pencerw

(note: i wrote the link in the OP)

as it happens, i spent about a decade working on an electronic product that, for complex reasons, wasn't suitable for outsourcing overseas. i wrote a reasonably long and detailed post about this process recently, which you can find here: https://scopeofwork.net/proof/ i also wrote about it a bunch on my personal blog; you can find the relevant posts here: https://pencerw.com/feed?tag=thepublicradio

it wasn't OT before the mods changed the URL that i originally posted: https://mailchi.mp/theprepared/the-prepared-4ydgzm58vl

wait, just to be clear - you changed the title and URL without actually reading the thing that I linked to?

IMO this ends up being way more advertorial (for Bauer) and lacks all of the engineering context (urethane inserts! damping! "the dichotomy between nature and human technologies"!). But, understood.

You're looking at The Prepared (theprepared.org/newsletter), a weekly newsletter about manufacturing and other stuff! It's sent via Mailchimp, which automatically creates an archive URL for every email campaign you send.

(Author of the post here)

I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.

I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.

to each their own! And of course you're welcome to learn all about what I used Patreon for - I linked to my business's website in the first sentence of the blog post.

(Author of the blog post here)

Point taken, though I'm not sure that's exactly what I said. My complaint re: accounting is that Patreon integrates horribly with QBO. If they cared, they would have a webhook that rolled up all collected pledges, payment processing fees, sales taxes and platform fees into a single sales receipt so that QBO et al could ingest and record it as a sale (or a list of sales).

Also, the thing about "revenue" vs "earnings" on their creator side analytics is just straight up deceptive. They don't need to be accounting software, but that doesn't mean that they can throw around accounting terms however they want.

Thanks for the love! <3

I took a bunch of the suggestions in this thread + a few of my own and compiled a tagged database here: https://theprepared.org/mx-record

<3 -Spencer

I <3 this.

Oh that's awesome - I wasn't aware of that at all!

Your argument certainly has validity, but the bottom line is that our customers don't interact with the choice of what to listen to (which is kind of the core idea of the product) on a day to day basis.

And, whatever philosophy we bring to the table is really neither here nor there. Our customers (apparently) like our product enough to buy it, and we have really low return rates, and the customer support emails (which I literally respond to 100% of) are almost exclusively positive and outright friendly. But that doesn't mean you have to like the product! And anyway the point of the blog post was to explain how our business works operationally - not to promote (or defend) the product itself.

So for one, WNYC is actually one of our biggest customers to date. You'll hear our radios being plugged on Brian Lehrer (among others) periodically if you listen closely. Again, our philosophy is that customers are deciding on the station (not parent organization - the actual broadcasting station) they want to listen to every day and staying there.

For two, we definitely tried that early on! And we've had a lot of conversations about replacing the potentiomenter (which controls power and volume) with a rotary encoder (which, if you added a push button to it, could be used to control a lot of other interactions with the radio, including seek/scan, etc). The issue is that doing so would easily raise our cost by $5, which means we need to raise our retail pricing by $15 or $20, which ends up being crazy.

I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but The Public Radio totally isn't for everyone! But a surprising number of people like it just the way it is, and we've worked hard to build a business to support their needs as efficiently as possible.

(Co-creator of the product again)

For what it's worth, we would have loved to sell The Public Radio for $25 and tried for many years at $40/45. I think that our experience is a testament to the idea that at least sometimes, it's okay to raise your prices above what you personally would be willing to pay. But yes, it's a very expensive member of its category (battery powered FM radios) even without the UI limitations.

Wow, internet compliment of the year. Thanks!

(Note: I co-created this product, wrote this blog post, etc)

Your skepticism is something I hear a lot, and something I make it a rule not to argue with. A lot of people look at The Public Radio with disdain, and at least as many look at it without any emotional reaction at all (which is arguably worse). This was never meant to be a mass market product, and it's okay that not everyone likes it.

I will say, however, that our customer base might not be as young, bearded, and IPA-drinking as you might expect. We do sell a lot to Brooklyn (I live in Brooklyn; Kickstarter is in Brooklyn; etc) but one of our biggest customers to date is KUER, which is Utah's NPR affiliate. We've also sold large orders to a pop station in Singapore, an Orthodox Jewish community radio station in New Jersey, and to someone's grandma in rural Nebraska who makes mason jars into light fixtures that look like fireflies (one of our first customers, back in ~early 2014).

