| Episodes | 125 |
| Mentions | 215 |
| Cited here | 18 |
| First — last | #1 — #713 |
| Top guests | Marcus Schappi, Luke Beno, Ken Burns |
| Related | arduino · open source hardware · breakout board · microcontroller · digi key |
SparkFun is an American open source hardware retailer and manufacturer whose business centres on designing and selling breakout boards, sensor modules and hobby electronics kits, supported by free documentation and code libraries.[1][458] By around 2010 the company was turning over more than 10 million a year, placing it among roughly a dozen firms that had passed the million-dollar annual revenue mark selling open source hobby kits.<sup><a href="#ref-1" title="Ep 1: What's In A Name?">[1]</a></sup> Its revenue was subsequently estimated at 10–15 million and then 30 million or more.[55][163][198] Beyond retail, the company operates as a contract manufacturer and distributor for outside hardware designers and runs an open source cloud data service for connected devices.[189][272][713]
History
SparkFun established itself early as the larger of the two principal open hardware retailers, at a time when Adafruit was still the smaller operation; the relative sizes of the two firms later reversed.[458] Adafruit at that early stage was running near a million dollars a year as a two-person operation out of rented space, a far smaller footprint than SparkFun’s.[1]
The company ran a recurring “Free Day” promotion in which it gave away $100,000 of product in each of two consecutive years; in the second year a quiz gate was added before customers could reach the shopping cart.[26] The promotion’s advertising return was essentially untrackable, since the traffic it generated would not have been obtainable through conventional advertising at the same price.[26]
In 2014 SparkFun attempted to import 2,000 China-made SparkFun-branded multimeters, retailing at about 5, and the shipment was seized following a complaint by Fluke.[190] The seizure rested on trade dress rather than trademark, a less clear-cut claim that SparkFun might have been able to challenge in court had it been able to fund the litigation.[190] Fluke’s public statement on the matter was worded so as to suggest that SparkFun should give the released meters away rather than sell them, converting the legal outcome into a reputational obligation.[190]
Business model
The core economics of the SparkFun-style business is producing breakout boards cheaply enough that a small company can sustain a broad catalog.[458] Margins in the open hardware kit and breakout board trade are thin, constraining how much engineering and support any one product can carry.[183]
The catalog is supported by practices intended to lower the barrier to using each part. SparkFun’s practice is to link customers to working code libraries for every sensor it stocks, including libraries it did not author itself.[155] It employs teams of people whose output is free tutorial content on its learning site, treating documentation as a funded product line rather than a side task.[189] That content follows a tutorial-first commerce model: the customer is led with a project to complete, and the parts are merely made available alongside it rather than pushed as a sale.[331] Its customer forums similarly operate as a support and community resource rather than as an advertising channel.[38]
Among the company’s published design contributions are Eagle footprints with staggered header pads, a mechanical arrangement that friction-holds a pin header in the board so it does not fall out during soldering.[43]
New product ideas enter the pipeline through a dedicated scout who surfaces candidate parts and pitches them to the whole engineering group, which then selects which to develop, and engineers are permitted to propose products drawn from their own interests rather than working solely from a centrally assigned roadmap.[157] Because the customer base ranges from beginners to NASA engineers, demand cannot be predicted reliably in advance, so the storefront itself serves as the test: the company stays small and agile enough to try a product and observe what happens.[157] Product retention decisions are only loosely tied to sales metrics; a part judged interesting enough is kept in the catalog even while losing money.[157] Internally, the company holds a company-wide culture meeting once a year in which employees collectively define what working there should be like.[157]
The model carries structural hazards. Chinese cloners can reproduce a SparkFun kit within days of release, forcing the company onto a permanent treadmill of introducing new designs to stay ahead, and its defence is not the designs themselves but brand, service and value-added support.[163] The same openness means a larger house can in principle manufacture an independent designer’s published kit at volume and displace the original designer.[6]
Manufacturing and distribution services
SparkFun acts as a contract manufacturer for outside products. It built and shipped 11,000 units of the Makey Makey on behalf of that product’s creators.[189] Small hardware firms that have already done their own fabrication, picking, packing and order shipping have chosen to outsource all of it to SparkFun rather than repeat the work in house.[189] The commercial value of such a deal lies partly in SparkFun’s distribution network, reported at around 500 distributors in addition to its own retail site.[189] The comparison set at that scale is small: Seeed Studio and Adafruit were evaluated as alternative manufacturing and distribution partners before SparkFun was selected for at least one such arrangement.[189]
SparkFun also manufactures the Teensy under contract for its designer, who had previously built the boards himself before handing production over.[713]
Data services
SparkFun operates a data-collection service to which hardware can push readings over a simple URL; the service stores the stream and re-serves it in a machine-readable format for third-party graphing front ends.[221] The service is positioned as an enabler for SparkFun’s own hardware sales to hobbyists rather than as a competitor to general-purpose IoT platforms such as Amazon’s, and it is released as open source, so a user can run the same server on a local machine or a private VPS instead of depending on SparkFun’s hosted instance.[272]
Ownership and market position
SparkFun is a private company with essentially all equity held by a single owner, which limits any outside acquisition path.[189] Using a rough two-times-revenue multiple, the company was at one point valued informally at around 10–15 million of annual revenue.[55] The predicted end state of the open hardware retail sector is consolidation, with the larger firms acquiring each other once they reach sufficient scale.[55]
Adafruit distribution dispute
SparkFun’s contract-manufacturing relationship with the Teensy’s designer placed it upstream of Adafruit, which resold the finished boards.[713] SparkFun revoked Adafruit’s right to resell the Teensy, citing a code of conduct violation rather than a commercial or technical dispute over the product, and the dispute escalated to a full cutoff in which Adafruit was barred from reselling any SparkFun product, severing a long-standing cross-distribution relationship between the two firms.[713] The Teensy itself is only partly open: its libraries are open source, but the board ships a proprietary bootloader that the designer was contractually unable to release because of a non-disclosure agreement with the microcontroller’s vendor, NXP.[713]