Going Pro
The first project I sold on Tindie was a programmer for ATtiny chips – it was an Arduino shield. We had a group at work who would meet at lunchtimes and we’d all become interested in the ATtiny. People were just starting to port Arduino stuff to it, which I really liked because it’s so simplified. We wanted to design something where you could just drop the ATtiny chip in, and be able to program it without wiring it every time.
A group of three of us sat down and laid out some schematics using a zif socket. We looked at what the price of the build was, and the price of the unit, and we thought that people would buy kits. We were really on the fence about whether to try and kit it out or not.
Two things happened that made it: we found Tindie, which is kind of an Etsy-like retailer where you can post your materials for sale, and we also got a grant from a company – I can’t remember their name – but we put their silkscreen on the back of the board. They gave us $500, which basically covered the initial purchases.
People were buying them and we weren’t getting any real negative feedback, but we were only selling a few. It was clear to me that if you really want to make any money at this, you need to have a number of kits, not just one.
There have been a couple that have been pretty good hits. It’s always funny to see – the orders start pouring in and you try to figure out what happened. One of my projects got featured on Lifehacker, so these kits sell out, they’re just gone in a couple of weeks, so you order more and get them kitted up, then these ones sell a little less fast, and then you kit them up again … I haven’t sold one in the last year.
This latest one that I did, that really kind of surprised me. I was doing a surface mount soldering kit for beginners, to teach people just how easy it is to do surface mount. The surface mount stuff goes very, very tiny and I wanted to see how tiny you could do that stuff by hand. I whipped out a little board that went all the way down to 0201 LED, which are very hard to work with. I posted it on Hackaday – I wasn’t going to sell a kit because it was just so abusive.
I didn’t actually think you could do the smallest ones by hand, so I just posted the instructions, firmware, and board designs on Hackaday and people just started going nuts about it. I did eventually do a kit for it, and it’s sold hundreds. People are actually able to do it by hand! SparkFun did a thing where their four senior electrical engineers had a little contest, and out of the four, only one successfully completed the thing in an hour. It was really fun to see the pros struggle with it.
Trials and tribulations
The biggest issue with the kits selling is that you’re competing with the likes of Banggood, where you can buy a clock kit with a full circuit board, with dozens of LEDs, for $5 or $6 dollars – I can’t even get a circuit board for that price. [Some people say] ‘I can get an Arduino from China from $4 or $5 dollars, why would I go to Adafruit and pay $20 or $25?’ The thing I’ve been thinking about is what the value proposition is. Adafruit publishes all their design files.
They have tutorials. All their boards are made in the USA at their factory in New York. You can get this stuff really cheaply from overseas manufacturers, but you’re not getting the value of the ecosystem that goes with it. You can email people and get information. The plans are really well documented. Some of these Chinese kits are not even in English. You get a schematic and a bomb, and you have to take it from there. To me, buying something from a reputable manufacturer, such as Adafruit or SparkFun, who have put time into creating it, and building an ecosystem around it and will support you – there’s a lot of value in that, and I think that’s why they’re being successful.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to open source, and there was an incident where someone was using my robot design without attributing it to me, and they were selling a kit. It made me upset at first, but I got thinking about how I learned from Adafruit and how I’m trying to teach, so I have to be willing to let people copy me and use my things. As a maker, my goal is to help people learn. For me, looking back at how I learned from Adafruit – they freely give away all their information and they’re still able to make a business out of it. That is what I’m trying to emulate, even at a small level.
