This is the first article of a series of interviews with the Tindie sellers’ community, sharing inspiring stories on how they got started and what it takes to create a fun and successful business in the open hardware world.

Since the launch of Tindie mid-2012 (I covered the early beginnings on MakingSociety), I’ve always wanted to know who the pro makers are, how they manufacture and how they find clients. For a few weeks, I’ll conduct interviews with makers living from their creations and using Tindie to sell their products. I expect to find interesting patterns and advice that could be use by all of us creating open hardware projects.

For the launch of the series, I also interviewed Emile Petrone, CEO and founder of Tindie, in a 30 min podcast where he shares plenty of advice on how to get started and be more successful online. Listen to the episode here.

Today, in this very first interview, meet Jason Hotchkiss. He is an electronics hobbyist based in Brighton in the United Kingdom. Jason’s store, Hotchk155, is all about noiseboxes and games. He currently sells 11 products in his online store including a gamer kit, a motor driver and 8 MIDI-related products. He creates MIDI and analog noiseboxes and make them available for other lovers of microcontrollers and sounds.

Mathilde: Tell us more about your store and how you started it.

Jason: I started working with electronics about 4 years ago when I decided to make a simple synthesiser from a design I found online (Ray Wilson’s excellent “Weird Sound Generator”). Quickly after that I discovered the Arduino and made a whole bunch of projects for my own fun, which started to pick up quite a following on YouTube. I love finding interesting ways to generate patterns that can be turned into sound and played around with MIDI Lava Lamps, robotic glockenspiels, Tesla coils etc.

Occasionally I’d get people emailing me to buy projects from me, but I really was not set up for it. It was only late last year when I discovered how cheap and easy it is to get Printed Circuit Boards made up by online companies and started to make kits out of a couple of my previous projects. Initially I tried selling them on eBay and Etsy without much luck before. A few months back I found Tindie, which is a superb place for selling DIY electronics kits, and during the last few months things have really picked up.

MakingSociety: Do you live from your store or do you also have other activities?

Jason Hotchkiss: I wish…! At the moment I work full time as a software developer. I would really love to be able to spend all my time tinkering and working on new products and kits but the current income from that would not pay the mortgage…

MakingSociety: How do you find your clients? How do they hear about you?

Jason Hotchkiss: So far I have really done no marketing and apart from my Tindie store and YouTube page its all word of mouth. Sometimes I see little bursts of sales of a single product from a specific places and I really do get intrigued what’s going on. Luckily a Google search can help out there… I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to find products (especially my MIDI stuff) through specialist message boards, forums and blog sites. In the age of the internet “word of mouth” has a whole new awesome power!

MakingSociety: What are your biggest challenges at the moment? Marketing? Manufacturing? Logistics?

Jason Hotchkiss: My biggest challenge is without doubt Time. Since I work in small batches, available time is a constraint that gets me a long time before I run out of money. I guess the next logical step is to ramp things up a bit, work in bigger batches, perhaps engage in some proper marketing and look for new retail channels, offload more of the manufacturing, kit packing, shipping etc. to specialist companies.

My basic problem is that I am really not a businessman… it’s the research and product development process that interests me, as well as talking to users and getting their feedback and ideas. The thought of spending all the time keeping a supply chain running scares me a bit… I really don’t think I am organised enough! However that next step is the next big challenge and is something I probably need to partner up with someone for… maybe I could even give up the day job then!

Find out more about Jason Hotchkiss’s work in his Tindie store Hotchk155 and his YouTube channel

See you soon for a new story,



