Seeed Studio is having a happy hour sale for their 3-Year anniversary:
Seeedstudio turns 3 years old next month, and because this is such a special event we’ve decide to launch our “Happy Hour” to celebrate with all our fans out there. What this means is that for couple hours every day from July 6th to July 8th, some of our featured products will be discounted at up to 50%! Yes, it’s our birthday but we’re ready to offer you presents!
There will be some discounts from us too on Bus Pirates, CPLD dev-boards, and protoboards.
The problems will be server availability because there will be more people than the server will be able to accomodate and it won’t matter if they upgrade their servers.
I don’t see a need for Twitter so I’m not going to set up an account for their web server that won’t be able to handle the demand. The idea of sitting at my computer for three hours hitting ‘submit’ over and over again is not appealing to me so my friends at Seeedstudio will lose some of my business to someone else. I’ll be buying from another vendor on those days.
If you want me to buy a product from Seeed, make me a deal that is attainable and easy.
You can tweet all you want to gain followers. I’ve already talked to my relatives and friends. They’re not into electronics so unless you are nice to people and make products that appeal to the average consumer, you aren’t going to make hobbyists out of them. You can tweet all you want but it takes probably two years of learning to get the average person to know enough about electronics to do anything before they can buy some of your products. All you are going to do is fish from the same pond as everyone else while I’d rather go in the back yard and play T Ball with my son than reading what people tweet about what they had for breakfast.
You want people to buy more products? Have a centralized location of tutorials teaching people how to do stuff so they can actually buy your products. Nobody wants to teach because they aren’t teachers and all they want to do is tell non electronic students to read the manual that was written for engineers instead of normal people like me. If I gave the average person on the street one of your manuals and asked them to explain it, they wouldn’t have a clue which means you couldn’t sell cold beer in the Sahara.
I’m sorry it’s not to your liking. Seeed asked if I would participate, and I said sure. I’m not into twitter or facebook personally, but a lot of people are.
I totally agree with you on the skill level of our stuff. It is for people with experience who want a new tool that makes something they already do easier. Beginners are already well served by Arduino and scads of intro development boards, tutorials, hacker space classes, and more.
Dangerous Prototypes doesn’t target beginners, we don’t do market research, selling things isn’t even part of the mission. I just make things I like. I prefer when people build their own instead of buying a copy, I’ll give you the PCB for free. For those who can’t or don’t want to build one, Seeed will sell you a copy for less than a DIY.
I admit it isn’t a sound business model, it’s not meant to be, it’s just for fun. I was drug kicking and screaming into manufacturing – I never wanted the liability or support duties, it takes away from hardware development. I’d still be publishing open source hardware designs and articles if there wasn’t someone like Seeed to manufacture copies. It would be way less fun though. It’s more fun to play with someone else, than it is to play with yourself ;)
My stepmother received the wrong medication from the Pharmacist and crashed her car but couldn’t sue because its her responsibility to check to see if she had the right medicine because its a dual responsibility.
I think if you were to include fuses and an enclosure to reduce fire hazard, I believe you would be okay. If someone burns themselves then it is their action and not yours. Maybe there is a lawyer that could give you legal advice but you should probably spend the money so you feel safer in branching out. I think you still have the same legal issues with what you are building now even though some of the projects are not for beginners and while it seems expensive, getting legal advice may save you considerably more money in the long term.
Getting beginners involved could widen your user base and would let you sell more.
If normal people want to use this stuff, some of us are glad to answer their questions in the forum! :) I’d be especially glad if I could do this full time instead of research in my lab (ok, maybe not that much :) )
And if anybody wants to begin with learning electronics, Dangerous Prototypes is not the site, the kits here are for intermediate to advanced scale (in my opinion). But there are many resources for a beginner, for example:
– Go online, Google the stuff you want to learn! Sparkfun has tutorials for beginning electronics, you can start from Ohm’s law and go up to soldering your own surface mount board with an electric skillet.
– Go to a local hackerspace. Most have just one rule: “Be excellent to each other!” and people I’ve met are great! They answer any question you have and most have some workshops for teaching people stuff. I finished first installment of Eagle CAD workshop at Tokyo HackerSpace and I was glad that most of my students were eager IT guys who didn’t know anything about electronics. After the workshop they were most interested in learning electronics to design their own circuits.
Ian’s mention of marketing reminds me of the video blog “An Engineering Mind”. Oh, how they made fun of marketing! :) And I still don’t get how these guys earn more than engineers. :S
I would like to buy a Maple Leaf and I would like to see more projects involving the Maple.