From Project To Kit: So You Want To Sell Electronic Kits

July 29, 2016 by Jenny List 41 Comments

Many of us have enjoyed building electronic projects that come not from our own inspiration or ingenuity but from a ready-made kit. It makes sense, after all in buying a kit you should receive a tried-and-tested design that you can assemble without some of the heartache associated with getting a self-designed project right. And though in recent years the barriers to entry into the professional PCB market for small projects have lowered significantly, there is still an attraction to a kit that comes with a decent PCB and case.

The kit version of the Sinclair ZX81 microcomputer. By Smaddison (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

If you start your electronic odyssey through kit-building, you gain more than a set of electronic projects. You learn about the circuits you build, and you gain a feel for how a well-designed project should go together. Eventually this feeds into your own projects, and in time you are producing builds that equal or surpass those you can buy as kits.

From the point of having a nicely executed project to that of wondering whether it too could be sold as a kit is not a huge step. This is the first of a series of articles that will examine the kit manufacturing process from project to customer, and will with luck deliver some insight to those of you who have always wondered whether you could make it as a kit vendor.

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What It’s Like To Quit Your Job And Start A Company – Then Fail

July 25, 2016 by Cameron Coward 142 Comments

Some of our more dedicated readers may remember me as that promising and talented new writer who disappeared after only a couple of months last fall. Or, alternatively, that moronic new writer who had no idea what he was talking about. But, I’m just going to go ahead and assume it was the former in order to protect my ego. In either case, if you remember me at all, you may have wondered why I left. Was it cholera? Was I drafted into a top-secret CIA program? Did I join a circus as a fledgling trapeze artist?

No, it was none of that. That would be absurd. What would make you think I had any trapeze skills at all, much less circus-worthy ones? The truth is a lot more straightforward, but was also a lot scarier (and more exciting) for me — I started a business. The astute readers among you have probably already put the dots together and figured out that I failed. The title was a pretty strong hint, right? This isn’t a story of bootstraps-pulling success, or a heartwarming underdog tale. This is an opportunity for me to talk about the lessons I learned as I failed, and to give the entrepreneurs out there something to consider when they start their businesses. We’ll laugh together, we’ll cry together, and maybe we’ll even learn something together. Ready? Alright, let’s dive right into the heart of it, starting when I was seven years old…

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Hackerspaces Are Hard: Insurance

July 19, 2016 by Kristina Panos 48 Comments

Do you dream of opening a hackerspace, makerspace, or co-working space? Maybe it’s in the works and you’re already scoping out locations, intoxicated by visions of all the projects that will emerge from it. Here’s a sobering thought: makerspaces are a great big pile of risk. If the doors of your ‘space are already open, perhaps you’ve come to realize that the initial insurance policy you signed doesn’t really fit the needs of your particular creative paradise. Even if it does, the protection you need will change as you acquire new toys.

So why should you even get insurance? For one thing, your landlord will probably require it. If you own the building, you should insure it to protect yourself and anyone who uses the space. Do it for the same reason you’d insure a car, your house, or your collection of vintage pinball machines: to mitigate risk. It takes a lot of hard work to open a makerspace, perform the day-to-day operations, and keep it growing and getting better. Whenever the unthinkable happens, insurance will protect your investment as well as the people who make it a great place to be.

In researching this article, I contacted several well-established makerspaces in the United States as well as most of the major insurance providers to get both sides of the story. My intent was not to make a how-to guide, but to simply explore the topic and provide a view of the process and the struggle.

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How To Set Up And Run A Makerspace

June 16, 2016 by Moritz Walter 34 Comments

A bunch of people who share a large workshop and meet on a regular basis to do projects and get some input. A place where kids can learn to build robots instead of becoming robots. A little community-driven factory, or just a lair for hackers. The world needs more of these spaces, and every hackerspace, makerspace or fab lab has its very own way of making it work. Nevertheless, when and if problems and challenges show up – they are always the same – almost stereotypically, so avoid some of the pitfalls and make use of the learnings from almost a decade of makerspacing to get it just right. Let’s take a look at just what it takes to get one of these spaces up and running well.

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Prusa Shows Us The New I3 MK2 3D Printer And Where The Community Is Headed

June 15, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 29 Comments

Josef Prusa’s designs have always been trustworthy. He has a talent for scouring the body of work out there in the RepRap community, finding the most valuable innovations, and then blending them together along with some innovations of his own into something greater than the sum of its parts. So, it’s not hard to say, that once a feature shows up in one of his printers, it is the direction that printers are going. With the latest version of the often imitated Prusa i3 design, we can see what’s next.

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Stay Scrappy, Hackers! Hardware Startups Versus Goliath

June 7, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 64 Comments

A toast to all the hackers out there who like to do it scrappy, who fight hard to get your products to work, who make your own tools and testing jigs and assembly lines in your basement, and who pound the pavement (and the keyboards) to get your product out there. Here’s to you (*clink*).

I had the fortune of a job interview recently in a big faceless company that you may have never heard of but probably use their stuff all the time. They make billions. And it was surreal. This article is about what it’s like for a scrappy start-up engineer to walk into the belly of the beast of an organization that counts its engineers in the tens of thousands. For obvious reasons, I can’t go into specific details, but let me paint for you in broad strokes what you, the hacker and entrepreneur, are up against.

When you have a company that’s been around for decades and whose yearly sales volume has more digits than some countries, everything is a few orders of magnitude bigger in scale. People, resources, volumes, everything.

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Why Kickstarter Products Fail

May 16, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 68 Comments

It seems every week we report on Kickstarter campaigns that fail in extraordinary fashion. And yet there are templates for their failure; stories that are told and retold. These stereotypical faceplants can be avoided. And they are of course not limited to Kickstarter, but apply to all Crowd Funding platforms. Let me list the many failure modes of crowdfunding a product. Learn from these tropes and maybe we can break out of this cycle of despair.

Failure Out of the Gate

You don’t hear about these failures, and that’s the point. These are crowd funded projects that launch into the abyss and don’t get any wings through printed word or exposure. They may have a stellar product, an impressive engineering team, and a 100% likelihood of being able to deliver, but the project doesn’t get noticed and it dies. Coolest Cooler, the project that raised $13 million, failed miserably the first time they ran a campaign. It was the second attempt that got traction.

The solution is to have a mailing list of interested people are ready to purchase the moment you launch, and share to everyone they know. Reach out to blogs and news organizations a month early with a press package and a pitch catered to their specific audience. Press releases get tossed. Have a good reason why this thing is relevant to their audience. Offer an exclusive to a big news site that is your target market.

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