 This is a recycled version of a talk I gave about three or four weeks ago at the sharks camp in the Netherlands. If any of you were there, then you may well have seen it already. You can perform a merge on it. because there'll be bits that i forgotten, bits which I'm doing differently or whatever. You'll get the full story. tacticsetty from project Kit is detailing my experiences running a small electronic kit business. Y rai ei ddigwad â 110, rai ei penochel anghilodau y gallwn argronwch gyfer gweld, a wneud i chi arweithio eich cyfrifiadau cyllid yn eu cyfrifiadau eich cyfrifiadau, eu gymwylo yn L-ROM,uestion Media, Computer Games, Web, Google, yng Nghymru Cymru, a'r eich hun yn ysbytyn ymdeg yw Oxford Dictionrys, ac ar gyfer wnaeth ym生, rwyf er mlynedd ar y dictionary. Y cwm ydw i'n gwybod i'r perthodol, nid wnaeth eich gweithio'r PNP, I was producing language technology software for manipulating language to do cool things and I thought I could make a living out of this and it didn't really work out because I couldn't find the customers. I was casting around for other things to do for a living and along the way I turned the kind of stuff I did for fun into some products. If any of you were here for this event about a couple of years ago you probably saw me giving a talk about Whisper, an amateur radio protocol and as part of that talk I brought in some of the I guess the development boards that turned into some of my first products as I launched them as playable kits. So that's the background to this talk. This is where this is coming from. I feel a bit bad about this kit business because I'm still running it but I haven't given it to the attention it deserves because along the way I also found Hackaday and you've got to follow the money and the fact is I write for Hackaday. I make more money writing for Hackaday therefore it makes more sense that I spend more of my time writing for Hackaday rather than developing further kits so I have to make a slight apology on that one but it doesn't take away from the experiences that I'm about to relate. So you want to sell electronic kits. I mean everybody has a kit on this. It's like there's an old thing about everybody has a novel waiting within them and in most cases particularly on dark and stormy nights that novel is probably best left unwritten but every electronic engineer thinks hey I can make a neat little kit and those people would buy that and build it but a few things you've got to think about it before you do it. The first is don't quit your day job. There are people who launch kits. It does really well and they make decent living out of it and live happily ever after. I mean I know one or two. I've got one or two friends who've had just hit the right kit, the right piece of electronics at the right time and have made a real contribution to the community. Lots of people have bought it and have made living out of it. If that happens to you that's wonderful. It really is good but I would suggest that you don't expect that to happen. It's a bonus if it does happen. But assuming you've got past that you are going to do a kit. You have to think okay this is the thing I want to make. I think it's really cool and I think lots of people would buy it but you have to have a look at the market in which you're about to work. I'm going to use as an example the Raspberry Pi business. There are a lot of boards or kinds of boards for the Raspberry Pi but among them are little educational boards that make an LED flash or conceivable little boards with LEDs on that you can plug into the Raspberry Pi. There are ones just matrices of LEDs. There are novelty ones shaped as Christmas trees or bananas or whatever it is. And people keep launching new Raspberry Pi LED boards for some reason. I don't know. All I can imagine is that there is a huge untapped market that is still unfulfilled by the vast number already on the market or they simply aren't going through this step and looking to see what other people are doing. Ultimately you have to take the very simple view that whatever you can do some other idiot is going to do either better than you or more stupidly than you because they are going to either do a far better job than you or they're going to sell it for such a silly price that they eventually go bust but on the way they take you down to because you can't compete. Therefore you've got to look at is this kit a viable proposition? Am I going to be able to sell enough? Is it going to make sense to put this on the market? Finally you've got to look at what makes a good kit. Think of the kits that you've made that you thought were good kits. You probably have an idea of some bad kits. If you go on eBay you can buy lots of little Chinese radio kits and they're fantastic little kits. They are quite beautifully designed often and what you'll get is a little bag of components and a PCB and if you're lucky you'll get some instructions and they'll probably be in Chinese. You go to your hackspace and you find a member of your hackspace who comes from China and speaks Chinese and you drop them down in front of her and you say Alice could you translate this for me in the case of Oxford hackspace where I am? She's called Alice and she translates it and it still makes no sense because it's not being well written by somebody who really understands how kits are built. Even in translation it's pretty