{"id":265,"date":"2010-04-28T13:02:55","date_gmt":"2010-04-28T17:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=265"},"modified":"2010-04-28T13:02:55","modified_gmt":"2010-04-28T17:02:55","slug":"the-sparkfun-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/the-sparkfun-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The SparkFun Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I heard Nathan Seidle talk at MIT about founding and growing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sparkfun.com\/commerce\/categories.php\">SparkFun Electronics<\/a> (an on-line supplier of microcontollers and related electronics prototyping and hacking items).<\/p>\n<p>He was smart, funny and engaging, and it was very inspiring.<\/p>\n<p>Interesting bits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He started in 2003 to provide a better on-line ordering experience for certain parts (moral: \u00a0good UI + UX can win)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>They had 65 employees and did $10m in 2009, will be close to doubling revenues this year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>They&#8217;ve been very scrappy, opting (for example) for developing their own solder-mask and reflow techniques, instead of buying expensive machines.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Their #1 product is <a href=\"http:\/\/\">Arduino<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>They don&#8217;t compete on selection (with Digikey, Mouser, Jameco, etc.) \u00a0Instead, they research the &#8220;best of X&#8221; and sell that one product. \u00a0Their customers are usually building small\u00a0quantities\u00a0(like one).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It was a reminder that you can build an interesting and meaningful company (a) doing what you love, and (b) without venture capital (he started with about $6-7,000).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I heard Nathan Seidle talk at MIT about founding and growing SparkFun Electronics (an on-line supplier of microcontollers and related electronics prototyping and hacking items). He was smart, funny and engaging, and it was very inspiring. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/the-sparkfun-story\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}