product.

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