How many units do you order per production run? I’m interested to see if there are some commonalities in the size of the runs by Tindie sellers. Thanks!
We try to sell a small batch first to test the markets and then we ramp it up big when we see there is demand for an product. I would say enough to cover 3 months of anticipated volume while keeping our budgets in mind.
A more direct answer is between 10 and 500
Depends on products breakpoints. My runs have / will be from 100-1000 for production. Sometimes there is no benefit over 100, sometimes none over 500. Most ICS go up to 500 Pcs breakpoint for the ones I use. Other components I buy in the thousands anyway.
PCBs are the key one here. Some companies can make PCBS 400 for £400 instead of 100 for £200. But if I only sell 100 then I haven’t actually saved any money.
TL;DR Depends on product, money I have in the bank accounts, pricing, market.
I have almost no cash built up so I usually start small to test (3 units from OSHpark), then do a smallish order 6-15 units, see how they sell, then ramp up into the 30’s at a time from there (having enough margin to grow inventory is critical).
I’d have more cash on hand, but this side gig is to fund my hobby robotics and it took a big hit this summer working on the Full Size Jeep robot for AVC. I just don’t get the volume to justify ordering in the 100’s at this point. Maybe some day.
Sometimes I know ahead of time if something is going to sell well, like my Turntable Strobe, because I knew the market going in. In that case, after the initial test batches, I posted to get a sense of numbers/interest. Then I did a big order to match the interest as I had enough cash to buy up front.
I’ve noticed that initial sale volume tends to peak after release, and then tapers off to a more-or-less steady stream after. I’ve seen this with most of my designs.
It’ll be interesting to see how OpenMV plays out. We’re doing a beta of 30 units soon. I’m curious to see if we can justify ramping up from there, if we can bootstrap it or if we have to do a fundraiser to make that happen, or what.
I ordered 100 Pi Powers and am about to order 300 crazy clocks. The difference has more to do with the product than with any factors of demand. Crazy clocks are physically smaller and the components much less costly, so the same investment bought three times as many of them. It’s mostly a factor of the rules of the OSHPark medium run service - minimum 150 square inches and everything has to be in multiples of 10. I still have yet to find anything that can compete with the combination of OSH Park medium-run and Small Batch Assembly for batch sizes as small as 100-500 units.
Next on the list would be a batch of my AVR programmers, but probably not until next year.
I have only done a couple medium run orders. i dont have the capital and my boards arent popular enough for orders of more than 10-60 at a time. i plan to do another med run soon for what i hope will be another busy Oct-Mar.