Lutetium
Hi everyone - Hack Chat starts in about 15 minutes. Shawn Hymel will be talking about the business end of hacking.
hacking? I got an email that says: " He'll be dropping by the Hack Chat to talk about everything you ever wanted to know about marketing your hardware projects but was afraid to ask."
about how long will the chat be?
Dunno if it's strictly hacking, but I'll be talking about how to sell and market hardware stuff that you might be working on. It's based on a talk I gave at KiCon.
Nice, I cant wait.
Hacking as in building electronic projects
thanks for being here and sharing
Just asking, why shawb left sparkfun?
*Shawn
I wanted to pursue my own thing....I'm making videos and content now for other companies.
I hate when the keyboard laggs on my phone
Shawn what was your main role at sparkfun?
I was an engineer for 1.5 years (laying out boards, writing libraries). After that, I spent 3.5 years in marketing making videos, writing tutorials, and going to events. I think my official title for that was "creative engineer."
OK, it's noon here in the Pacific time zone, so let's kick things off. I'm pleased to welcome Shawn Hymel to the Hack Chat today to share his experiences with marketing and selling hardware projects.
Looks like you've already given a little bit of your background at Sparkfun, Shawn. Anything else to add?
Sure! just for folks who missed it: I worked at SparkFun for 5 years, with 3.5 of them being for the marketing department. I really enjoyed making videos and tutorials, but I got more into marketing strategy toward the end. I found out that there was a lot more science that goes into marketing than I initially thought.
At KiCon last month, I gave a talk about how to market and sell a device, aimed at hobbyists and people looking to sell their weekend hardware projects. I’d like to go over a few of the slides I used as a starting point for our discussion.
It’s not marketing yet, but I’d like to start with a question to everyone here. What recommendations do you have for an electronics assembly or turnkey contract manufacturer (if you’ve used one)? This is for my own curiosity :)
I sent this basic project out to Screaming Circuits for some estimates, and found that it didn't seem worthwhile to manufacture anything less than qty 1000 if you hoped to maybe make money off it :-/
What was the mix of SMT to through hole? Through hole tends to be the expensive step of China
I found that 100 brings cost down, but 1000 and up is thee real savings
outside of china
A local one called Elektromont, they charge a lot, but it's fast and you don't need to bother with hard to solder components.
There were only 8 unique SMT parts on it, no PTH
It seems that it takes a lot more to units to bring it down much more.
good to know! Was there a certain quantity you recommend with Elektromont, @pop13 ?
*minimum qty
1000 seems like a lot to manufacture up front, but is it that much in terms of sales? IOW, isn't selling 1000 units of something a pretty reasonable expectation?
@Shawn Hymel Matrix Circuits in New London, IA is a good shop. It's not really a minimum quantity as much as a minimum dollar amount.
No idea, mind you - never tried to sell anything on Tindie or anywhere else. Just seems like a reasonable number to me.
I think it heavily depends on what you expect. I can say that at SparkFun, we would usually assume a minimum quantity of only a few hundred.
I have heard of pcb.ng and macrofab.
HI Im new to HackChat, does this have a video segment or something? Anyway @Shawn Hymel I love the thoroughness of your videos and will be anxious to hear more about your experiences branching out on your own.
Chris from Circuithub was speaking at KiCad. They have more detailed cost breakouts in their automated quoting system and lets you slide the volume to see how it changes
@Audi McAvoy nice! Do you know what the min $ was?
depends on board but 100 can test the market and proof of concept without going broke
It's around 200 for stuff with stuff like BGAs and large boards. For small simple stuff about 50, they do manual assembly and have smt pick and place lines.
@jonathanfdillon good to know, I'll have to check out his video when they're posted
@Shawn Hymel Re: min quant at Sparkfun, do you mean you would do runs of 100 for most products?
I'm afraid to through out a number from memory. Sorry.
@Caleb I would say in the 100-200 range for initial quantities
@Audi McAvoy no worries :)
@Michael Graham - no video, just text.
@pop13 that seems pretty reasonable
@Shawn Hymel That's less than I expected. Were the quntitites so low b/c you could do them in house?
Although Shawn will be pasting in some slides
Or just that low to test new products?
Who said shipping a thousand would be good?
@Caleb Yes, almost all assembly was done in-house
no.
@Caleb And many times it would be to test how well a product would sell
Gotcha, makes sense, thanks.
From there, we could gauge interest and make more/less as needed
Here are a few things I found for ways to sell your device. Having worked at SparkFun, I can say that trying to get SparkFun (and I assume Adafruit is similar) to carry your device is really hard. It’s a lot easier to get them to resell it vs. having them manufacture it (as they prioritize their own designs). So, if you pitch them, I recommend getting your own manufacturer and promise you’ll do a good “getting started” guide for them.
