PCB Drink Coasters: Funded, Fulfilled, For Sale!

Printed circuit boards as drink coasters with transistor facts? Now for sale after being fully funded on Kickstarter on the first day!

As reported here, in early February of this year I initiated my second Kickstarter: PCB coasters with transistor diagrams printed on them. This had a rather modest capital goal of $200, which was funded on the first day.

The Transistor PCB Coasters are now for sale on Tindie, including the rather snazzy black and gold premium coasters that I hadn’t yet seen as of the Kickstarter. If you want to buy one (or more) there, use discount code: E8CA5247 at checkout for 10% off through the end of May!¹

Looking good! Available here

While the Kickstarter was successful, I used roughly all of the money I raised there to buy the coasters owed² to my backers + more coasters that I could sell later. Buying this sort of custom thing is generally quite a bit cheaper per unit en masse.

So while Kickstarter eliminated much of the risk in ramping things up to the… medium time, I haven’t made a real profit yet. So there is still a risk that I will have wasted my time with no ultimate monetary return.

Monetary Success!(?)

The medium-term monetary returns will become evident in the next year or so. I hope this will be profitable, but we will see. I am selling these on my Tindie³ store, though other outlets could be appropriate. Seems there is a decent market (slash competition) for PCB coasters on Etsy, but I’ve yet to establish a store there.

I can also potentially sell these… in person. My best selling products (EZ Fan 2 transistor breakout, Arduino Opta PLC I2C breakout) are rather niche–things that you look for, not impulse-buy–but a transistor coaster… What engineer could resist that?

And if I’m an even halfway decent salesman⁴ it should be easy to convince people that their engineer/technically-minded/computer-person friend/relative/acquaintance will love one as a gift. And they will love it!⁵

OOOoo, black and gold!

Encouragingly, my friend Paul, owner of 4-bit industries, claims to have fairly poor sales for his soldering kits and such online. However, the first time I saw him sell at Maker Faire Orlando a few years ago people were (almost, but not quite) literally throwing wads of cash at him in an attempt to procure his kits. After the show he flew us home in the helicopter that he rented with the profits.⁶

Could this actually be a waste of time?

Short answer: no.⁷ If I don’t sell any (more) coasters, I’ve made something that I enjoy using, and that I think is really cool. Plus it gave me another successful Kickstarter project under my belt, which is helpful for the book/posts/series that I’ve been (procrastinating) writing.

Finally, making these PCBs meant more practice making this sort of art, e.g. the business card below👇 I’ll write more on this card’s process in an upcoming post. I hope you’ll subscribe and/or check back for more. Again, PCB transistor coasters are available here.

Wow, this one turned out beautifully. Looking forward to talking about it further!

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

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Addendum/Footnotes

1. Excluding shipping & handling

2. I’m still a little unclear as to whether you have to deliver on a Kickstarter campaign. You definitely should deliver if at all possible.

3. Tindie: as in “indie tech”, not the rather similar-sounding dating site. I actually used to write articles for their blog.

4. Am I a good salesman? Not sure. Probably better than some… You’d look great in this lightly used Buick. Ignore the odometer, the previous owner just used it to go to the store and church once a week.

5. Probably. If not, hopefully they’ll at least act like it.

6. No, not really. He did drive off in a sweet minivan though–I think it was his sister’s. AFAIK he made a significant amount money that day, but probably certainly not enough to fly him and some friends from Orlando to ~Tampa. Besides, what would I do with my beloved-ish 2006 Acura TL? 👇

7. Was it the BEST POSSIBLE use of my time? That is a bit more nebulous.