Club Jameco wants to help you make money in the kit business

What red-blooded engineer doesn’t fantasize about leaving their day job to create a start-up business? Maybe you’ve fantasized about starting the next electronics kit business – one like Sparkfun or Adafruit, companies that started offering kits or specialized electronic parts, and grew into multi-million dollar businesses. (For more about what it takes to start a kit business completely from scratch, read 15 steps to starting your own electronics kit business.)

Well, stop dreaming and start designing: Jameco would like to help you get started in the electronics kit business. The electronics distributor has started Club Jameco, an electronics project community where members can design, sell, teach and learn about electronics projects and kits.

You design a step-by-step project, Jameco creates the kit for your project and sells it, and then pays you as the designer a royalty on every sale. Let’s cut to the chase and talk about royalties:

 You start by creating a Product Brief for your kit idea. The Brief is just a paragraph or so description of the project. Once a Brief is approved by Jameco, it’s published within the Club Jameco community and members can comment and vote on the project. A vote is the way a registered Club Jameco member encourages a project designer to go ahead and actually design the project for submission to Jameco to be made into a kit. Jameco assigns the price to the kit, but you can get a good idea of the ultimate kit price by adding the kit parts to your Jameco shopping cart.

Your kit will probably need a pc board – no problem, one of Jameco’s partners is Bay Area Circuits, which makes custom pc boards for hobbyists. Just upload your Gerber files as part of the project design step, and Bay Area will make the kit’s pc boards.

Other Club Jameco partners are LinkEdge Technologies, Make Magazine, Nuts and Volts, Instructables, and Circuit Cellar.

Take a look at the FAQ page for Club Jameco, and start thinking about good kit ideas.