Anyone here have any luck selling their device through a marketplace or through their own site? What was your experience like?
I tried adafruit once couldn't get them to return my emails, don;t blame them
I've sold a couple dozen dumb little boards on Tindie. It hasn't made any money, but has been educational.
I agree with caleb was educational
@Caleb educational in terms of...?
Customer support for the product was minimal, customer support for international shipping issues was significant.
@Caleb Is the Tindie process difficult? I haven't gone through them yet
The tindie weekly emails are particularly useful. I average about 10-20 views a week, and maybe one sale every 4 weeks.
@caleb, what's you storename?
Tindie is easy to set up. I'm not sure it's as easy to get real sales.
educational of the process of build, manufacturing, working with others etc
heh, same, but it's one sale every 2-3 months
@Jasmine Brackett Crowbar Tech, I've only got the one thing for sale at the moment. It's extra boards from last defcon.
@doug.leppard Good to know...I'm considering selling a few of my side projects there for fun, too, but I know they likely won't sell much.
for anyone wanting to automate orders fetching from tindie, i made a script a while back allowing you to do so: https://github.com/limpkin/tindieorderprintout
generates pdf of orders, can send an email to your logistics center for shipping
Cool! Thanks for sharing that
@Shawn Hymel -regarding marketplace. I have a successful business on etsy selling custom 3d printed widgets. More art than machines, but I am currently developing a new kind of CNC equipment to serve an untapped market. Ive used a couple kinds of webstores but Etsy is by far the best.
planning to release 3 more products, so that people actually have something to be interested. Plus, of course, gotta have something good so that people actually are interested
@Michael Graham How so? Did you get lots of views/buys on Etsy?
@Michael Graham do you think Etsy is the best just because there's the most people there?
@Shawn Hymel Any tips for developing a product?
oh shit, I can't into typing. last reason - "so that people have actual reasons to buy"
@Arsenijs That's a good point. Even though I like doing marketing, you need a great product to start with.
@Arsenijs Awesome!
@Shawn Hymel How would you market the kind of tiny widgets that people sell on tindie?
@Asher Gomez It really comes down to what people want. Spend some time learning your audience (potential buyers) and figure out what they like, what will make their life easier, etc.
@Shawn Hymel Thanks.
@Asher Gomez After that, it's a lot of aesthetic design and design for manufacturing, which I'm guessing will be another Hack Chat for another time :)
Does "great product" mean "wide appeal" (so the market is likely to be large, but filled with other products), or "niche" (so the market is small, but maybe not so well served)?
both have their own pros and cons?
Do you only aim at makers or also "mainstream" users?
@Shawn Hymel - DFM is actually the theme for the Hackaday Prize this year
@Audi McAvoy I do know that Dave Jones reccomends niche. His logic is that folks like us can't beat the big folks, so it's better to adopt a galapagos strategy.
@Henrik Ding!
what's mainstream? I.e. you can probably sell drone accessories on Tindie, for drone enthusiasts that aren't makers but want to get upgrades for their tech
If you're just starting out, I think that going niche is the way to go. If you try to make something that say, competes with the iWatch directly, you probably won't sell much.
Yeah, Mooltipass and RC2014 are top sellers on Tindie and are examples of a specific product niche.
What @Caleb said
so some self-developed i.e. power distribution boards could sure find a market, even if they're not developed with makers in mind
When it comes to marketing, most people equate that with advertising, but advertising is just a component of marketing. We normally think of marketing as billboards, radio ads, web banners, etc. These are known as “outbound marketing” techniques. You pay money to have a radio station, web site, etc. force your ad on some unsuspecting victim. Think about your own experiences: how often do you pay attention or click through these types of ads?
(-Marketplace thread.) Well, Ebay has a terrible UI and I have trust issues with that marketplace. I tried the total DIY route with freewebstore but few ppl found me and it was a lot of maintenance work. Tindie doesnt seem to have a large market nor do I see it being applicable to things other than PCBs (no offence HAD). On the other hand Etsy BRINGS ME customers and the UI on computer & phone is ideal. Ive experimented with advertising and google ads seem to yield more than facebook or etsy ads. I started in earnest a few months ago and have nearly 200 sales. (Not bragging, ive wasted tons of money on failed experiments in the past :P )
@Michael Graham that's good info, thanks
Thanks for the insights. I've had an idea for a while now; but, it is niche. Which has stopped me from pursuing it.
@Michael Graham Good to know about the different market places! Forgive me if you already posted it: could you share your page on Etsy so we can see an example of it?
Yes, very interesting.
@Michael Graham Thanks, Do you think etsy is a good place to sell electronics as well?
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