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I just love the maker's mind. > I want something that does not exist, I will make it. Making things has never been so accessible, if you don't know how to sta

I just love the maker's mind. > I want something that does not exist, I will make it. Making things has never been so accessible, if you don't know how to start, join a community and ask, if they are hostile, just ask chatgpt and start from there. 3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano. Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it. I have few bank PCBs, and every day I hold one and I ask it 'what do you want to be?' and just wait and listen, it doesn't tell me, so I make it into what I want, and then try again the next day. As David Lynch says, ideas are very quiet, you have to learn how to listen, so far I have not heard one, but maybe some day..

fxtentacle 3y ago
To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, the process is now almost fully commodified with all those OEM and production services. The only thing that now stands between your idea and financial success is your ability to reach the target market, i.e. marketing. Also, such a slick KickStarter campaign typically costs $10k plus ad spend if you buy it from an agency. Roughly 25% of the final price will be marketing and ads. I know because I've seen first hand that you need a 3400% mark-up on the production costs to profitably sell bikinis in the US. These hangers will also likely cost <$0.1 to make at scale. It's the initial investments into CNCed molds and the upfront marketing that determine the price.
- pknerd 3y ago
  True. As a developer I could make any thing but don't know how to sell. People lik e peter levios can earn millions with a single index.php and SQLite by reading tutorials. And now gpt would make non programmer more free from devs.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Making a product, certifying it and making sure it’s safe is also hard. But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech. I make these epaper calendar displays. https://shop.invisible-computers.com https://shop.invisible-computers.com I have invested thousands of hours into making them as good as possible. You couldn’t tell from my website :D I would probably profit much more if I just stopped improving them and focused on marketing. But I just feel much more drawn to improving the product.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    That's great! Some small things about your website: - "Contact" page says "Kontact" in en-GB locale - Do you need a shopping cart for one product? Just have the "buy it now" and leave the cart out? - Do you need a search? There are only a couple of pages. - The Contact page might want to highlight to the user that there is a chat feature in the bottom right, if they prefer that to email. Other than those little bits, the site looks pretty good to me! Payments seem slick. Have you done things like ProductHunt?
    - konschubert 3y ago
      Oh, wow, thanks for the feedback! No I haven't done ProductHunt. I am not sure if I can disable the cart on shopify? I think I need better pictures, and I need a better shopify theme.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        I think the pictures are pretty good already, but yes, perhaps. If you wanted to dive into more feature work, possibly the next thing is thinking about CEOs who might want a) Outlook integration, and b) a way to shade off their calendar for privacy somehow. Another thing could be to stick more with consumers and have a way to display recipes on it? Maybe if there's a recipe service you could partner with that has a decent API? But in general I reckon you should market the Google Calendar stuff, which already exists and looks awesome!
      - mhb 3y ago
        A nice application for this might be places that have reservations that would be helpful if displayed. For example, tennis courts, squash courts, etc. People make the reservation online and, when they get to the facility, often don't remember which court they've reserved. Having it on a display would avoid having to look it up on the phone. Those sorts of places also might have a budget for something like this.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Simone Giertz (the video's creator) is what you could call a professional DIYer. She has an 8 year old Youtube channel dedicated entirely to making weird or beautiful stuff. She happens to also be good at a specific flavor of marketing, but just because the maker part appears easy when she demonstrates it I wouldn't conclude that anyone with the right idea could have reached the same end result. There is a lot of skill and experience still involved.
- codedokode 3y ago
