RETIRED - How to Sell Your Widget on SparkFun

Contributors: jimblom

Choose Your Adventure

Have an awesome electronic widget that you want to get to market? Great! We are always listening for new ideas from our customers and the community. We get many inquires on this topic, so read this tutorial carefully to keep your product pitch from getting lost in the shuffle.

We're lucky, here at SparkFun, to have an amazingly creative and talented group of customers. Not only can they identify gaps in the catalogs of electronics suppliers, they can create a gizmo that fills that hole. But, going beyond a prototype or even a limited-quantity production run, often the hardest task in getting your world-alterring product out there is producing, marketing, and/or selling it to the masses. That's where we come into the picture.

Over the years SparkFun has helped to bring dozens of unique widgets and useful electronic shortcuts -- dreamt-up and designed by our customers -- to the throngs of electronics hobbyists, artists and students. A few examples include:

• MaKey MaKey -- A collaboration with Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum. A product we produce, and pay royalties on.
  
  
• WAV Trigger -- A collaboration with Jamie Robertson. Another product we manufacture and pay royalties per sale.
• pcDuino3 -- A powerful SBC that SparkFun buys, stores in our warehouse, and resells.
• BITalino - BioMedical Development Kit -- Another product SparkFun buys and distributes via our online catalog.
  

We've gone through this process enough to know how to guide any product through it. The goal of this tutorial is to walk you through two of the most common routes previous collaborators have followed in getting their widgets sold on SparkFun. Which route you choose mostly depends on who is manufacturing your product. Time to choose your adventure:

Option 1: You Manufacture, SparkFun Buys and Resells

Have you already set up a manufacturing process for your design? Whether you're cooking the boards in your basement reflow toaster, or working with an established assembly house, we'd be interested in reselling it. What really matters is that you have a solid, tested design, a manufacturing process set up for it, and a market starving to buy it.

Hundreds of products in the SparkFun catalog go through this process, including pcDuino3 and BITalino - BioMedical Development Kit. It's the fastest route to our storefront, if that's what interests you the most.

Check out this half of the tutorial to find out more about how to pitch your product.

Option 2: SparkFun Manufactures, and Pays You a Royalty Per Sale

Have you prototyped your design, and proven that it works, but gotten stuck trying to produce and sell it? Well it just so happens that we have pick-and-place machines, reflow ovens, and a all-star production team that can help with manufacturing. Plus, our engineers can help polish the design along the way.

The best part about this option is you still get paid. Instead of buying the products up-front, we pay you a percentage-based royalty per product sold.

We do have limited production and design resources, so there's no guarantee that we can take your product on. But if it's unique enough, and fits within our manufacturing abilities, we're certainly interested in working with you to help productize your widget.

Products like the MaKey MaKey, WAV Trigger, and EasyDriver have all gone through this process, and are now some of the highest-selling, most important products in our catalog. Check out this section of the tutorial to learn more about how to pitch your design.

So, it all begins by figuring out who's producing the widget. Read on to learn more about each option.