6 Things I've Learned About Niche Markets
The FroBoard was an interesting experiment for me. It was my first experience in releasing a product, and in all honesty it was the first PCB design I'd ever taken to completion. It was never my intent to sell millions of them- I designed it for my own use, and decided to use it as a pilot product for spingarage. It was there to establish spingarage as a real business, and also to take me through some of the inevitable growing pains of releasing a product without risking a full-size electric vehicle motor. I think it served its purpose very well, and I hope that those that purchased FroBoards are equally satisfied. My email address is still at your disposal for tech support, should you need it, and the PCB layouts and schematics are available here for those interested in building their own.
I learned a lot in the process of designing and marketing the FroBoard. Most of this is described in pretty FroBoard-specific terms, but it should be generally applicable to most niche-market electronic products. Here are the top 6 things that come to mind, in no particular order.
1) People are going to break your product, especially if it's a development board. Make it fixable. Surface mount technology is sexy, but it isn't very fixable. On V2 of the FroBoard, I would use socketable DIP versions of the processor and FAN7390 driver ICs. Blowing up one chip and spending three dollars on another one is much better than spending $150 on a new board.
2) Don't put parts on both sides of the PCB. It isn't worth it.
3) Don't excessively specialize your product. This might be the most important thing I learned with the FroBoard. Since the FroBoard, I've seen this mistake made on several other products- taking a small market and making it even smaller isn't good for anyone. On the FroBoard, I'd say I made the mistake of over-specializing it for the large EV market. The two relays are useful mostly to EVers, and added $10 to the cost of the product. The RS-232 is great and all- but it probably added another $10 and would have probably been just as well served by some prototyping space. Features like these added cost, weight, and board space that made the product less attractive to the DIY UAV market, for instance.
4) If you are going to make a specialized product, do it right. The EV market would have probably been much more attracted to the FroBoard if it wasn't limited to 30nF of gate capacitance. People build their own motor controllers for a few reasons, but they probably want it to be better than what's commercially available. That means that they want to yank the gate of a 1200A IGBT up and down at 30 kHz.
5) The fewer peripherals needed to make a product function, the better. In order to do something with the FroBoard, the customer needed a PIC programmer and a power section, not to mention the knowledge to operate both. Maybe the FroBoard should have been a fully functional, reprogrammable motor controller- or maybe it should have been more universal, but with a much lower price. Added peripherals make a product less valuable.
6) If it's a development board, make it open from the get-go. Maybe not the PCB artwork, but at the very least, the schematics. I've found that nothing is more frustrating than trying to reverse-engineer someone else's handiwork with insufficient documentation, and I sincerely apologize for putting my early customers through this.
I hope this helps some of you on your way to creating great products!
//AGA
Posted on Wednesday, Jan 18, 2012
