There should be an O’Reilly book for business. It would be really short. “Make something people want, charge them money for it. Advanced: charge more money.”
B-school is West Point for industrial capitalism. It trains generals, not foot soldiers. Market now rewards people who can do stuff.
The hype around Silicon Valley may distract us from the basic business idea that Graham emphasizes: make something other people wish they had. If you can do that and you can reach people who will buy, then you can have a successful business. I’m seeing makers who are creating products for other makers to buy. Limor Fried’s Adafruit Industries is one example…
Makers of physical goods have some advantage in that people seem to understand paying for them. Makers may also find good opportunities making things that businesses need rather than selling direct to consumers.
Just to add to that – There are many success stories in the world of makers, but they’re mostly ignored by places like TechCrunch and business magazines. We’ve spent countless hours with journalists who have contacted us only to hear later that making good products that people want and charging a fair price is too “boring” for their editor.
So what I’ve been doing to help avoid these unexpected charges is just add a note to my order when I check out. I’ve received about 5 orders now, all very carefully packaged, all making the best use of space – and best of all – no more huge shipping charges! Woot! Now I’m saving about $30 an order.
…another tip with mouser – if you’re spending more than 150 or so, choose UPS ground. they’ll often upgrade it to 3 or 2 day air if you spend over (150? 200? 300? not sure precisely)
For biz geeks – Starting in 2010 any taxpayer with business income will need to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year unless they use a credit or debit card for the purchases… Greg writes -
Meanwhile, the IRS will have its hands more than full trying to administer everything else this law requires, according to the Washington Post. Some of this is just beginning to sink in to the minds of the public. In 2012, every business, including sole-proprietorships, will have to issue a 1099 to anyone from whom it buys $600 worth of goods or services. The IRS’s Tax Advocate Service says, “For example, if a self-employed individual makes numerous small purchases from an office supply store during a calendar year that total at least $600, the individual must issue a Form 1099 to the vendor and the IRS showing the exact amount of total purchases.”
When I try to explain this to business groups, they invariably reply, “No, that can’t possibly be right. You mean if I buy $600 worth of paper from Wal-Mart in the course of a year I have to get their IRS number, the address of the corporate accounting office, send them a 1099 and another copy to the IRS?” Yep. That’s exactly what it means…
I don’t know, but the Tax Advocate Service estimates 40 million businesses will be affected. And no money was appropriated to cover the cost. CNN Money reports that purchases made with debit and credit cards will not be subject to this new rule, because “a separate reporting requirement kicks in next year that will cover card transactions and help the IRS spot unreported payments made through those channels.” The article quotes Tom Henschke, president of SMC Business Councils, as estimating only 10 percent of all transactions will be exempted. He says, “Most of the small businesses out there that do small business [purchasing] don’t do it by credit card. One of the reasons is the transaction cost is very high – 2% to 3%.”
It’s unclear there are enough human or computer cycles to do anything with all the 1099 information that will flood the IRS too. This will be interesting to watch, we don’t think the expanded 1099 reporting is going to end up happening the way it was first outlined once more people and businesses become aware of it.
I got my order in record time, thanks! I noticed the box had a small sticker that said Digikey, what’s a Digikey??? – Tim
Answer! A long time ago we decided we’d try to save all the incoming packaging and boxes and reuse it for our outgoing packaging, this takes us a bit of extra time but we think it’s worth it. This is why you might have a box with a weird sticker on it or packaging from other electronic’s suppliers like Mouser, Digikey, etc. It’s just one of the small things we try to do to keep our environmental impact as low as possible for the things that we can. When possible we buy recycled goods and when we make kits that come in boxes we use ULINE white boxes that can be written on for storage after you get your kits (many makers do).
At Foo Camp 2010, I caught up with Liam Casey of PCH International, an Irishman living in China who runs a supply-chain business, helping mostly American tech companies manufacture things in China. Casey offers his insight into why China has become the place to make things. China has the infrastructure, the expertise and the labor force to be the world’s leader in manufacturing.
Casey’s view is that manufacturing has become a commodity; fewer large companies own their own factories. In a sense, they rent rather than own, and the cheapest places to rent are those in China. As China begins to create web interfaces to its manufacturing capacity, the rest of the world will find it even easier to make things in China.
On July 6, the United States Postal Service announced its proposed prices for Mailing Services products, which include First-Class Mail parcels, Standard Mail Parcels and Non Flat Machineable , Bound Printed Matter, & Media Mail… there is a 23.3% average increase proposed for Standard Parcels & Non Flat Machineable Pieces. The USPS filed the proposed prices with the PRC, which by law has 90 days (until October 4) to review them and issue a final decision on whether “extraordinary and exceptional circumstances” exist to justify this effort, and whether the prices requested are in fact “reasonable and equitable and necessary.” The New Rates will go into effect January 3, 2011, if the PRC approves the increase.
