Tindie Becomes A Part Of The Hackaday Family

A little over two years ago, we announced that Hackaday became a part of Supplyframe. This was a natural fit: both sides are comprised of hardware engineers, computer scientists and hackers alike. We immediately pooled forces and set out to make Hackaday bigger, with a broader mission. So far, it has been an amazing journey: Hackaday.io is approaching 100,000 registered users, The Hackaday Prize is in its second year, and the Hackaday Store is about to fulfill its 5,000th order.

The main theme behind all of this is fostering collaboration, learning, and providing incentives for everyone in the community to stop procrastinating and try to build something amazing. Hackaday.com is here to inspire, Hackaday.io to help develop projects in the open, and the Hackaday Store is to provide a way to turn passion projects into a self-sustainable lifestyle. While the road to community-powered innovation might not be easy, it’s something we’re all incredibly passionate about, and will continue investing in to further this goal.

With that in mind, we’re very excited to announce that everyone’s favorite hardware marketplace – Tindie, has been acquired by Supplyframe and will be joining the Hackaday family! Apart from the fact that most of us are personal fans of the website, we believe that Tindie fills an important gap in helping projects cross the chasm between prototype and initial production. Crowdfunding provides access to capital for some (and access to laughs for others), but it’s not always the way to go. You might not be ready to quit your day job or take on a project full-time. You might be working on rev1 of the project and want to try the “lean manufacturing” thing. Or maybe you’re building something for your own purposes and have some extras lying around. Tindie is a platform that has helped launch many such projects, and we’re incredibly lucky to have it be a part of Hackaday.

Now what?

Naturally, the question that’s on everyone’s mind is, what happens next? Are we going to mess things up? Paint Tindie in black? Change the fee structure? While we have ideas on things that we could help with, our main goal will be making sure that the Tindie community continues to thrive. The only changes we’re interested in are the ones that make the community stronger. We are fascinated with the challenges surrounding the supply chain and will be looking into tools to help sellers improve margins and ship better products. Hackaday.io and Tindie combined represent the world’s largest repository of (working) Open Hardware products, so we will be looking into more closely integrating the two. We will also make efforts to grow the overall Tindie audience, as every new buyer helps move the community forward.

All of these are some of the ideas, but we’re ultimately looking at you for guidance: things we should do, problems we should attack, dreams of future capabilities.

Wish us luck in this new adventure.

Aleksandar Bradic
CTO
Supplyframe

50 thoughts on “Tindie Becomes A Part Of The Hackaday Family

    1. Mooltipass is essentially complete. My unit will be delivered later this week, several sponsors already have theirs.

      There were a few setbacks in development, but nothing Earth shattering. Each time they sent a letter explaining what happened, how long it would take to recover, and that they were still committed to the project.

      Overall, it was a well-managed project. Mooltipass will probably be available for purchase soon.

      1. The moon tip assistance (as auto correct calls it) always seemed kinda half baked to me. Seems you could kick start a pencil that required you dip it in ink and make a million, people will buy into anything if you hype it enough.
        Bruce Jenner is appearently a hero…

  1. Well, this looks good!
    Just curious – are going to link (or integrate) project page and Tindie? What benefits/improvements/whatever can users expect, compared to current status, when Tindie and HaD were not under single roof? Single account for projects and tindie?

      1. One suggestion:
        To have feedback to project author whether users would buy his product and how much they are willing to pay. Something like poll (with options 1-10, 10-25, 25-50, 50-100 USD, etc., maybe user selectable) to give author indication whether he should invest the time and effort (it is not trivial to make product to sell from quick hack) to make tindie offer.

        1. The challenge I see with the poll is the difference between a 1 second click to answer a poll question to actually paying for it. I like your point on minimizing time and effort to invest time/effort. Things on this end might be streamlining BoM (part picking) creation -> fabrication -> soldering. What I’d like to see is more on the sharing economy where folks who are really good at soldering could “get a job” to do a number of boards for example. Then the person who contracted out would rate the work. I.e.: move into a sharing economy business model for building products to sell on Tindie.

    1. Quote: What benefits/improvements/whatever can users expect,

      The Overlords have received your question and are baffled that the minions should “expect” anything beneficial from this aquisition.

      ZOT!

      B^)

      1. Well, then would it be possible to add a dropdown on the top of the page that leads to the other supplyframe sites like tindie, findchips, parts.io, datasheet.net, etc.
        Also I don’t know how much influence you would have over this but a unified supplyframe account rather than having to create a new account every time a new site pops up that someone wants to use would be nice.

  2. I wish you folks would spend some time improving Hackaday.io before touching Tindie. Hackaday.io needs a proper project/how-to template that presents information in a consistent well laid out format. As it is now, I no longer use Hackaday.io as a resource because it’s such a digital quagmire. Together with HAD and Tindie an improved Hackaday.io (that acts as a easy to use project reference) would offer existing and new HAD fans an amazing ecosystem.

    1. Many of the projects on Hackaday.io use links to direct to their project page. That should say something about the user interface. I tried using the messaging system to communicate to a project owner and both of us ended up double posting. (“Enter” key posts the message. Come on!!)

  3. I guess that’s a good thing.

    As a seller I started to get very concerned about the viability and vitality of Tindie. Communication with sellers slowed down to a trickle, not even an email about this acquisition yet.

    My only wish to the new overlords: don’t pull a Google+ on us.

  4. ps. The Hackaday prize is a great lure for Hackaday.io. Unfortunately Hackaday.io falls flat on it’s face. Having just spent a few minutes looking at supplyframe.com (which, is another digital quagmire) they need to spend some time focusing on the user interface, so that resources are presented in a clear and organized fashion.

  5. Hopefully optimistic about this. Tindie is great — their “This Week’s Featured Products” mails are awesome for getting the word out — it helped me get my stuff off of the ground and gauge the viability of my ideas, based on the response it generated. It fills a great niche for smaller makers who aren’t ready/willing to do a Kickstarter full-on and quit their day jobs, or just want to make things on-demand for fun!

    Tindie occupies the sweet spot between concept/prototype and mass-market, and I hope the new overlords don’t mess with that. Please don’t try to make it ‘Etsy for Geeks’ or something.

  6. Ugh… sent an email when this was announced back to Tindie. Utterly disappointed, both in Hackaday and SupplyFrame. SupplyFrame is quickly becoming the next evil Danaher-like corporation, buying up all the cool little indie projects and trying to squeeze some more cash out of them. I can only predict that many of the original hackers and makers will leave, and eventually form another indie, small website, which will grow, and be bought by some other money-grubbing %$&#s… *sigh* the cycle never ends. And we all lose for it in the end.

  7. Can anyone who regularly sells on Tindie tell me how this is supposed to work? After someone places an order, do I get the money in PayPal and then ship? Or do I have to ship the order /before/ I get paid to PayPal? I’m asking because my first ever order on Tindie is large, out of the country, and a technical glitch is really lowering my comfort level with the platform. Their support says they will get devs to look at why the order doesn’t show up in my account next week, but this has raised with me the question of when sellers get paid, and I can’t find it documented anywhere on the site. Paid then ship or ship then paid? Should I ship the order without payment as their support is asking me to do? Would you?

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