Starting a Business

[TheKnerd]

I am planning on starting an open source electronics business (in store, not online). The plan is for it to also be a hacker space (probably a later implementation of the space). Any advice from those of you who are experienced and implementation suggestions from those of you who are not.

Thanks in advance.

[adafruit]

I am planning on starting an open source electronics business (in store, not online). The plan is for it to also be a hacker space (probably a later implementation of the space). Any advice from those of you who are experienced and implementation suggestions from those of you who are not. Thanks in advance.

great timing

we recently had tyler post up an overview of maker-business resources and we have an entire category of previous posts and resources:

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/05/09 ... usinesses/
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/category/maker-business/

[lyndon]

This is an awesome resource! Thanks for posting it. Like most geeks, my strength is technology, so a Sales Saturday (or marketing Monday) would be a great addition

Building stuff is easy; selling it is harder.

[nootropic]

I'm curious why you would choose to not sell online, and only through a store. Your market will be a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can reach online. When you sell online, the whole world is your market.

[TheKnerd]

The idea is to provide personal support that is hard to provide through the net.

[jetmech90295]

I think the idea is great. I live in the most west part of Los Angeles and there is a serious dearth of electronics stores where you can actually buy a few resistors and switches, leds and caps and get a little advice about a project. Radio Shack is absolutely USELESS anymore, as it is a corporate shill for a cheap-ass cell-phone company now, they sell a few by-products for DIY home networking, but the days of assembling circuits and getting help or even a book to study are long gone from the shelves. I'm thinking of just amassing a few parts from Ladyada, and being the only guy on the west side with experience and know-how, I get questions all the time from buddies at the local pub----"how do I fix this network hub?" "will three phase work on this?" What the hell is 240 power?" " How can I rewire my headlight (washing machine, lamps in the house, etc......) and do it cheap?" More and more people are trying to fix stuff instead of just throwing it out. I will give props to Ladyada, she's been the most inspirational person I've seen in this industry. I've made an Arduino-driven RGB lighted desktop box by buying her stuff, and hacking some code out of the forum and elsewhere. As long as we keep the guts of the system "open source" we'll be able to hack stuff together, and fix the crud that fails on us, given the corporate culture of "buy to replace and update".