  Marketing is only important if your product is equal to existing or worse. For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    Uber's initial rates were way below a sustainable rate. Pure marketing combined with lots of media work to make them known. Low prices don't help, if nobody knows the product exists.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    That is not true, at least not for all types of products. I make an e-paper calendar. There is nothing like it on the market. Regularly, I have customers who say "wow, I have been looking for this for years!". Some of these customers have googled for such a product before mine existed, and found that none exists. Without marketing, how would these people learn that the product they've been looking for does now exist?
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      How do you expect to face competition from general-purpose, high-resolution E-Ink displays appearing on the market now? They are getting to the point where it would be within the ability of an average computer hobbyist to mount one on their wall along with one of the many 'HDMI stick' computers. Your product looks very polished already, and is considerably cheaper than such general purpose displays right now. However, the E-Ink display market is (finally) becoming mainstream, which makes me wonder where you'll go from here. No problem if your response would be too sensitive to share in public; good luck with your business in any case!
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- Karellen 3y ago
  > To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, Um, did you see how many prototypes she went through? And also, 3 years - it's in the title. Designing products that kinda-sorta work might be easy and affordable. Designing products that work well and don't have annoying edge cases is still hard. Unless you think that Simone Giertz is unusually bad at this sort of thing?
  - runamuck 3y ago
    The sweat equity of 3 years and dozens of prototypes only contributes to 5% of the product's success. Marketing will drive 95% of the return.
    - Karellen 3y ago
      Damn, with that kind of math, it almost doesn't seem worth investing the time and effort to ensure that the product works well! I hope people who think like that are happy with their buggy-as-shit computer games on release day. Because they deserve to be.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        EA, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, etc all release broken shit and rake in millions and millions. I don't know what you think your point is. The vast majority of the market responds by whining on social media and then giving you 80$, plus whatever you ask for for literally new textures. Just look at No man's Sky and Cyberpunk! They basically advertised games that didn't even exist, released something basically unrelated, and now the market rates their products highly positive and earnest people will tell you to give them more money! America hasn't rewarded sincerity in a hundred years
- grbsh 3y ago
  This is something I’ve come to appreciate much more recently - how hard (or at least unnatural) marketing / sales is. A social media following (upon the right audience) is turning into a new metric for economic power, and it’s a skill in it of itself to self-promote tactfully. What’s the best way to learn marketing skills? Books, courses? I feel like there’s a lot of trash to sort through here. I have a product I’ve been working on that is nearly ready, but I’ve told only a few people. Would it be better to learn by getting someone who is great at marketing involved, and learn from them?
  - runamuck 3y ago
    You will need to dive in, hit road blocks, fail and regroup to learn sales. Books/ courses can give you motivation, but you will learn most of the art through "the school of hard knocks."
traceroute66 3y ago
> Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it. Or, you could just, you know, buy them. My beef with people who say, like you do that 3D printers are cheap or you can buy an arduino/pi/whatever, is simple. People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost. The startup cost because your thinking works on the assumption that people know how to use, e.g. a 3D printer out of the box. The reality is that most people don't. And as such, they will expend a great deal of time with Mr Google and various internet forums trying to figure it out. They will then proceed to flush money down the pan on materials during their learning. Second people seem to value their time at zero. If you value your time at zero, then sure, its cheaper to make it yourself. But if you value your time realistically, its cheaper to either (a) buy it or (b) pay a domain-expert to make it for you.
- yard2010 3y ago
  But what's the fun in just buying stuff? Imagine every problem is solved with money, there is no taste to anything amymore.. if she could just buy a foldable hanger this video was much shorter, not fun, not interesting..
