as it happens, i spent about a decade working on an electronic product that, for complex reasons, wasn't suitable for outsourcing overseas. i wrote a reasonably long and detailed post about this process recently, which you can find here: https://scopeofwork.net/proof/ i also wrote about it a bunch on my personal blog; you can find the relevant posts here: https://pencerw.com/feed?tag=thepublicradio
IMO this ends up being way more advertorial (for Bauer) and lacks all of the engineering context (urethane inserts! damping! "the dichotomy between nature and human technologies"!). But, understood.
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>If you’ve been paying (extremely close) attention to the NHL playoffs, you may have noticed a weird-looking stick with a hole in the blade. The hole apparently allows for two different properties: stiffness above it and flexibility below. According to Bauer, this produces a slingshot effect -- almost like a smaller version of the stick’s shaft (which, as explained in this video, bends almost unbelievably to whip the puck forward). These days, ‘twigs’ are made of carbon fiber, though as the hockey lingo suggests, wood used to be the material of choice. The evolution of the hockey stick from wood to carbon fiber gives us insight into a material property called resilience.
>Resilience is basically the opposite of damping. High resilience materials bounce back with most of the energy that you put into them. As Stevel Vogel illustrates in Cats’ Paws and Catapults, spider silk is a great example of low resilience material. “A web of high resilience would, like a trampoline, tend to fling the prey back out.” Vogel goes on to note that “resilience management highlights the dichotomy between nature and human technologies.” Natural materials, like wood, tend to have lower resilience whereas man-made materials, like carbon fiber, tend to have higher resilience.
>You can see why carbon fiber, with its higher resilience, has overtaken wood as material du jour; more of the energy you put into the stick comes out on the puck for a faster shot. But a stick can be too resilient/springy -- when receiving a pass, you don’t want the puck to bounce off the stick away from you. Players call it “feel”. Some damping is beneficial, as shown in this slo-mo video of a stick that combats springiness with a urethane insert. These hole-y sticks try to solve the problem a different way, adding a softer spring into the mix with the aim of providing “feel” without taking away energy from the shot. So, is it worth buying the latest in hockey tech - a stick with a hole in it for $450? If you’re a beer leaguer like me, clapping your usual head-hunting bombs twenty feet wide of the net, probably not.
I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.
I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.
to each their own! And of course you're welcome to learn all about what I used Patreon for - I linked to my business's website in the first sentence of the blog post.
Point taken, though I'm not sure that's exactly what I said. My complaint re: accounting is that Patreon integrates horribly with QBO. If they cared, they would have a webhook that rolled up all collected pledges, payment processing fees, sales taxes and platform fees into a single sales receipt so that QBO et al could ingest and record it as a sale (or a list of sales).
Also, the thing about "revenue" vs "earnings" on their creator side analytics is just straight up deceptive. They don't need to be accounting software, but that doesn't mean that they can throw around accounting terms however they want.
Your argument certainly has validity, but the bottom line is that our customers don't interact with the choice of what to listen to (which is kind of the core idea of the product) on a day to day basis.
And, whatever philosophy we bring to the table is really neither here nor there. Our customers (apparently) like our product enough to buy it, and we have really low return rates, and the customer support emails (which I literally respond to 100% of) are almost exclusively positive and outright friendly. But that doesn't mean you have to like the product! And anyway the point of the blog post was to explain how our business works operationally - not to promote (or defend) the product itself.
So for one, WNYC is actually one of our biggest customers to date. You'll hear our radios being plugged on Brian Lehrer (among others) periodically if you listen closely. Again, our philosophy is that customers are deciding on the station (not parent organization - the actual broadcasting station) they want to listen to every day and staying there.
For two, we definitely tried that early on! And we've had a lot of conversations about replacing the potentiomenter (which controls power and volume) with a rotary encoder (which, if you added a push button to it, could be used to control a lot of other interactions with the radio, including seek/scan, etc). The issue is that doing so would easily raise our cost by $5, which means we need to raise our retail pricing by $15 or $20, which ends up being crazy.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but The Public Radio totally isn't for everyone! But a surprising number of people like it just the way it is, and we've worked hard to build a business to support their needs as efficiently as possible.
For what it's worth, we would have loved to sell The Public Radio for $25 and tried for many years at $40/45. I think that our experience is a testament to the idea that at least sometimes, it's okay to raise your prices above what you personally would be willing to pay. But yes, it's a very expensive member of its category (battery powered FM radios) even without the UI limitations.
(Note: I co-created this product, wrote this blog post, etc)
Your skepticism is something I hear a lot, and something I make it a rule not to argue with. A lot of people look at The Public Radio with disdain, and at least as many look at it without any emotional reaction at all (which is arguably worse). This was never meant to be a mass market product, and it's okay that not everyone likes it.
I will say, however, that our customer base might not be as young, bearded, and IPA-drinking as you might expect. We do sell a lot to Brooklyn (I live in Brooklyn; Kickstarter is in Brooklyn; etc) but one of our biggest customers to date is KUER, which is Utah's NPR affiliate. We've also sold large orders to a pop station in Singapore, an Orthodox Jewish community radio station in New Jersey, and to someone's grandma in rural Nebraska who makes mason jars into light fixtures that look like fireflies (one of our first customers, back in ~early 2014).
As to whether the market's going away: As I mentioned in another comment, I'm continuously surprised when I see The Public Radio in the wild and can say without reservation that we have sold way more of these things than I ever expected. And if it were someone else's creation, there's a good chance that I'd look at it with furrowed brows as well.
(Note: I co-created the product, manage the business that produces it, and wrote the original blog post)
In many ways I'd say the answer is still in flux. On the one hand this is a part-time business that has not, by any means, made either myself or my partner rich. On the other hand, we sold our first units in 2014 and are in continuous production today. It's a weird side business to have, but we've figured out a way to make it fit into our careers/lives.
In other words, I'm continuously surprised that The Public Radio continues to be a _thing_ and am always slightly shocked when I see one in the wild. And it's nice to have something like that.
That's fair, but if I were to guess I'd say only 5% of our customers are even aware that the radio is re-tunable. It's not a secret by any means, but we don't really promote it and even if you did once know about it you could easily forget that it's an option at all.
as it happens, i spent about a decade working on an electronic product that, for complex reasons, wasn't suitable for outsourcing overseas. i wrote a reasonably long and detailed post about this process recently, which you can find here: https://scopeofwork.net/proof/ i also wrote about it a bunch on my personal blog; you can find the relevant posts here: https://pencerw.com/feed?tag=thepublicradio