Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Partnering to Get it Made: James “Laen” Neal, OSH Park PCB”.
Uh i’m lane uh. I run the uh ash park community pcb order uh. I i i’ve seen a lot of you’ve seen any purple boards purple pcb boards out there. Those are probably run through my service. My service helps uh hobbyists and engineers get their their first pcbs, um, uh, quickly and uh inexpensively. I identify with hobbyists and and uh people who are kind of doing this as their as their side, projects playing with their with their own electronics, to learn and to help others learn and uh. So that’s really who i’m i’m talking to here uh. I am a fan of the of kind of the self bootstrap startup companies like sparkfun and sparkfun and adafruit are both two great examples of this um companies who are able to just kind of build some projects using their own resources and and get them out in The world um i’m also a big fan of uh of companies that and services and technologies that uh kind of speed up or that allow uh and enable self-bootstrapping. These would be companies like like shapeways and pinocco, and uh and techshop, and big blue saw companies that will that you can inexpensively, send off your stuff to be to be fabbed in order to to start the to build your prototypes and do those those early models For for everyone, i like to think that ash park is on the list on that list as well. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas, and a great source of those ideas is kind of scratching your own itches. It’S now possible, and lots of us are doing it. Um of kind of looking at our own lives, seeing the things that that could be done better. That are bothering us that things that are broken in our lives and and building that first quick prototype building.
A few of them sharing them with your friends, talking about them in the social networks, putting them up for sale on tindy and doing this uh and seeing where which of your itches other people share and uh and through that see um. What would be where you should be focusing your time in order to make money off of it in order to to help others with the same problems that that you have? We tend to not be good at figuring out, which of our own ideas are, are good or bad, so uh, i think that sort of engine of self-prototype, test, share, sell and uh and evaluate is a is a pretty good engine for figuring out uh. What what we do that that is uh is a good idea and um. What we should just kind of keep to ourselves, so um uh ash park is uh is self bootstrapped, though i run a service and not a products company that this this doesn’t really apply. As much to me, but a lot of the principles are the same. Um we’ve we’ve heard a bunch of these today, things like build a minimal viable product for uh for the first two years of its life.
My service was the dorkbot pdx pcb service, which was which i was doing for my local electronics group uh. We, the minimum viable product for me, was an email interface where you email me. Your files and i manually add them to a to a panel and i send them in for manufacturer and then and then look at the boards and figure out who’s, our who’s and and and mail them off and uh a bit accident prone um but uh. But it it served as a good minimum viable product. It was something that um that there was enough interest in that i could that i could build it up pretty quickly and um and add features and speed things up and and um, and build my back-end technology to to take over to to to optimize. Which brings me to my my next point: don’t optimize prematurely! This is a software um, a software principle mostly, and that is that you, you don’t want to spend a lot of time optimizing for things that aren’t that turn out to not be that important. Since my service, chris grew pretty slowly over that the first year every time something really started to dominate my my waking hours.
That was a sign that that’s the piece that i should i should automate. I should automate or spend some time optimizing. Um optimization has costs, it has time, costs, money, costs and uh.
It’S very easy to spend a lot of time and money. I’M optimizing things that um that way before they need to be optimized if you’re, if you’re setting off to to, if you’re flying to shenzhen, to um, to get set up in your in your manufacturing and you and like no one else, has shown any interest in It then you then um that that’s probably not your best place to to um to focus your costs. I think it’s now possible to bring a product to market, to um, to sell the first few hundred or thousand uh to build up that that interest um uh without um, with just the uh, the the the tools and services that are available for everyone. Now, like again like shapeways and 3d printing and laser cutting um and uh and board fabing and self-assembly, i think these things are all uh.
Uh are sufficient to get us to uh to a pretty high level of a company before that before then partnering with manufacturing manufacturers and filling that stuff out. My next principle is: uh is plan for the worst and con in contingency plan um. At several points in in my pcb services life, it was uh it. It was to the point that um that one or two bad panels would have would have sunk the service and um so hope for the best, but um try and figure out what can go wrong and and put in automated tests for it.
If you can check for it a test procedure, if you can’t and uh and just uh, have it contingency fund, if, for those things that for when those things go wrong, um before i was just recently able to um to quit my day job and start doing Ash park full-time and um the before i would let myself do that. I really needed to know um. I really needed to make sure that my last piece of contingency, that the one fab that i used would would stay in business um, which is not at all a sure thing in in u.s fabrication in the u.s manufacturing. It’S uh, the pcb fab industry has been.
Has been hit really hard in the last decade or things happen at the fab every now and then there’s a fire and uh you’ll in my news, feeds i’ll see like ah this fab caught fire in his and has stopped doing orders for uh for a month And so i i needed that sort of um that sort of redundancy um i went out and and uh and did it and spent a week contacting a bunch of fabs all over the u.s um to try and find ones with my specs, because i i i Require pretty tight quality control, specs um and also i wanted geographic redundancy um. All my the fabs in the u.s tend to be clustered around uh um points of of high-tech activity like chicago, where motorola i was born or or uh in arizona where texas instruments did so much of its uh development and and, of course, all over california. So i i got a fab in arizona and instead of my little cluster, there um and my my last principle: um get help uh the open, the hope and heart source hardware community is uh is full of really helpful. People who um love to offer assistance and and and help out these, these new companies um, for example, if i can help you um email me, i’m lane oshapark.com thanks.
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