- throwaway71271 3y ago
  I don't value my time at zero, I just think making something is more valuable than my time.
- Kodix 3y ago
  You are correct about the utility calculation, of course. It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  Sadly, 3D printers are still cheaper. I once needed to make a few customized gears out of food safe plastic. I asked several online services for quotes and I called several on-location shops in northern Germany. The quotes I got were all around $1800 per unique gear shape. Since I needed 4 different shapes (i.e. $7k for outsourcing), it was much cheaper to buy a 3D printer, watch some tutorials and spend two working days just to make them myself. Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time. What do they do in those 2 weeks after the print finished but before they send the parcel?
konschubert 3y ago
I think the best ideas come when you make something that you really want for yourself. In 2020, I really wanted an eink calendar to hang on my wall. Still, many people built one for themselves and never turned it into a commercial product. It’s a lot of work and some of it is boring. And you have to pay for certification and worry about all that paperwork that comes with a business. It took me 3 years: https://shop.invisible-computers.com https://shop.invisible-computers.com
- vincentleeuwen 3y ago
  link is broken for me
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Fixed
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dom96 3y ago
  > And you have to pay for certification This is the thing that got me down and it seems to be the biggest barrier to entry for commercializing hardware products. The CE/FCC certification is killer.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    CE is much worse than FCC. Maybe the US Market would work as a start? I can recommend Sunfire Testing for certification. They are used to working with hackers. If you want you can email me and I can maybe help with you with some advice.
    - throwaway71271 3y ago
      thats a great reference, thanks!
    - 3y ago
blkhawk 3y ago
cough there is a common module with an esp32-s2 you can grab for 2EUR. Its cheaper than i can get a pro micro clone. look for "s2-mini" on Ali. I cannot fathom somebody still using an arduino nano.
- throwaway71271 3y ago
  I had stocked on 10-20 nanos from some years ago and was cycling through them but now that you said that I went and bought 10 esp32-s2s from aliexpress, thanks! I am planning to do 'advent of things' this year, where I will make something small every day until Christmas, hopefully the s2 minis will arrive before december :)
  - blkhawk 3y ago
    they are especially good for emulating USB-hid stuff - I have made several password and OTP emitting boxes with them.
pplonski86 3y ago
Ideas are talking to me so ofte , that it is hard to decide with which one to go. Which one people need?
taneq 3y ago
> As David Lynch says, ideas are very quiet, you have to learn how to listen, so far I have not heard one, but maybe some day.. If that's your experience, either you're lucky, or just wait, or both. They're loud, and they keep coming faster and faster, and ideas beget ideas. You need a solid mental wall to protect yourself from them. Edit: *you're
the_powerless 3y ago
>3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano. If all you have is a hammer... I have an opposing view. The current popularity of those particular crafting items has resulted in a plethora of crumbling and misshapen plastic widgets with barely-functional networking features that required limited creativity or novel ideas to create. This is to the detriment of the many other skills and crafts used to create physical objects.
brotchie 3y ago
The state of off the shelf maker tools and parts is insane. Recently built a custom LED controller based on a WT32 ETH01 (cheap, $8 on Aliexpress, ESP32 with an Ethernet port). I ended up building 3 revision, all in EasyEDA (Web-based EDA tool), which integrates directly into JLPCB (PCB manufacturer). After submitting to JLPCB, they fabbed the PCBs, assembled them, and shipped them to West Coast USA in less than a week! For like an all-in cost of ~$10 per board, insane. The esp-idf toolchain is amazing, and pretty well documented, with lots of concrete examples of getting peripherals up and running (SPI, Ethernet, TCP/IP stack). Then I need custom enclosures, so got a Bambu Labs X1. Learning Fusion 360 was a bit of a lift, but a week later had a snap-fit, fully custom enclosure. That combo of super easy, supplier integrated EDA, cheap and quick fab and assembly, good tools chains, and easy building of enclosures is night-and-day from doing hobby electronics back in early 2000s. Choose a base ESP32 board, design and have a shield fabbed in a week, quickly code it up, done.

