There are little things that would eventually be improved I'm sure, but right now the biggest, albeit slightly vague, feedback I got is - "Make it more passionate." Like Etsy does for handmade goods or sparkfun does for its electronic parts; (You're lucky because your target audience is easy to excite). Not like ebay does where they have to deal with a generic store because they dont know what to specialise for. As it is the bootstrap theme looks nifty, but doesnt get me excited as much as it possibly could.
Brilliant idea though. So much potential, great job man :)
Can't agree with this more. There needs to be more indie in tindie. The only problem is time and getting stuff built as fast as possible. But great comment and there definitely be more soul coming to the site.
Where did you find the people who are working on these posted projects, and how did you get them to post?
I think generally, etsy works because they can sell small runs of handmade things at a premium to cover costs (not the only reason). I'm not sure what the costs are to get small runs of circuit boards made, but it may push up prices of small runs of electronics to be much higher than what we're use to paying--and people generally don't think of electronics as being 'handmade' to justify paying the high premium. It's not a show stopper, but it's something I'd watch out for.
That said, it might work for addons for already made platforms like raspberry pi, arduino, etc. I think it's worth a shot to try it out. Keep us posted of your progress.
Initially, I just threw a post on /r/arduino asking people if they thought it was a good idea, then had a signup form for people to start seeding projects before the site was built.
How about adding a "request" feature? For example, say someone is looking for a Kindle DX hacked to accommodate a USB keyboard. It would be nice to allow him or her to post this request so interested makers could jump on it. Perhaps prices or bounties could be offered by both buyers and sellers?
I actually had this up for a month, and it turned into "well go buy it here (insert link)". I thought it would work out like you are thinking but it turned out a bit different in execution
If the product already exists, the advice on where to find/buy it is valuable. It would be a great boon to visitors, as well as drive more traffic to your site through web searches. One of the most valuable things about Amazon is the reviews which often contain additional info/insights about products, even where to find (legitimately) free ebook versions of print titles, etc.
This suggestion is actually pretty good! Don't be too afraid of loosing customers that way. Most who are looking for this special kind of solutions are most likeley interested in other products as well. And things like these let your site come across as community friendly, i.e. let visitors bond with your site and less likely to run away when something new comes along. The site is a great idea, but try to get more products on board, i.e. troll robotics sites, offer successful kickstarter campaigns a place to sell their "overproduction" units, etc.
But that's an excellent response. If the thing "here" is what they wanted, wonderful. But often it's not exactly what's needed "yea, like that, but I need it to be wireless" so what's happening is you're now facilitating a dialogue between the Maker and the Buyer and that gives the Maker an opportunity to create a product that's exactly what that Buyer and others like him will want.
I'd be perfectly happy - so long as you disclosed it up front - for ou to automatically add your own affiliate code to links like that where you can (perhaps with special handling for people who post links with their own affiliate tracking already). If you managed "the community" right, you MIT even be able to start a culture of recommending vendors for which the site has affiliate deals - so users might selectively choose to recommend Sparkfun or Adafruit (where you've got affiliate relationships) over deal extreme or eBay (where you don't)
You can expect more visitors in the next few hours from HN as the day progresses since its almost weekend and all. I would consider those new views pretty valuable. Maybe you could serve a static page untill the 502 situation gets resolved.
Really great idea. I was actually pondering this concept to myself the other day. I had noticed there wasn't really a "go-to" place for people to buy and sell custom tech gear. I mean, I guess ebay would be the default, but ebay is a pile of shit aesthetically.
Twitter Bootstrap header cheapens the whole thing for me. It's fine if you're designing the documentation for an open source project. It's not fine for a commercial product.
While I understand that you said the bootstrap header cheapens the whole thing, I think that criticism is very "inside baseball", and in the wider market no one cares.
(Personally, I like the bootstrap header and I think anything that speeds up time-to-market should be applauded.)
Understandable.. I used it to get something out the door. For launching a v1 and testing a concept, Bootstrap is pretty amazing. But when I redesign it, I'll definitely move away from the Bootstrap defaults. Thanks for the feedback
Of course that's the point. Just as you don't care what design firm did the packaging for your iphone, the target audience for this site doesn't care where he got his template.
It only cheapens it for you, in that you know it didn't take him as long as it could have.
Brilliant idea though. So much potential, great job man :)