WANTED - Experiences selling custom parts/kits

Creators & Developers
1

Hello!

Over the last week, I’ve been considering starting a small business designing and selling custom parts for FW laptops. I was initially a bit surprised to discover the rather lacking space of third-party customizations for sale around the platform, considering how successful FW seems to be becoming and their initial stance on promoting customizations. I also understand by reading the forum that FW itself is not currently very open to allowing listings on their marketplace unless they involve expansion cards, which definitely seems to be limiting the potential of the third-party ecosystem that they appear to still want to promote.

I want to hear from other creators who have developed and sold/or considered selling their customizations. How did your experience go? Did something dissuade you from selling or move you towards open sourcing designs? Did you find that users and FW were receptive to your product?

I would love to find any major blockers early. I am considering investing in tooling and want to make sure that the cost will justify itself.

Thanks!

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2

Would you have a website that others could sell on?

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You mean like a marketplace?

4

Absolutely

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5

Yeah I would consider it if I found enough builders who were interested in selling on it. I would rather have FW open the door to builders who want to add more products to the framework official marketplace, but that doesn’t appear to be a priority for them atm except in very limited cases.

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I suspect the problem with doing this is the possible liability issues, and possible throw backs at Framework when things go wrong for items that they don’t supply - “but it is on your marketplace …” type issues, implying that they officially support or approve the product.

Framework won’t want to get involved in that sort of haranguing - they are busy enough already.

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7

That’s a pretty simple problem to solve, and has been solved by many marketplaces, past and present. I only press FW about it because of their own commitment to supporting customization, while not giving their creators the proper access that they would need to realize a 3rd party ecosystem. Launching a successful business selling parts that are only compatible with FW laptops becomes much more likely when the customizations can be ordered with the laptop from the same marketplace. If they would like someone to grow a competing marketplace, I suppose that’s their choice but it appears short sighted when they could be taking commission to sell on frame.work.

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Regardless, I agree with your reasoning for why they likely aren’t doing it. I hope they’ll release an update on the future of marketplace soon…

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9

Hello and welcome to the creator community. As the first seller of a 3rd party accessory I may have at least a couple answers to your questions.

You’re right that there is not a dedicated section of the forum for custom parts that aren’t expansion cards, expansion bay parts, or the input modules. I don’t think that this is any kind of intentional way of keeping out other projects. I haven’t seen anyone’s project get kicked off the forum for not fitting into one of these categories. The various cyberdeck projects would seem to disprove that. If you haven’t already seen it, please check out the List of company or individually driven projects.

It has been going well despite some hiccups at the beginning with setting up a website to accept orders and payments. But I sorted that out pretty quickly. Small payment processor things do occasionally show up from time to time, but I’ve found customers always very accommodating as long as I’ve been transparent about the issues and timely in my communication.

There were a couple people who half-joked about me selling “closed source” (though I do sell the design files) products for an “open source” device. But most people have been understanding that design, manufacturing, and shipping takes time and money which should be compensated for and incentivized monetarily. I would say that although most people here are tech savvy, the number of people that have chosen to buy my 3D printed drawers is higher than you might think compared to buying the files and printing them themselves (74% bought physical).

I have found good reception, yes. I will put a caveat on that though. Although the Framework customers (your potential customers) are very passionate about the product and tinkering etc. There just aren’t very many of them. First of all, you are only getting a subset of potential customers here on the forum, maybe what 12% of all framework customers? Maybe @nrp could chime in on the proportion of customers that come to the forum.

Of those forum users, you then get a subset that wants to buy anything third party. Of them, some subset that would be interested in buying your product. In my 4+ years of selling SNACK drawers, I have only sold to 103 customers. I am very grateful for each and every one of them, but I think I have just barely now made back the price of the printer, plastic, and website upkeep. Now, maybe I am undercharging, but increases in prices might not have actually resulted in more money due to lost customers.

So, figuring out how to set pricing, getting customer attention outside of the forum and cutting production costs are going to be challenges to overcome.

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10

Hi,

I don’t think there is much profit to be gained.
TAM, SAM, and SOM are metrics used to understand market size for a business. TAM (Total Addressable Market) is the total revenue opportunity if a company had 100% market share, SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) is the portion of TAM that can be realistically served, and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) is the share of SAM that a company can realistically capture.
TAM: We don’t know how many FW laptop/desktops have been sold, so TAM is difficult to judge.
SAM: Again unknown.
SOM: If we take the 8i oculink expansion bay card, there is reported that 150 units were asked for from users.

So, if you do make anything, only expect to get 50 to 150 unit sales.

A majority of the items made here are done by one user because they themselves wanted it, so don’t really care how much it costs to develop. Once they have made it, they tend to also offer it up to others.

For example, i got a EC CCD expansion slot card from another user who designed it. I don’t think they have sold many of them, but that is probably because there is not much demand for something that helps debug the embedded controller.

There are some companies making an effort. E.g. deep computing with their RISC-V mainboard. It is very much a loss making enterprise for them at the moment, but they have a long term plan that will probably work out very well for them in the end. Plan being, getting good RISC-V support into Linux mainline kernel, then produce a high core count/performance RISC-V mainboard.

So, my recommendation is pick something you would want yourself, and then ask on here who else might want it, to give you a SOM figure. You can then decide to continue or not based on that.