fxtentacle 3y ago

To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, the process is now almost fully commodified with all those OEM and production services. The only thing that now stands between your idea and financial success is your ability to reach the target market, i.e. marketing. Also, such a slick KickStarter campaign typically costs $10k plus ad spend if you buy it from an agency. Roughly 25% of the final price will be marketing and ads. I know because I've seen first hand that you need a 3400% mark-up on the production costs to profitably sell bikinis in the US. These hangers will also likely cost <$0.1 to make at scale. It's the initial investments into CNCed molds and the upfront marketing that determine the price.

pknerd 3y ago
True. As a developer I could make any thing but don't know how to sell. People lik e peter levios can earn millions with a single index.php and SQLite by reading tutorials. And now gpt would make non programmer more free from devs.
konschubert 3y ago
Making a product, certifying it and making sure it’s safe is also hard. But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech. I make these epaper calendar displays. https://shop.invisible-computers.com https://shop.invisible-computers.com I have invested thousands of hours into making them as good as possible. You couldn’t tell from my website :D I would probably profit much more if I just stopped improving them and focused on marketing. But I just feel much more drawn to improving the product.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  That's great! Some small things about your website: - "Contact" page says "Kontact" in en-GB locale - Do you need a shopping cart for one product? Just have the "buy it now" and leave the cart out? - Do you need a search? There are only a couple of pages. - The Contact page might want to highlight to the user that there is a chat feature in the bottom right, if they prefer that to email. Other than those little bits, the site looks pretty good to me! Payments seem slick. Have you done things like ProductHunt?
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Oh, wow, thanks for the feedback! No I haven't done ProductHunt. I am not sure if I can disable the cart on shopify? I think I need better pictures, and I need a better shopify theme.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I think the pictures are pretty good already, but yes, perhaps. If you wanted to dive into more feature work, possibly the next thing is thinking about CEOs who might want a) Outlook integration, and b) a way to shade off their calendar for privacy somehow. Another thing could be to stick more with consumers and have a way to display recipes on it? Maybe if there's a recipe service you could partner with that has a decent API? But in general I reckon you should market the Google Calendar stuff, which already exists and looks awesome!
    - mhb 3y ago
      A nice application for this might be places that have reservations that would be helpful if displayed. For example, tennis courts, squash courts, etc. People make the reservation online and, when they get to the facility, often don't remember which court they've reserved. Having it on a display would avoid having to look it up on the phone. Those sorts of places also might have a budget for something like this.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
wongarsu 3y ago
Simone Giertz (the video's creator) is what you could call a professional DIYer. She has an 8 year old Youtube channel dedicated entirely to making weird or beautiful stuff. She happens to also be good at a specific flavor of marketing, but just because the maker part appears easy when she demonstrates it I wouldn't conclude that anyone with the right idea could have reached the same end result. There is a lot of skill and experience still involved.
codedokode 3y ago
Marketing is only important if your product is equal to existing or worse. For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  Uber's initial rates were way below a sustainable rate. Pure marketing combined with lots of media work to make them known. Low prices don't help, if nobody knows the product exists.
- konschubert 3y ago
  That is not true, at least not for all types of products. I make an e-paper calendar. There is nothing like it on the market. Regularly, I have customers who say "wow, I have been looking for this for years!". Some of these customers have googled for such a product before mine existed, and found that none exists. Without marketing, how would these people learn that the product they've been looking for does now exist?
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    How do you expect to face competition from general-purpose, high-resolution E-Ink displays appearing on the market now? They are getting to the point where it would be within the ability of an average computer hobbyist to mount one on their wall along with one of the many 'HDMI stick' computers. Your product looks very polished already, and is considerably cheaper than such general purpose displays right now. However, the E-Ink display market is (finally) becoming mainstream, which makes me wonder where you'll go from here. No problem if your response would be too sensitive to share in public; good luck with your business in any case!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
Karellen 3y ago
> To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, Um, did you see how many prototypes she went through? And also, 3 years - it's in the title. Designing products that kinda-sorta work might be easy and affordable. Designing products that work well and don't have annoying edge cases is still hard. Unless you think that Simone Giertz is unusually bad at this sort of thing?
- runamuck 3y ago
  The sweat equity of 3 years and dozens of prototypes only contributes to 5% of the product's success. Marketing will drive 95% of the return.
  - Karellen 3y ago
    Damn, with that kind of math, it almost doesn't seem worth investing the time and effort to ensure that the product works well! I hope people who think like that are happy with their buggy-as-shit computer games on release day. Because they deserve to be.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      EA, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, etc all release broken shit and rake in millions and millions. I don't know what you think your point is. The vast majority of the market responds by whining on social media and then giving you 80$, plus whatever you ask for for literally new textures. Just look at No man's Sky and Cyberpunk! They basically advertised games that didn't even exist, released something basically unrelated, and now the market rates their products highly positive and earnest people will tell you to give them more money! America hasn't rewarded sincerity in a hundred years
grbsh 3y ago
This is something I’ve come to appreciate much more recently - how hard (or at least unnatural) marketing / sales is. A social media following (upon the right audience) is turning into a new metric for economic power, and it’s a skill in it of itself to self-promote tactfully. What’s the best way to learn marketing skills? Books, courses? I feel like there’s a lot of trash to sort through here. I have a product I’ve been working on that is nearly ready, but I’ve told only a few people. Would it be better to learn by getting someone who is great at marketing involved, and learn from them?
- runamuck 3y ago
  You will need to dive in, hit road blocks, fail and regroup to learn sales. Books/ courses can give you motivation, but you will learn most of the art through "the school of hard knocks."

traceroute66 3y ago

> Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it. Or, you could just, you know, buy them. My beef with people who say, like you do that 3D printers are cheap or you can buy an arduino/pi/whatever, is simple. People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost. The startup cost because your thinking works on the assumption that people know how to use, e.g. a 3D printer out of the box. The reality is that most people don't. And as such, they will expend a great deal of time with Mr Google and various internet forums trying to figure it out. They will then proceed to flush money down the pan on materials during their learning. Second people seem to value their time at zero. If you value your time at zero, then sure, its cheaper to make it yourself. But if you value your time realistically, its cheaper to either (a) buy it or (b) pay a domain-expert to make it for you.