useless instructions and so you need to think what makes a good kit and so think about the good best kits that you've encountered. I always think the gold standard are the heat kit kits from the 50s, maybe 60s, 70s. They are legendary for having amazing instructions and everything just worked. You followed the instructions and you got a beautiful professional product. I'm not talking about the current heat kit kits which I'm sure are very good but I just somehow can't see it. I don't know quite where they're coming from on those products. I think they bought the name and are trading on the name but that's only a personal view. More recently there was an amateur radio kit company in the 70s, 80s, 90s CM House. I built quite a lot of CM House kits when I was a teenager. I thought they were fantastic kits. They had nice printed circuit boards, components that fit. The printed circuit boards had good writing on to tell you where the components went and the instructions were well written. Back in the day I think they were done with one of those turn the handboard duplicators that used to get exam papers at school with. But you can't blame them for not having 2017's repro graphics in 1987. So you've decided that the kind of kit that you want to make. In my case, I should say the kind of kits that I've produced, some small amateur radio kits for the Raspberry Pi. It's a niche that nobody else seemed to have jumped into and it's what I was making for fun anyway so I just thought hey I'll make these into kits. You've made it on your bench and it works. It's on a redboard or something like that. It's made from kit bits and pieces, components that you've dug out, your junk box or whatever and you're very proud of it. It works really well. What you have to do is turn that into something that works repeatably. You can make it again and again and again with exactly the components that the punters are going to get. None of the, oh I've got one of those in my junk box and you pick out some part from the 1950's or none of those, well I can do that because I have elite coil winding skills and it works for me so it must work for you. It has to be pull it out of the box, solder it to the board, it works. When I was here two years ago I had one of the early prototypes which I showed to a few people of my little Raspberry Pi HF shortwave radio receiver. The first version of that had a little toroidal transformer. Didn't perform very well. As part of this process of iteratively making sure it worked repeatedly I discovered that Ethernet cards have a little transformer on which is actually a fantastic little low power wide band RF transformer and the minute I changed it to one of those I had a repeatable HF radio receiver. That's the kind of thing you need to do. You need to work with exactly the parts that you are going to sell to the punters. Then you have to think about how you're going to package it. The packaging has to protect it to send it to the other side of the world and it has to be attractive when they look at it. It has to present the stuff well so that you've got to imagine that you're actually having it on a stall and people are coming up and looking at it. You want people to look at it and say hey yeah that looks like a really nice kit. Now yet again your little Chinese kit will arrive and it will just be a mess of bits in a bag with a sort of scrunched up photocopy leaflet in Chinese. You've got to avoid that. You've got to make it look wow when you see it. Pricing. There's no point selling a kit if you're not going to make money. It's a place a lot of people get wrong when they for instance do a Kickstarter project. They think oh I can make that for a tenner. I'll sell it for a tenner. Of course you can make it for a tenner because you just spend a tenner on bits but you forget all the other work you put into it. You forget not just your time but taking it to the post office. You forget postage. You forget customs on ordering a whole load of stuff from China. You forget the cost of the staple that sticks together the instructions. Nothing on one of them but when you're doing a thousand of them, hell it's expensive. Almost everything the puffy envelope you send it off in the integrated sticker stationery, the little sticker on the front of the kit, the printing costs of those. You think when you hit print on a laser printer it pops out a few sheets that's nothing but it can be 20p, 30p, 40p that's a lot on a kit. What I do with mine is I produce a spreadsheet which has the bill of materials and then every other conceivable thing associated with the kit underneath it. I price that up for I think 25, 50 and 100 kits and I come up with a figure of what it costs me and then I stick a mark up on it. I would suggest you don't do less than double it. In some cases if it's a low amount, more than double it. Now that sounds like yeah, I'm ripping off my customers. But no, when you are putting in everything that you are doing with the kit you have to make it a sensible and sustainable price for your business otherwise there's no point in doing it. I should be speaking from the same side of the PC shouldn't I? Now I'm a writer, I'm... Oxydictionary is trained literacy so I would say that writing the instructions are the most important part of the kit but genuinely they are. It doesn't really matter what the kit is, it can be the nicest kit in the