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Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

blog.adafruit.com

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Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#41

Post by elromulous »

Zenst wrote: post #24
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #16

Huge fan of Hackaday so I'm really not with this acquisition but if you offer me 700,000,000 for my blog I'd sell it too. I wish them the best of luck.

Not just the blog but Tindie as well all under the umbrella(Supplyframe) they brought for $0.7m. "The expected revenue of Supplyframe for the fiscal year 2021 is around $70 million with profit margins typical for the software business." sure does make for a different perspective upon the offer and on the basis of that, along with the growth in that area of hobby electronics. I figure for the buyer, it's a bargain and…

$0.7b*!

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#42

Post by drone »

satya71 wrote: post #21

Didn't realize Hackaday and Tindie were making $70m in revenue. Siemens seems to have good track record in other acquisitions in EE space. I guess they're trying to go up against Arrow, Avnet, etc

They're not. SupplyFrame has traditionally been a software vendor for companies in the electronics manufacturing space. The blogs and Tindie are a very, very small part of their portfolio.

For example, there's QuoteFX, DirectSource, DesignSense, FindChips, and a host of other solutions they sell.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#43

Post by Zenst »

elromulous wrote: post #41
Zenst wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the blog but Tindie as well all under the umbrella(Supplyframe) they brought for $0.7m. "The expected revenue of Supplyframe for the fiscal year 2021 is around $70 million with profit margins typical for the software business." sure does make for a different perspective upon the offer and on the basis of that, along with the growth in that area of hobby electronics. I figure for the buyer, it's a bargain and…

$0.7b*!

Thank you - added an edit in time, epic brain fart upon my part that and certainly makes the price with the turnover balance out more as a much fairer deal.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#46

Post by cosmie »

jhallenworld wrote: post #35
rjzzleep wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of these typical German conglomerates that absolutely doesn't understand consumer and consumer products. I don't know if it will mismanage Hackaday. They literally only have to keep it as is. But if they don't(mismanage) I'll be positively surprised.

Their twitter messages quoted in the Adafruit blog imply that they don't know what they bought :-) "Thank you for reaching out @adafruit. @Hackaday und @Tindie are websites of @Supplyframe, and thus also part of the acquisition. Hackaday in particular is a community exchange website for engineers and developers. " (no need to explain what Hackaday is to Adafruit.. probably they don't know who Adafruit is either.)

Seems more like an innocent mix-up by the social media PR person, who likely isn't familiar enough with the properties to notice the mixup between Hackaday and Tindie at the end there.

Or they could have been referring to Hackaday.io rather than hackaday.com.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#47

Post by luma »

As a Tindie seller, I have hopes that this injection of cash will address several outstanding issues with the platform.

I sell a DIY touchscreen home automation controller that I build by hand in my basement[1]. My product is targeted at DIY types interested in owning their own home automation environment. The project utilizes a 3D printed enclosure, a custom PCB, an ESP8266, Nextion LCD, and a few supporting components, fasteners, etc. All firmware, gerbers, STLs, etc are open source and available on GitHub[2].

I didn't really intend to sell these things, but several interested users who didn't have access to the required tools or skills talked me into listing on Tindie. It is a great platform for my use case - basically zero friction to get a simple store stood up and to start collecting orders. There is nearly no customization possible, you simply upload some markdown, setup your products, then add your PayPal info to collect payments.

Over the years, users have been requesting (seemingly simple) features to be added to the platform. For example, the Tindi API is a read-only affair. You can collect your orders via the API, but once you've shipped them, you cannot use the API to mark the order shipped (or provide tracking info, etc). User requests for this functionality have been made going back to 2015, and nearly immediately, statements were made that an "API v2" was coming "soon". You can request beta API access, but in my case that request went unanswered and no others have suggested that their access was granted either. 6 years later, there is still no way to mark an order shipped without clicking around in the web UI.

More concerning has been the lack of any ability to deal with taxes. US law now requires that I collect and pay state sales tax, but Tindie can't handle it and shows no sign of ever adding that feature. The list goes on, no way to handle UK VAT post-brexit, no ability to utilize payment providers besides PayPal, etc etc. Each request is met with "we're working on it", but in the 3 years that I've been selling on Tindie, I've never once noticed any new features added to the platform and no community announcements to that effect have ever been made.

There is allegedly a development team behind this, but there is zero outward indication of any product development happening at all.

Hopefully a cash injection might get Tindie up to modern standards for a web store. I love the ethos behind the product, but the product itself is severely lacking.

Hopefully, $700M will help move this platform forward.

[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/luma/ha-switchplate-hasp-sin... [2] https://github.com/HASwitchPlate/HASPone

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#50

Post by LeifCarrotson »

cosmie wrote: post #46
jhallenworld wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their twitter messages quoted in the Adafruit blog imply that they don't know what they bought :-) "Thank you for reaching out @adafruit. @Hackaday und @Tindie are websites of @Supplyframe, and thus also part of the acquisition. Hackaday in particular is a community exchange website for engineers and developers. " (no need to explain what Hackaday is to Adafruit.. probably they don't know who Adafruit is either.)

Seems more like an innocent mix-up by the social media PR person, who likely isn't familiar enough with the properties to notice the mixup between Hackaday and Tindie at the end there. Or they could have been referring to Hackaday.io rather than hackaday.com.

That's exactly the problem. The Siemens Press Office employee doesn't have the domain knowledge of what Adafruit and Hackaday are that would be common knowledge to end users of their products, or would be if they, like their users would, bothered to do a cursory search before replying.

These German megacorps put so much procedure and so many layers between the people who build stuff and the people who use it that it's impenetrable. You can get a Siemens sales guy in the office by just mentioning you might buy something, but when he gets there he can only parrot the information off the glossy brochures. You have to go through him to talk to the applications engineer. The apps engineer has a cursory knowledge of typical uses of the product, but when you actually need some details, they have to call their technicians in the lab. That tech can try it but can't offer any guarantees it will continue to work, they'll have their manager contact a manager of the domestic Siemens engineering office, at which point you finally get to the guy who worked on that product. But it turns out he only translated the English version of the manual, there's no way to reach the guy who wrote the original in German.

The inevitable result of all that communication friction just to answer a basic question is that the company representatives can't tell a good idea from BS. You need that to keep scams off of Tindie, submarine marketing and pseudoscience off of Hackaday, and in general build stuff better than the discrete companies that the megacorp slowly amalgamated.

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