As to whether the market's going away: As I mentioned in another comment, I'm continuously surprised when I see The Public Radio in the wild and can say without reservation that we have sold way more of these things than I ever expected. And if it were someone else's creation, there's a good chance that I'd look at it with furrowed brows as well.

(Note: I co-created the product, manage the business that produces it, and wrote the original blog post)

In many ways I'd say the answer is still in flux. On the one hand this is a part-time business that has not, by any means, made either myself or my partner rich. On the other hand, we sold our first units in 2014 and are in continuous production today. It's a weird side business to have, but we've figured out a way to make it fit into our careers/lives.

In other words, I'm continuously surprised that The Public Radio continues to be a _thing_ and am always slightly shocked when I see one in the wild. And it's nice to have something like that.

That's fair, but if I were to guess I'd say only 5% of our customers are even aware that the radio is re-tunable. It's not a secret by any means, but we don't really promote it and even if you did once know about it you could easily forget that it's an option at all.

Yeah, Josh's method of tuning The Public Radio is super cool. We never actually implemented it in production, but our manufacturing line is in some ways even cooler (it's fully just-in-time) and is remarkably advanced for a FM radio in a mason jar :) I wrote it up in a separate blog post here: http://pencerw.com/feed/2018/2/8/the-public-radios-assembly-...

Exactly - we never wanted to compete with the rest of the home audio industry!

Hey! Co-inventor of the product (and author of the link) here.

The reason that the button isn't on the lid is because that makes the lid uglier and, more importantly, undermines the philosophy behind the UI - which is to keep the device as absolutely simple as possible. The idea came from my partner (Zach Dunham) and was inspired partly by Radiolab's 2008 episode, "Choice" - it's a bit of a deep cut but I recommend listening to it and thinking a little bit about how choice functions in the FM radio world (which is, obviously, competing with Spotify & podcasts) today.

Also note that we developed the product in ~2013, when everyone in the hardware scene in NYC was all into IoT and making everything bluetooth. I think there was part of us that believed that IoT (and connecting everything to the internet) was misguided and that having a long term relationship with a local news/radio source (which for me is Hot 97, but for most of our customers is their local NPR affiliate) is actually really cool/powerful/valuable.

Lastly, you should note that a lot of our business now comes from selling The Public Radio to radio stations (again, mostly NPR affiliates) to give out as fund drive gifts. For obvious reasons, having a single-channel radio is attractive to both the station managers and their donating listeners.

<3 thanks!

[Disclaimer: I edited and published the piece and own theprepared.org] I think the answer is "yes," at least to an extent. I think the big limitation is the degree to which software projects are mission-focused, and also the degree two which they span generations. The former does exist in certain places, but the latter (intergenerational development) is pretty hard to find.

All, thanks so much for the comments. We wrote this up so long ago; it's really interesting to get feedback now.

FWIW, The Infrastructure Observatory is working on more tours like this one, mostly in the NYC area. If you want to get involved (or have an idea for a tour that we should organize), get in touch at http://infraobservatory.com or @NYInfraObserve on Twitter.

-Spencer

:) Thanks!

Yeah, that's something I've spent a bunch of time thinking about. I've gotten a lot of emails from people around the industry saying they'd like to be able to share more process data, but I'm not sure what the best approach is. If anyone out there has any thoughts, I'd LOVE to collaborate.

Those are definitely good use cases, yup. There are a few things I can do to increase the value of this part (or similar ones), and in general the high end cycling market tends to require a lot of 1) lightweight structures, which additive is good for, and 2) customization.

It's also worth thinking about this in context: Even without offering any customization, the cost to buy my part in batches of ~40 actually works out pretty well (caveat: this is a decidedly high end bike part). With forged, machined, and composite parts, that's an extremely low purchase quantity; in most cases, you'd never come close to amortizing the tooling & setup time.

That said, I'm definitely interested in exploring other products, and new business models for how to sell them. This part is just the first step in that process :)

Totally fair question. This part would be really hard to manufacture traditionally - there's a hollow in the middle of the part that couldn't be machined, so you'd have to machine it in two parts and then weld it.

That said, this design is very much NOT optimal, and there's a lot I can do to tune it for the process. I'm working on that more in the coming months; first I needed to 1) prove that the process could produce a functional part, and 2) get access to more advanced design software (topology optimization + lattice structure generation). Stay tuned!

Yeah! That one's pretty nice, though personally I probably would have skipped the gold coating on the lugs.