Sell Your Small-Batch Thing in Multiples for Extra/Acceptable Profit

Sell things in batches when they wouldn't normally be worth your time + get paid non-monetarily

For several years I’ve maintained a storefront on online retailer Tindie. Unlike Tinder, which its search listing describes as “Dating, Make Friends & Meet New People,”¹ Tindie “is a marketplace for maker made products.” Over the years I’ve made grossed close-ish to $20,000 and fulfilled 627 orders.² That sounds impressive if it was all in one chunk, but…

Consider that $17,346.57/627 is $27/order. For rough math chop 50% off for raw materials, shipping, and (perhaps even more for) design time and you’re left with $13.50/order. Each order that I get means that I have to interrupt whatever I’m doing, and spend 10 minutes putting whatever doodad in a bag + some more nebulous amount of time preparing stock for the next 10 orders (that may or may not come) + restarting whatever task I was working on before.

Still, $1.35/minute, or $81/hour isn’t bad, and the whole experience helps me promote myself as a maker and electronics aficionado³. But what about products that you just can’t justify selling for $27 each—or whatever break-even point makes sense for you? In this case, I suggest you push multiples of your products with discounted multi-packs, add-on products and other revenue increasers. Or only sell in multiples.

Some warez on the JC Devices Tindie store

Take my Arduino Opta I2C and Serial Aux Breakout Adapter. While quite useful to the right person, I couldn’t (yet) bring myself to charge more than $9.95 for one of these rather simple boards… which isn’t really worth me interrupting my workflow over. However, a discounted “2-pac⁴” is “just” $16.95. You can also add in a couple of OLED screens, pushing the total up to $23.95, much closer to where a purchase is worth me getting out of my Jeremy Cook Consulting LLC command chair to fulfill the order.

Don’t let your idea die—Let it multiply!

If it rhymes, it can’t be wrong.⁵ That being said, if you have an idea for something that you just can’t bring yourself to sell at an acceptable profit margin, consider whether you could sell 2, 3, 4, or even 5 of that same item for enough cash to make it worth your while.

Also, don’t be afraid to charge what something is worth to you to make available. While I might feel silly selling something as simple as the aforementioned adapter for $30, there are probably people for whom what would be well worth the cost. If your invention isn’t for sale, you’re depriving people of the opportunity to make that choice for themselves.

Non-monetary rewards

While working solely for exposure or to learn skills is often a sub-optimal endeavour (especially in our day of generative AI), if you can get paid something for your work and learn and get your name out there, a price that might not make sense in terms of just dollars (pounds, euros, won, shells, rand, etc) can become attractive.

EZ-Fan 2: Tiny and photogenic

For example, my EZ-Fan 2 board was one of the first PCBs that I ever designed, and the first that I had assembled by another company. I don’t sell these for that much money (though I have increased its price over the years), but I learned about how to get these products properly made, which has led to other successful projects. It also helped me get my name out there and established a track record of fulfilling orders, and gave me content to write about as the subject of paid articles.⁶

At the end of the day I’m not rolling in money based on my Tindie profits. However, when combined with my other tech-related pursuits, I’ve been able to support a medium-sized family for the better part of a decade.

To summarize: Sell more than one thing, charge enough, and figure out how else you can get paid. Thanks for reading! For more on running your own business, check out the following post 👇. Also, happy Thanksgiving! -JC

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Sharing is caring! Rhymes, but is it correct? Not if it’s mold. Unless it’s a mold for something cool, like tiny toy soldiers.

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.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. I could probably use more friends, but I’m 100% sure my wife would have some serious questions if was a user of said app. And rightfully so. As my neighbor Jason tells me, it’s tough for men to make friends after college or what have you. Probably that would a good use for such an app, but unfortunately anything billing itself as helping you to meet adult friends would immediately be taken in a different way… OTOH, maybe this was a commentary on ME, since it took a battle with our HOA overlords and/or the nearby golf course that we may or may not have thought was a state park to become friends with Jason.*

*To any HOA overlords reading this… I’m totally joking. Maybe.

**Ironically enough, Tindie (again, not Tinder) has helped me meet several people with whom I’m friends, or at least friendly. One of these people is Pat, of patshead.com fame, who actually pointed out this multiples concept to me some time ago. Weird how things come full circle sometimes.

2. Whenever I wrote that. I’m not doing the math again.

3. I put a QR code link to Tech Adjacent on the PCB business cards that I send out with orders. Shout out if you’re reading this because of one. 2x shout out if you LMK in the comments!

4. Yes, like Tupac Shakur, who you may know as one of Digital Underground’s backup dancers.

5. Feel free to insert your own historical example to refute this. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but add in alliteration and things quickly go downhill. Oh, right 👉 “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Not alliterative, but it does rhyme. One might question that statement by another (more) famous JC.

6. Or unpaid, like this one. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to sponsor this publication and change that status.