How Arduino designs and spreads virally an open product people love
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Welcome to Part Two of this three-part series into how Arduino created a viral hardware product:
Part I: How to set the foundation for an open source community and organisation
Part III: How to organise the community engines behind a successful open source movement
Today in Part II, we’ll cover:
How to face cheap counterfeit boards with marketing and community
Designing a beloved product by removing suffering
Making users badass
From zero to mini-multinational through relationships
On the importance of timing and leaning on existing demand
Focus on a few people first. Then, let them guide your diversification
TL;DR: How can you replicate some of Arduino’s successes?
Read time: 11 minutes
Facing cheap counterfeit boards with marketing and community
It can be tempting to believe that making something open source is enough to attract people and get them to contribute to your project. But this is very far from what happens in reality.
First, you have to create something attractive enough to get people in the door.
Second, you need to offer a path that’s compelling and easy enough for people to contribute.
Let’s dive into how Arduino did it:
Designing a beloved product by removing suffering
“Have you ever heard of somebody taking a class on how to use Facebook? That’s the problem with technology, the idea that you need to suffer, that it needs to be a painful experience. Because you are a professional.”—Massimo Banzi
Arduino’s response to that myth has always been to make their tools simpler to use.
This has led to products that attract people who shouldn’t be interacting with electronics, like artists or designers, but also professional engineers that can do so much more with an easy tool than a complex one.
Instead of indulging in the temptation to add more complexity to technology, the team at Arduino keeps asking, “How do we make it simpler for people to also build connected products?”
The response, very likely inspired by Dieter Rams’ principles, has been to always work on four principles:
User Experience: make things simple to use and understand. In fact, Arduino’s goal is to make it so easy that even kids can create with it.
Remove friction: whatever stands between what people are trying to achieve and makes it complicated for them to achieve it.
Open source: good things happen when people don’t feel they are locked-in and are free to use it everywhere. This enables the community to collaborate, keep improving the product, and make it more valuable.
Edge computing: this means user’s data and their privacy stay with them, which also improves performance and reliability.
Their goal is to remove friction by removing every ounce of energy that’s applied that’s not really needed.
They have developed over 4000 libraries that support all sorts of sensors, actuators, and protocols, and support 15+ kinds of processors, so people just have to write code and move it around different platforms easily.
They have also developed a Project Hub platform where people can describe their projects in full and make them easily replicable for other users.
Making users badass
In her book Badass: Making users Awesome, Kathy Sierra explores how to create a bestselling product with no marketing budget or PR stunts.
In short, it’s about making a product that makes your users look so good to their peers that they can’t help but ask how they did it. And that’s exactly what Arduino ended up making.
As students started to create projects, these generated a lot of interest, and people started asking, “How did you build that?”, which led to the students sharing that they made it with Arduino.
If you’re building an open platform, that’s why it’s very important to target creative users. They will create great projects, and people will start asking, “What did you use to make that great project?” and that will feed back to your project. Making things open source helped people jump in by lifting every barrier to contributing and becoming ambassadors for the project.
From zero to mini-multinational through relationships
The beginnings were pretty modest.
In fact, David Cuartielles admits that at the beginning they had no clue what they were onto:
“When we first designed the first Arduino Boards we thought like great we have a board that we can use with our students but we also thought […] “well we made 300 boards and I had 15 students per year. So [we have] boards for like 10 years. [But] it was March and by September and I had zero boards [left]. […] [We] completely misunderstood the need that there was in the whole world for something like this.” — David Cuartielles
For the first batch, the Arduino team decided to work on 200 units As a test, their schools in Ivrea and Malmö agreed to buy 50 units each.
The selling price was exactly what they paid for it, and they earned 1€ for each board, which was nothing considering all the effort put in.
But they eventually understood the potential of their tool. After some promotion and speaking with friends, this movement started to move, and they received the first calls from customers asking for boards.
But here’s where things get interesting: They built relationships with a lot of the key players in their industry that would help them become known to every maker out there.
Tom Igoe, one of their cofounders, taught at NYU in a similar programme to the one taught in Ivrea. So he brought Arduino to the US and started to use it to teach his students, which were more numerous and better located than those in Ivrea.
They also built key relationships with other manufacturers and distributors, like Nathan Schneider from Sparkfun, Phil Torrone from Adafruit, or Dale Dougherty from Make magazine.
Initially, Sparkfun didn’t think they could carry the Arduino board: “We don’t do kits.” But 6-7 months later, Arduino came out with a full USB version, fully assembled and tested. Sparkfun tried twenty to see how they sold, and that was the first twenty of a series of hundreds of thousands that have been sold since.
They also participated in the spaces their community was hanging out. At the beginning, the cofounders presented the project to groups of hackers at Medialabs and Fablabs, and they always made sure to attend Maker Faires.
These relationships are the ones that led Arduino to become known worldwide to designers, engineers, and creatives of all sorts.
Takeaways:
Consider how your project can make its users look so impressive that people will ask them what they used to come up with it.
When making an open platform, target creative users first. The projects they build with your platform will get people to ask what they used and fuel the word of mouth behind your project.
The people you seek is not limited to the people within your company. To scale, you also need to develop relationships with key people.
To find these people, what are the three Fs (Fund, Follow, Frequent) of your community? (Shoutout to Lloyed Lobo for this framework):
Who does your community Fund? What tools, products, and services do your ideal members pay for? For Arduino, it was Adafruit and Sparkfun.
