Announcing Tindie Biz

Originally published at: http://blog.tindie.com/2015/02/announcing-tindie-biz/
From the beginning, Tindie has been dedicated to building a community to support hardware creators and enthusiasts. In 2012, the most immediate need was a place for makers to sell their hardware creations to like minded enthusiasts. As of today, the Tindie Marketplace has - Over 100k unique visitors a month Over 21,000 orders to 96 countries…

We’ve been working on this a long, long time. As we dug into it, the one thing we kept hearing was “This is needed and everyone that has tried has failed. It takes a community.” What makes Tindie special is our community.

As a community, there is much that we can accomplish where others have failed in the past. Things that will make it easier for everyone to bring hardware to life. And while there are many things we can do, we want to lower the bar for everyone. This is a start of features we think will benefit everyone - not just a super seller but new sellers as well.

It’s going to be a long slog to get content and reviews, but we’re betting on the long term. As Tindie grows, this will only become more valuable to the community as a whole. Once we have enough reviews, we’ll be opening it up fully. Thanks everyone for your help!

Looking good and great idea. How do I find some of the most recent reviews? Sometimes we don’t know what it is we need until we find it. Might be nice to see either latest or random company reviews with high rankings.

@ubldit thanks! We aren’t opening reviews just yet. We want to make sure we have enough content first. The problem with a project like this will be momentum and getting early traction. Thats why right now we are only exposing manufacturers and the ability to gather reviews.

Just trying to get the wheel spinning…

I like the idea, but as it stands I’m struggling to see how it will get off the ground. I can submit reviews, but I don’t get anything out of it except a thankyou message, and no indication anything’s done with my submission or that I’ve made any impact at all. Where’s the incentive to put my time into this?

Also, as a HaD poster points out, it’s trivial for a manufacturer to forge their own invoices, so the insistence on proof of purchase prevents only fraudulent bad reviews, not fraudulent good ones.

@arachnidlabs this is meant as a starting point. We can’t open it up with 0 content. We’re starting slowly so we can build reviews, build content and make it useful. There are no illusions of this being an easy problem. It’s going to be a long slog.

However it is needed so badly, we’re willing to give it time to pick up steam. Tindie wasn’t born in a day. Neither will this…

Emile, understood, and I’m glad you’re committed to it - it’ll be a valuable contribution. My concern is that without some kind of feedback to users that their input is having an effect, or some sort of reward (be it purely virtual, like reputation, or whatever), people have no incentive to contribute, and motivation to put time into doing so is likely to be low.

Even some gauge we could all collectively fill up to the top by entering reviews (whereupon the main site would be launched!) would provide some motivation.

+100

All great points - I’m going to creating a new landing page for this next week. All feedback is welcome