I have a suggestion for a change in strategy for SparkFun. It seems to me that you are walking down a path that has been traversed many times before by tech companies, a path that leads to short-term gains and long-term losses.
The problem is most easily perceived in the fates of many games companies. Awesome Games Company releases its first game, Blasto-Cremo, and it’s a big hit. A year later, they release Blasto-Cremo 2, which features bigger guns and bigger monsters. Their fans love it and on their public forum the fans suggest all sorts of embellishments: super-guns, turbo-guns, and hyper-guns. Flattered by all the praise, the developers at Awesome Games Company produce Blasto-Cremo 3, with even more powerful stuff, tougher monsters, and trickier puzzles.
So it proceeds through Blasto-Cremo Supreme, Beyond Blasto-Cremo, and Ultimate Blasto-Cremo. The gameplay becomes ever more subtle, trickier and harder to master. The aficionados love it.
But this evolutionary process has driven out the casual players. The help files have become too big. You must dedicate yourself to months of play to figure out how to win. It’s too much for most people. So as the aficionados become ever more enthusiastic, the consumer base shrinks. Eventually Awesome Games tries something else and, quite possibly, goes out of business.
This has happened with almost all software. I doubt that you were around in the early days of personal computing, but all that early software was really simple. In word processing we had MacWrite and, a little later, Microsoft Word. You wouldn’t believe how easy Word was to use back then! Nowadays, if you challenge a hundred people to count the number of verbs in Word (the number of unique commands), you’ll get anywhere between 300 and 500; nobody’s really sure because Word is so obtuse.
Spreadsheets? Excel was much simpler in the 1980s than it is nowadays. Many categories of software have split into “professional” versions requiring entire courses to learn, and “consumer” versions requiring only huge manuals to learn.
Seriously, do you use anywhere near the full capabilities of your word processor or spreadsheet? Do you even know what those capabilities are? Do you even try to use a photo manipulation app, a website editor, or any of the other major genres? These days, most people learn only a few apps because they’re just too damn complicated.
The roots of this problem date all the way back to the early 1970s; I described the history in this essay:
http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/c839b … ights.html
The mistake that everybody makes is always the same: listening to the aficionados demanding more and more features. Sure, the aficionados are the only ones you hear from; the great majority of your customers don’t know enough to even offer a justifiable complaint. Since you hear only the aficionados, you have little appreciation for just how confused and intimidated most of your customers are. Old farts like me have no reservations about bitching and moaning to you; we don’t care if you think us ignorant. But younger, less self-assured people, will keep their mouths shut.
I see you doing the same thing. I’ve bought stuff from you for years, and now I see your product offerings becoming ever more complex, your explanations ever more obtuse, and your website harder to figure out.
At last I have come to the point in this post where I can offer my suggestion: break your company into two departments catering to two classes of customers: Aficionados and Normal People. You have already addressed this idea partly with your sections on Educational uses, but I think that falls short of what is needed. I suggest that you completely redesign your website so that the home page is much cleaner, having just three visible blocks along with the usual fine print at the bottom:
“We offer a ton of great stuff for Arduino, robots, education, etc, etc.”
“We have plenty of great stuff and help for non-hotshots”
“We have plenty of great stuff for the real hotshots, too. “
All of this should be visible in the window without scrolling. Keep it simple!
When the user clicks on #2, he is taken to the “Normal People” section of the website. This sports simple, clean page design, big text, and a limited product list including only Arduino stuff and Raspberry Pi stuff. No development kits for microcontrollers! No expensive stuff! Be ruthless in keeping the entire set of offered products small! Each of the two sections has its own forum — you don’t want the beginners intimidate by the pros.
But you can also include a button at the bottom of each page saying, in effect, “We’ve got all sorts of neat stuff once you’re ready to go big time.” Pushing that button enters the Aficionado half of the website. That half can look pretty much like the current website, although you wouldn’t need to make concessions to the beginners in that section.
As the man said, “Render unto aficionados the things that are aficionados’… etc.”
Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, it will require reorganization. Yes, it will cost money. But if you don’t, somebody will eventually come along with a more user-friendly company and steal away your non-hotshot audience. Go through your customer records; how much of your profit comes from the hot shots and how much from the normal people? I suspect that the latter group provides a big chunk of your revenue. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s already too late.
Anyway, at the very least, I hope my comments trigger some interesting discussions in-house. Good luck.