Who does your community Follow? Who are the influencers and stars in your industry? In Arduino’s case, that was Make magazine.
Where do they Frequent? Go where your ideal community members already hang out. For Arduino, these were other interaction design schools, Maker Faires, Fablabs, and Medialabs.
Write down a list of your top 25 players, or more, and then connect and nurture relationships with the people on that list, and keep them in the loop when you come up with initiatives or ideas that might be interesting for them.
On the importance of timing and leaning on existing demand
“It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.
It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”
— Seth Godin in This is Marketing
Massimo Banzi openly admits that they were able to change their industry because they were exactly in the right place at the right moment, as people needed what they were trying to do around 2004 with a maker movement that was growing like crazy with other trends like fablabs, DIY, drones, or 3D printers growing at the same time. Since then, other trends like the Internet of Things (IoT) or automation have accelerated their growth.
Timing is out of everyone’s control, but what you can control is not creating demand for something that seems exciting. It’s to find existing demand and satisfy it.
You can have the best idea in the world and end up selling nothing if there’s no demand.
If you’re launching something that’s already been done, here are two questions to answer to make sure it’s an opportunity that can sustain you and your organisation:
Is the overall market slowing down, flat, or growing? You should be looking for flat or growing opportunities. You can explore this with Google Trends, Facebook Ads, market analysis reports, or by manually identifying how many potential customers you might look after, but you can also rely on your knowledge of the industry.
Is this valuable enough to become financially sustainable? For example, can this make a million dollars? To figure that out, we have to know the potential number of clients and the price of your product or service.
If you’re launching something that has never worked before, what signs show that it’s the right moment to launch this project?
These can be a few things:
A window of technological opportunity has opened
A given breakthrough has made it possible to do something previously impossible
There is a change in behaviour
Or whatever other reason you have realised
For that, it’s essential to know the previous tries and to understand why they failed and what has changed that makes it not impossible to make it this time.
In Arduino’s case, they were surfing the growing trend around DIY and the huge existing electronic hardware market with hard-to-deal-with products.
By beginning to work and making something great for themselves and their students at Ivrea, they could naturally target beginners, which is generally the largest part of a market, as there are always more beginners than experts.
Takeaways:
If you want to create a business around your product or service, make sure there is demand for what you’re creating.
If you’re creating something that has never worked before, what makes your innovation possible this time around?
Focus on a few people first. Then, let them guide your diversification
A bunch of people started to use Arduino to learn; others used it to build projects they would take to Maker Faires or to publish on their blogs or Instructables. And some would even start using it inside their companies to build prototypes and automate their factories.
Arduino was so easy to use that lots of high schools and universities use it to introduce people to technology. And working with education became key to ensuring the future of the company. As future engineers get used to their chips at school, they later carry these tools with them in their careers.
Now that Arduino has been around for 20 years, we can see how their users have evolved and the opportunities they have created for the company. With its simplicity, Arduino has enabled kids to build robots. These kids would go to school and university using Arduino for different projects, eventually becoming product managers and developing sensors or automations for companies like Bosch thanks to everything they learned with Arduino.
This is the secret to communities that escape beyond their initial focus. They don’t perform some remarkable marketing tactics; they expand their focus to accommodate more members while cleverly not losing their existing members.
Below, you can see the journey through which the Arduino products evolved from 2005 to 2013:
Takeaways:
Don’t invent something for everybody. Start with a very narrow group of people first. Arduino started with students who would expand their demand as they would become professionals carrying their tool with them to their employers.
If you want to diversify, don’t forget the concerns of your initial users, but follow their journey as their careers evolve and keep helping them solve their professional challenges.
How can you replicate some of Arduino’s successes?
Arduino’s approach helped them grow to 30 million customers despite sharing their products in open source and even encouraging others to replicate their designs.
Here are the key takeaways you can borrow, modify and adapt for your business based on Arduino’s real life strategy and tactics:
1. Use Open source to create a standard, and lean on transparency and community to avoid becoming a commodity
When you open a product, and its a good alternative to the previous competitors, it often creates a standard, which becomes an advantage when other manufacturers create compatible devices that increase the value of your product. But this can also turns your product into a commodity.
To maintain a premium positioning, invest in transparency and community. Community helps you innovate faster than any proprietary solution can. And transparency encourages people to buy your product rather than your cheaper competition. Instead of looking to build artificial barriers, look for opportunities that are naturally scarce. For that, Arduino has developed services, cloud platforms, education and a compelling path to becoming an engineer.
2. Target creatives first, and make them look badass
If you can manage to create tools for creatives that allow them to impress their peers, people will ask them what they used and spread the word on their own.
To find these creatives, consider building relationships and partnering with other tools or services they pay for, influencers or media they follow, or communities, events, schools or spaces they frequent.
Sources
Keynote: Arduino & Linux: A Love Story - Massimo Banzi, Co-founder, Arduino Project
The Untold History of Arduino, by Hernando Barragán
The History and Evolution of Arduino, by Arthur Wang
How did it begin? The history of Arduino, by Device Plus
Story and History of Development of Arduino, by Circuits Today
Interview with Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, by Arsenio Spadoni
Interview: Massimo Banzi, Codeveloper of Arduino, by Circuit Cellar
Interview with Massimo Banzi: cofounder of Arduino, by Postdigital Node
Arduino’s Massimo Banzi: How We Helped Make The Maker Movement, by Lauren Orsini in ReadWrite
Why open source hardware is(n't) working | David Cuartielles