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Into The Forge Season 1: Adam Ellsworth from 8-Bit Lit
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 8 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Adam Ellsworth, founder of 8-Bit Lit.
About two years ago, a friend and I were discussing an idea for a touch-sensitive lamp for his two-year-old son. We came up with the idea of the question mark from Super Mario Bros. We made one for ourselves. We used TechShop, which has a lot of tools that you can prototype with: laser cutters, CNC mills, etc. We threw it up on Etsy, not really thinking much about it, but it got a ton of blog attention. We got a large number of orders right away. We made 1,000 of them at home in San Francisco, by hand, over three months. That actually turned out to be a helpful experience for production later because I really understood what it was like to set up a production line, to have to try to establish efficiencies, and to work through the line.
I did a program through Singularity University, and Autodesk, one of the big sponsors, had an innovation lab with a 3D printer. I actually designed an SU ring for the class, then printed it out and could wear it right away. That process of going from idea to creation was one of the first sparks that led me to this point.
Yes. I spent a lot of time at TechShop, which is a community workspace that’s like a gym. You pay a membership fee, but instead of barbells and machines, there are CNC mills, laser cutters, 3D printers, and prototyping tools to make a hardware product or furniture. There, I worked as a consultant for different startups, prototyping their hardware for them—just learning the tools day-by-day. Before that, I also built 3D printers for a company, and that was the first time I really honed my chops in the hardware world.
My days have been in waves. There are times when it’s just sprints all the time, and then there are lulls, when it’s like, okay, what’s the next step, what are the next stages?
A few months ago, my days were crazy because we decided to do all the fulfillment for our product ourselves. At this point, it’s in a bit of a lull, which is nice, but I also have to talk with the team in China. So most of my evenings between 6:00 and 8:00, or 9:00 and 11:00 are taken up with meetings.
The most difficult moment was actually launching the crowdfunding campaign because it was first time that I’d ever been responsible to thousands of people. It was higher stress than I had experienced before.
We ran a Kickstarter campaign because we realized our margins were just too low, with getting materials locally, going on Digi-Key, and also paying people a fair San Francisco salary. We couldn’t even offer wholesale because people were looking for 50% off, and we just couldn’t do it. So we decided to shut down and say we probably need to go to China or at least do a larger-scale manufacturing, which led us to Kickstarter. But even before Kickstarter, we started working with a manufacturer in China. We sent prototypes back and forth, so that by the time we actually launched, we were basically ready to go and all we needed was the money.
We also worked with a contract manufac
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By Eric KleinIn each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 8 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Adam Ellsworth, founder of 8-Bit Lit.
About two years ago, a friend and I were discussing an idea for a touch-sensitive lamp for his two-year-old son. We came up with the idea of the question mark from Super Mario Bros. We made one for ourselves. We used TechShop, which has a lot of tools that you can prototype with: laser cutters, CNC mills, etc. We threw it up on Etsy, not really thinking much about it, but it got a ton of blog attention. We got a large number of orders right away. We made 1,000 of them at home in San Francisco, by hand, over three months. That actually turned out to be a helpful experience for production later because I really understood what it was like to set up a production line, to have to try to establish efficiencies, and to work through the line.
I did a program through Singularity University, and Autodesk, one of the big sponsors, had an innovation lab with a 3D printer. I actually designed an SU ring for the class, then printed it out and could wear it right away. That process of going from idea to creation was one of the first sparks that led me to this point.
Yes. I spent a lot of time at TechShop, which is a community workspace that’s like a gym. You pay a membership fee, but instead of barbells and machines, there are CNC mills, laser cutters, 3D printers, and prototyping tools to make a hardware product or furniture. There, I worked as a consultant for different startups, prototyping their hardware for them—just learning the tools day-by-day. Before that, I also built 3D printers for a company, and that was the first time I really honed my chops in the hardware world.
My days have been in waves. There are times when it’s just sprints all the time, and then there are lulls, when it’s like, okay, what’s the next step, what are the next stages?
A few months ago, my days were crazy because we decided to do all the fulfillment for our product ourselves. At this point, it’s in a bit of a lull, which is nice, but I also have to talk with the team in China. So most of my evenings between 6:00 and 8:00, or 9:00 and 11:00 are taken up with meetings.
The most difficult moment was actually launching the crowdfunding campaign because it was first time that I’d ever been responsible to thousands of people. It was higher stress than I had experienced before.
We ran a Kickstarter campaign because we realized our margins were just too low, with getting materials locally, going on Digi-Key, and also paying people a fair San Francisco salary. We couldn’t even offer wholesale because people were looking for 50% off, and we just couldn’t do it. So we decided to shut down and say we probably need to go to China or at least do a larger-scale manufacturing, which led us to Kickstarter. But even before Kickstarter, we started working with a manufacturer in China. We sent prototypes back and forth, so that by the time we actually launched, we were basically ready to go and all we needed was the money.
We also worked with a contract manufac