world. If the instructions are awful then the kit is going to be awful. The punter isn't going to remember the design, they just can remember that they couldn't build it and that comes down to the instructions. I always say keep it simple, pitch it at somebody who to me knows a bit of electronics but hasn't built something like this before. If I pitched it at me some of my customers wouldn't be able to do it because my customers are radio amateurs and they are experts in what they do. They have incredible experience that goes back decades of radio but for instance my kits all use surface mount components. They may not have done much surface mount work so you have to pitch it at somebody who hasn't built anything like this before because though you know most of your customers will have done it gives them all the opportunity to get something from it. This is a lower level than them at all points therefore they don't feel it's above their level. I split my very carefully up into sections. First sections isn't really much use but I consider it very important it's the cheery introduction. Nice picture of the completed kit and hello and congratulations for buying a kit from me. You now own a nice little radio, aren't you wonderful? Isn't the radio wonderful? Just a paragraph and a half, a little bit of blurb. Then I go into a you will need, you will need a soldering iron, you will need side cutters, you will need a lamp, you will need a magnifying glass etc. That kind of stuff, very clearly laid out. Then I have a section on surface mount soldering. I probably wouldn't have a big section on soldering if it was just through a hole because I think most people who buy a soldering kit know how to solder. But because all my kits are surface mounts there are a lot of people who I think are unnecessarily scared of surface mount soldering. It's perfectly within their skill set but they've never done it before so they're scared of it. So I try to lead them in gently, yes you can do this. So I put quite a lot of effort into my surface mount soldering section. Then I have a step by step go through every section of the build. I have a little screenshot with first you do R1, then R2, then R3, then the next section will be IC1, IC2 etc. And I take them through every step of the build. You cannot overdo this, you cannot make the instructions for a kit too clear. Going back to one of those 50s Heath kits. Have a look online, download, you can find all sorts of places that have the 1950s Heath kit instructions. And just look how wonderfully detailed they are. If you can make them more detailed than the 50s Heath kits you're on the right lines. Then I'll probably have a little section on, you've built the kit now just before you plug it into the Raspberry Pi. Let's just check it works. In the case of these what I do is I say connect up a 5V supply with your multimeter measuring current. And I can't remember what the current is but let's say if it's measuring about 20mA it's probably not going to fry your Pi. And an instructions here are the places to look for solder bridges, that kind of stuff. And then I have a little section. Congratulations you appear to have produced a working kit. Plug it into your Raspberry Pi. Here are the instructions for downloading the software and running it. And here are the instructions for use. Then I'm into a little section of appendices. Here are the frequency bands to look at for the radio. Here are a few technical specs. And then right at the end I have the really, really boring bit which is a statement of CE compliance. I consider CE compliance to be an important thing to go for. But I'm very lucky I have a get out clause on the worst bit that for EMC compliant compatibility there is a loophole for kits of parts for radio amateurs. If it wasn't a kit of parts for radio amateurs if I wanted to smack a CE logo on it I'd have to take it to an EMC test lab and I don't have the money for that. So if I make anything else I'll find a tenuous and weak amateur radio angle just so that I can sell it without an EMC test. And then you've produced your instructions. Assemble, I'll put together a working kit of all your instructions and components just as you would want to sell it to the customer and then farm it out to want to see your friends. If they can build it you've probably made a kit that will work and you can proceed to the next step. If they haven't, go back, iterate, find out what they had problems with, fix it, take it back to them. It's an important step, it's a bit tedious and you waste a few kits doing it but you'll thank yourself later when your customers don't give you grief. Then you're ready to put together something for the customer. Come back to what I was saying earlier about presentation, your packaging. You want them to look at it and think wow this is wonderful, I want to buy it. My kits, I looked at different packaging options, there were little cardboard boxes, whatever. In the end I went for plastic click and seal bags because if it neatly in the smaller type of, is it large letter I believe it is, postal puffy envelope. I have a nice colourful sticker on the front with my company logo saying what the kit is. I have to have a tiny little bit underneath saying not for children it's got small parts in but nice cheerful label. Inside the plastic bag I have the instructions carefully folded so the nice