Custom Work & Designer Profile?

[emilepetrone]

It seems like more and more sellers are open to custom jobs. Fun fact, one of our investors actually hired a Tindie seller for some PCB design work he needed

Anyway - I think we can expand upon this. What do you all think? Would you want a more professional design profile that lets you present yourself as a designer available for custom work?

[femtocow]

How are gonna be custom works handled that may take more than a month if a limit to ship the item is gonna be 14 days?

[emilepetrone]

I wasn’t thinking we worry about that - just thinking we give people a way to better show off what they can do/ have designed.

Right now it happens without any real promotion. I’m thinking sellers could greatly benefit if we did a little bit more promotion and had a different page where they could better promote themselves.

[femtocow]

I know but how do you want to handle the current situation if somebody orders something that requires a custom works that will take more than a month to complete, but seller is required to ship in less than a month.

[dirtyengineer]

I’m going to assume that most custom work won’t go through the Tindie market place. It just doesn’t make sense for it to. You showcase your skills in the product you have on Tindie. If someone is interested in custom work then they contact you and it moves forward from there. This is how it has always worked for me in other market places.

[miker]

I’ve done a few custom jobs with great success. Mostly slight mods to existing designs. It would be nice to post somewhere that the option is available.

[lowvoltagelabs]

Seems like a good idea. A page to list the skills you can offer and examples of custom work you have done. I make most of my income from engineering consulting but all the work I’ve done has come from people I worked with in the past or from other offline contacts.

[jkicklighter]

I did one custom project where I was approached via Tindie in a PM. It was a derivative of my motion sensor by adding on an IMU capability for a very specific application. It isn’t something I plan to offer for retail sale (yet; if ever), but perhaps a place to at least post photos and searchable descriptions/keywords could be nice. While it isn’t for sale, it does give the prospective customer a place to see your experience so they can browse these projects and find the best match for their needs.

-John

[alicemirror]

I can only answer: Yes ! I see that already other shops, especially like Etsy particularly oriented to craft and original creation selling (not only electronics) has this options for every product you put on their shops

[jkicklighter]

This forum thread about custom jobs actually connected me with my second custom job that I’m currently working on. So, making this a bit more organized will bring in more custom jobs I suspect.

-John

[emilepetrone]

To keep this alive, I heard from another seller today who has gotten a lot of consulting work from his Tindie listing. We’d like to add categories to Tindie Biz for consulting/custom work.

What skill sets would you all like for us to add?

[alicemirror]

Prototyping, design circuits and small mechanics components (various material, from plastic to Aluminium, maybe iron but not the better results).

Prototype for testing I think is attractive for a potential client: he has the design, proof of concept or similar. Then needs a prototype well done for final testing purposes and need to outsource the effort needed to make all the prototyping phases.

Firmware testing on prototypes.

I suggest all these skills, that involve physical parts (i.e. components, servo custom parts and circuitry) just because it is almost uncommon and I think that with a minimum investment this is instead “normal” job for a maker.

[jkicklighter]

3D Printing, CNC Milling, Electronic Design/Engineering, Mechanical Design/Engineering, Consulting

[alicemirror]

The only problem I see is that the same things that can be done with 3D printing can be done with 4-axis CNC in 1/10 of the time. Don’t you agree @jkicklighter ?