Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Marketing and Selling Hardware Hack Chat with Shawn Hymel!
It may not be every hardware hacker’s dream, but a fair number of us harbor fantasies of thinking up the Next Big Thing and kissing the day job goodbye forever. It’s an understandable dream and a laudable goal, but as they say, a goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline. What’s your plan for turning your project into a marketable product? Chances are good you don’t have one, and if you ever expect to get to your goal you’re going to need one.
Shawn Hymel is an engineer who led several marketing campaigns for Spark Fun and recently shared his thoughts on marketing with attendees of the first-ever KiCon conference in Chicago. He’ll be dropping by the Hack Chat to talk about everything you ever wanted to know about marketing your hardware projects but were afraid to ask.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 8 at noon Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Thanks for using real money instead of Benchoff Bucks in the banner photo!
Maloney Moolah is more valuable, IMHO:
I think they are American dollars, fiat currency, about as “real” as bitcoin.
Probably lower carbon footprint per “unit of value” (har har, as if the things we have to use money for are actually all valued along the same single dimension).
USS „Nimitz” beg to differ.
Benchoff Bucks ARE real money.
I would love to see an article on the FCC Part 15 aspects for DIYers going to the primetime.
That’s definitely one area that I’m not very knowledgeable in, so I second the proposition for an FCC expert (or an engineer who’s gone through testing) to host a chat or write an article. From my very vague understanding, you can basically sell “prototyping boards” (or any assembled PCB without an enclosure) without testing/certification under Part 15, so long as it meets a few basic transmission power requirements. Once you add an enclosure, it then becomes a “consumer product,” which requires FCC certification (whether it’s an intentional radiator or not).
I’m not sure how accurate that description is, so I’d love to learn more from someone with more experience on the subject!
Have you read this HaD article?
https://hackaday.com/2016/09/19/preparing-your-product-for-the-fcc/
I will now, thanks!
Good suggestion. I’ll try to scrape someone from the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology for a Hack Chat on FCC certification.
That would be awesome @Dan!
I don’t work for the FCC, but I hate the thought of someone “scraping” me from my office!
B^)
*scrape up, sorry. Meh, even then it sounds painful…
I’m not holding my breath on this one, TBH. I doubt anyone from the FCC is going to take an interest in reaching out to us. But, the email is out there, so we’ll see.