It appears there is a cash crunch and this might be a way of the USPS to solve it…
The Great Recession rolls on, but it’s not too early to single out the major powers that have come through the wreckage in the best shape. They are the ones the other major nations implore for help — to bail out weaker economies, to diminish their dominance of the world’s production and start consuming more themselves. There are just two such nations: China and Germany.
…Most Americans, I suspect, believe we’re losing manufacturing because we can’t compete against cheap Chinese labor. But Germany has remained a manufacturing giant notwithstanding the rise of East Asia, making high-end products with a workforce that is more unionized and better paid than ours. German exports came to $1.1 trillion in 2009 — roughly $125 billion more than we exported, though there are just 82 million Germans to our 310 million Americans. Germany’s yearly trade balance went from a deficit of $6 billion in 1998 to a surplus of $267 billion in 2008 — the same year the United States ran a trade deficit of $569 billion. Over those same 10 years, Germany’s annual growth rate per capita exceeded ours.
…So even as Germany and China have been busily building, and selling us, high-speed trains, photovoltaic cells and lithium-ion batteries, we’ve spent the past decade, at the direction of our CEOs and bankers, shuttering 50,000 factories and springing credit-default swaps on an unsuspecting world. That’s not to say our CEOs and bankers are conscious agents of foreign powers. But given what they’ve done to America, they might as well have been.
A lot of the manufacturing equipment we’ve seen used for production is made in Germany which makes sense if they’re both rapidly growing at the moment. “Cheap labor” doesn’t seem to be what is making manufacturing a challenge in the USA, it’s also supply chain and the culture we celebrate (non-manufacturing / engineering / science careers). All you 6th graders’ now will need to solve this in a decade or so, no pressure.
We are seeing this and hearing this from a lot of our customers – one of the many benefits of an Adafruit kit is you get great documentation and it even looks/work great on a tablet-type device – photo by Adafruit customer and group member fell.clutch…
While PayPal is a great option for getting your business off the ground, most e-commerce businesses can save on credit card processing fees by switching to a more robust merchant account. It’s easier than ever to get an internet merchant account, and many support processing Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express right out of the box with no additional steps or fees.
Anyone use TransFS? The issue we have with the tool is the fees do not seem to be accurate, cute – but not quite accurate. It’s good to manually compare rates against this – at least a good starting point.
We roll with the open source zen cart shopping cart software here (details on what we use here) – but we’re always looking around at other shopping cart systems, not just for ourselves, for other makers that are trying to sell their goods online. Here’s one called “Goodsie” – looks like Tumblr-ish + shopping cart. If you have shopping cart services and systems you’re interested in post up in the kit biz forums or in the comments!
Made in Brooklyn @ Metropolis Magazine The Brooklyn Navy Yard is rebranding itself as a “sustainable industrial park.” Less than a handful of its 240 businesses have anything to do with ships…
The United States has lost over 42,000 factories since 2001, and some 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since the turn of the millennium. Officially, this is a death spiral. At the same time, a powerful desire to make things—tangible things, products even—has sprung to life in the border zones where high tech meets the green movement. And Brooklyn now sits squarely in this fertile territory. The borough is home to the wildly successful Web site Etsy, a marketplace of handiwork, which can be read as a Web 2.0 rebuke to the clean-out-your-storage-locker ethos of creaky old eBay. Local food production is booming; it seems as if every 28-year-old guy in the borough has a line of artisanal pickles.
And then there’s the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre site on the East River, established by the U.S. Navy in 1801. Since 1966, when the Navy pulled out, it’s been a city-owned industrial zone. Sitting on what is now prime real estate, just across the river from Manhattan, the Navy Yard contains a fascinating mix of about 240 businesses, only a couple of which have anything to do with ships. There’s Crye American, a young company that managed to snag a defense contract to make Kevlar body armor; Steiner Studios, the largest soundstage on the East Coast; and Cumberland Packing, the company that invented Sweet & Low. There are also artisans—metal- and woodworkers, set builders, display makers—who straddle the boundary between art and industry. The Navy Yard, according to Andrew Kimball, its president, is energetically rebranding itself as a “sustainable industrial park,” home to America’s first “multistory, green industrial facility,” the newly completed, 89,000-square-foot, LEED-certified Perry Building.
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses in the U.S. employ over 50 percent of the private sector and shell out 44 percent of the private sector pay. Small-business owners are the backbone of our economy (PDF here).
Printable catalog (PDF)