colour picture is visible. I tuck the loose components behind the instructions so they don't get a mess of components. I very carefully tuck the printed circuit board, deck all side upwards in front of the instructions. So when you look at the kit you see a nice cheery label, a picture of the kit and a printed circuit board. The printed circuit board says yes this is a professional kit and the effect is of quite a colourful thing. I am kicking myself metaphorically at the moment for not having brought one with me to show you. I should have done my apologies. And then you've got a finished product. Great. You're almost ready to sell it. I'd always say I can't remember if I put this on the next slide. I'll see in a minute. That at that point you need a final set of testing. Give one to another friend, somebody who hasn't seen it before and just check that they can build it from that. That's your final set before sale. Let me come to you've got a kit. How are you going to sell it? Probably the most easy, the easiest and the most difficult simultaneously is to sell it direct. So hawk kits, take them out on the road. Get yourself an estate car, a foldy table, a foldy chair, a cash box and a big box of kits. And go to radio alleys, go to events like this. Actually we don't have any traders here. But go to hacker camps, go to make affairs, go to hack spaces, everything. In one way it's probably the easiest way to sell kits because you just stand in front of the punters. They give you money, you give them kits. It's the most difficult way because it is incredibly hard work. You spend a lot of time on the road. There are some people who thrive on that. I know one or two of them and they've done very well. I'm thinking one in particular who sells a little retro computer board who sells quite a lot of kits. Face to face in that way. Personally I didn't because I think it would have given me too much stress and tiredness and I don't think I would have been able to take it. But if that's what works for you, if you think you can do that, it's a very good way to start. Then online. Now I have to give a bit of a disclosure here. I write for Hackaday in other work I do. Hackaday is owned by a company called Supply Frame. One of Hackaday's sister companies under Supply Frame ownership is a company called Tindie. Tindie is described as Etsy for Makers. Effectively it's a very easy online store for people who sell electronic assemblies, kits, that kind of thing. Have a look at Tindie. I'm not so just saying this because I wrote for Hackaday. I'm saying this because I know quite a few people who sell the kits by Tindie and say it's quite good. Is it just tindie.com? I think if you Google Tindie you'll find it. I didn't go for Tindie in the end because at the time I set this up I wasn't sure about some of the implications with respect to tax. At the time I believed they only would pay me via PayPal which I preferred not to go down. It's a decision for yourselves if that's the kind of thing you're looking at. But it's an option and the people I know who use it seem to rate it. I've certainly bought quite a lot of things from Tindie and it seems to work from the seller's side too. Then you've got online shops. That's the route I went down. Now as somebody has done web development in the past I've built online shops of all varieties. Like J-Shop and Magento and all those kinds of things. This is a living hell of payment gateways and other nasties. If you are an online shop guru for whom that is easy then go for it. Knock yourselves out. Personally I wanted to be a maker of electronic kits rather than a maintainer and builder of online stores. I've been there and done that and I really didn't like it. Therefore I went for a turnkey online shop. I went with Shopify. There are other online shops turnkey operations that will do you something similar. It's cloud hosted, real shop experts, real financial experts, real gateway experts, real security experts handle all that side of it. So you just give on with your shop. It's about $20 a month, $30 a month and to me that was absolutely worth every single penny. That's my experience, your experience may vary. Finally is crowdfunding. I actually the first thing I tried was a Kickstarter campaign. Now Kickstarter is great. Obviously you bung something up and say I'll make 200 of these back me and then the money rolls in and you send them out. There are pitfalls. There are some wonderful online nightmare stories of Kickstarter campaigns where they woefully underestimated the amount of money they went and had 100,000 people wanting to buy whatever it was they were making and only had about half the money and practically went bankrupt doing it or else just folded. I launched my first little board which is a little RF prototyping board for the Raspberry Pi on Kickstarter. I like to think I got the estimation part completely right. It actually failed in the end because I got a bit greedy. I said I can make 200 of these and I only think I got about 170 backers. I will say this. There's a lot to be said for Kickstarter project that fails because you don't actually have to ship anything. You don't get any money but it's an interesting experience. You get quite a lot of publicity. You get in touch with quite a lot of potential customers but you don't have the inconvenience of actually having to ship anything. In the end, when