Has anyone been successful selling products? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: Ram80
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2024, 05:11:59 pm
content: The electronics you make, have you sold them and if so have you been successful?I Understand there are various compliance regulations to pass and maybe this makes it not viable.

author: jmelson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2024, 10:43:50 pm
content: I make a line of products for CNC motion control systems. Many of my products are designed to work with the LinuxCNC open source software package. I have sold hundreds of boards of each type. So, this is a very small operation - a one-man shop. I have tried to be compliant with regulations, but it is way too expensive to have each product tested, especially for EMC compliance. For that reason, I only sell boards, not complete systems.Jon

author: Circlotron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2024, 10:58:38 pm
content: Find someone that has an existing customer base and knows what they would like to sell but doesn’t know how to make it themself. Let them have the hassle of dealing with a million phone calls from individual customers while you stay insulated from that and do what you do best.

author: nigelwright7557
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2024, 01:04:19 am
content: These days it is very hard to compete with common items.I find I do better with rarer more specialist stuff.I can mark up prices a bit more.Find a niche market to sell in.

author: Manul
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2024, 02:52:22 pm
content: Only one-off designs by special order from customers, never something in volume. I'm sure, selling a product in volume lingers on many minds on this forum. Not necessarily for economic profit, maybe just as a personal legacy. Knowing that there are a bunch of people all around the world using your product is emotionally moving. I'm personally more driven by this later thing, not profit. Who knows, maybe one day.

author: fourfathom
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2024, 09:07:46 pm
content: Quote from: Manul on May 06, 2024, 02:52:22 pmWhen I retired there were some very successful products out there that I was deeply involved with (architecture, pieces of the design, team management), and I still feel very proud about that.But I still have the desire to solve problems and create things. As a spinoff of my ham radio activities, especially solving frequency accuracy and stability problems in existing ham gear, I became hooked up with a bunch of very smart people involved in ionospheric propagation research (http://wsprdaemon.org/andhttps://hamsci.org/). I started a small company to design, build, and sell items useful to this community, and others. Some of these items have become pretty popular. I probably don't break even overall (certainly not if I had to pay someone to do what I do for free), but it's fun and rewarding, and may expand into a profitable venture. This is my company:https://turnislandsystems.com/

author: aliarifat794
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2024, 05:59:00 am
content: No. I planned a couple of times. But did not proceed finally. You are right. Compliance is a concern. Moreover, it is often impossible to be price competitive.

author: fourfathom
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2024, 06:55:11 am
content: You've got to go niche or go big. Unless you have massive financing and a killer design that can't be easily duplicated, and customers, stick with niche.

author: Retirednerd2020
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2024, 03:24:58 pm
content: I made a good living over the last 15 years designing and building products to order. The customers have been commercial and industrial and never consumer items. The products tended to be fairly involved electro-mechanical systems vs. one product. The majority of the income was generated by the design, not the production portion of the jobs. Support was also "paid support".I did try a consumer product with a friend. Got patents, certifications, etc. The product looked like it would be a winner as far as filling a need but it did not work out well because we could not get our costs down and due to logistical issues. The product sold about 3500 pieces. Fun project but not a good revenue generator. As mentioned above, way too much customer hand-holding was needed even though the product was about as easy to use as can be imagined and it had a very good instructions (that too often weren't read).