yard2010 3y ago
But what's the fun in just buying stuff? Imagine every problem is solved with money, there is no taste to anything amymore.. if she could just buy a foldable hanger this video was much shorter, not fun, not interesting..
throwaway71271 3y ago
I don't value my time at zero, I just think making something is more valuable than my time.
Kodix 3y ago
You are correct about the utility calculation, of course. It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.
fxtentacle 3y ago
Sadly, 3D printers are still cheaper. I once needed to make a few customized gears out of food safe plastic. I asked several online services for quotes and I called several on-location shops in northern Germany. The quotes I got were all around $1800 per unique gear shape. Since I needed 4 different shapes (i.e. $7k for outsourcing), it was much cheaper to buy a 3D printer, watch some tutorials and spend two working days just to make them myself. Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time. What do they do in those 2 weeks after the print finished but before they send the parcel?

konschubert 3y ago

I think the best ideas come when you make something that you really want for yourself. In 2020, I really wanted an eink calendar to hang on my wall. Still, many people built one for themselves and never turned it into a commercial product. It’s a lot of work and some of it is boring. And you have to pay for certification and worry about all that paperwork that comes with a business. It took me 3 years: https://shop.invisible-computers.com https://shop.invisible-computers.com

vincentleeuwen 3y ago
link is broken for me
- konschubert 3y ago
  Fixed
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dom96 3y ago
> And you have to pay for certification This is the thing that got me down and it seems to be the biggest barrier to entry for commercializing hardware products. The CE/FCC certification is killer.
- konschubert 3y ago
  CE is much worse than FCC. Maybe the US Market would work as a start? I can recommend Sunfire Testing for certification. They are used to working with hackers. If you want you can email me and I can maybe help with you with some advice.
  - throwaway71271 3y ago
    thats a great reference, thanks!
  - 3y ago

blkhawk 3y ago

cough there is a common module with an esp32-s2 you can grab for 2EUR. Its cheaper than i can get a pro micro clone. look for "s2-mini" on Ali. I cannot fathom somebody still using an arduino nano.

throwaway71271 3y ago
I had stocked on 10-20 nanos from some years ago and was cycling through them but now that you said that I went and bought 10 esp32-s2s from aliexpress, thanks! I am planning to do 'advent of things' this year, where I will make something small every day until Christmas, hopefully the s2 minis will arrive before december :)
- blkhawk 3y ago
  they are especially good for emulating USB-hid stuff - I have made several password and OTP emitting boxes with them.

pplonski86 3y ago

Ideas are talking to me so ofte , that it is hard to decide with which one to go. Which one people need?

taneq 3y ago

> As David Lynch says, ideas are very quiet, you have to learn how to listen, so far I have not heard one, but maybe some day.. If that's your experience, either you're lucky, or just wait, or both. They're loud, and they keep coming faster and faster, and ideas beget ideas. You need a solid mental wall to protect yourself from them. Edit: *you're

the_powerless 3y ago

>3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano. If all you have is a hammer... I have an opposing view. The current popularity of those particular crafting items has resulted in a plethora of crumbling and misshapen plastic widgets with barely-functional networking features that required limited creativity or novel ideas to create. This is to the detriment of the many other skills and crafts used to create physical objects.

brotchie 3y ago

The state of off the shelf maker tools and parts is insane. Recently built a custom LED controller based on a WT32 ETH01 (cheap, $8 on Aliexpress, ESP32 with an Ethernet port). I ended up building 3 revision, all in EasyEDA (Web-based EDA tool), which integrates directly into JLPCB (PCB manufacturer). After submitting to JLPCB, they fabbed the PCBs, assembled them, and shipped them to West Coast USA in less than a week! For like an all-in cost of ~$10 per board, insane. The esp-idf toolchain is amazing, and pretty well documented, with lots of concrete examples of getting peripherals up and running (SPI, Ethernet, TCP/IP stack). Then I need custom enclosures, so got a Bambu Labs X1. Learning Fusion 360 was a bit of a lift, but a week later had a snap-fit, fully custom enclosure. That combo of super easy, supplier integrated EDA, cheap and quick fab and assembly, good tools chains, and easy building of enclosures is night-and-day from doing hobby electronics back in early 2000s. Choose a base ESP32 board, design and have a shield fabbed in a week, quickly code it up, done.