I put the same product on my store and the other products on the Shopify store, quite a lot of my Kickstarter backers bought it anyway. For some people Kickstarter is an amazing thing. It works really well. It didn't work for me but it wasn't quite a failure. If you fill up to a Kickstarter, I think do it. It's an interesting process to go through. Anyway, however you've flogged it, you've flogged a kit. You now have to get it to the customer. You have to get the customers in and you have to keep them happy. When you're sending it out to the customer, you can have the best operation in the world. As far as the customer is concerned, your operation is whoever delivers it to them. You see very large billion dollar online organisations falling foul at this. They think the cheapest bidder always wins so we will hire the cheapest white fan men we can find. And they send out the orders to the customers and the white fan man chucks it in next door's bin or something or just doesn't bother and the customer is unhappy with them. And it's not them that are at fault, it's the white fan man that are at fault but of course it's them that are at fault hiring the white fan man in the first place. Go for the best delivery service that you can. In my case I send everything out, signed for or international tract and signed and I do it with Royal Mail because in my view the posties are best at delivering stuff because they know where everybody lives. That sounds very sinister doesn't it? They know where everybody lives, they know how to find people, they know where to deliver things so if you send something with the posties it will arrive and if you send it signed and tracked people will know that it arrived. My customers probably pay a tad more on the postage than they might do if I use some of the cheaper options but I'm unrepentant about that because I know that they will get it and they will get it in one piece. And when you send it out it also has to withstand the worst that the international postage system can throw at it. I didn't quite test my packaging by packaging up some kits and jumping up and down on it but I should have done but I did do a bit of loading kits in envelopes and sending them through the mail to people. In the end I went for the mail light, I think they are puffy envelopes. The ones I use are a post office large letter. They cost about £2.50 to £3 to send within the UK first class signed for and I've had one or two returns. I had one I sent to Florida I think it was and the US post office cocked up the delivery and I got it back about six weeks later and it had been to Florida and back. The envelope was battered as anything but the kits were perfect inside it. In that case the guy very slightly complained and I sent him another copy of the same order which he received in about a week so it was obviously just the post office cocked up that time. So think very carefully about how you are going to send it out and who you are going to send it with because that's what your customers sees. Next you have to get in the customers, become a marketing genius. At this point you get all sorts of characters in suits popping up and say I can help you on Kickstarter, Facebook, Twitter or whatever it is. You have to do that yourself unless you've got lots of money and to be honest a lot of them are very questionable businesses anyway. I went for this by trying to be a helpful and knowledgeable person on social media, forums, whatever, QRZ, all this kind of amateur radio stuff. Not going buy my kits, buy my kits, buy my kits but if somebody came up talking about stuff to do with the Raspberry Pi with radio with my particular niche I would pop up and talk about it and there in my signature was buy my kits. But I wasn't saying to them, pushing out them, buy my kits. I was being a helpful and friendly expert, at least I like to think I was anyway. And then finally afterwards support your community, you sold the product, help them if they've got a problem. To be honest 99% of my customers never hear from them again. It's possible they buy the kit thinking yes I'm going to build that one day and put it on one side and never build it. I hope they build it, it works for them and they think wow that's a cool kit and just get on with their lives. Very occasionally I'll have one who comes on to me and says I've got a problem. I've had people who've damaged surface mounts components and sent them another little tape of components in the post or whatever or people who haven't got a component or something. You just have to bend over backwards, you just have to take the hit. Even when somebody is very irate, you just have to send them another product. Eventually if it doesn't really doesn't work for them just refund them the whole lot, chalk it up to experience. Occasionally you're going to get annoying customers, move on, refund, move on. And mostly you'll help them, they'll get their kit working. Even if you have to refund them often they'll be happy that you tried and you refunded without a question. It's better to refund them and lose a bit of money than have somebody going around telling all the mates that you're a really bad supplier. So that's what I've tried to do. I've probably lost a bit of money on a few orders but overall I think I've gained. Ah, that's it, sorry. Okay, that's my experience selling or starting in a small kit business.