Tindie and Hackaday : A Combination Made In Hardware Heaven

by Hisham Daou · Published June 2, 2016 · Updated October 10, 2016

Tindie Image

I must have been living under the rock lately. Yesterday, I received an invitation from one of Hackaday‘s staff members to like Tindie’s page on Facebook. I was already familiar with Tindie, but I found it weird that the invitation came from someone at Hackaday. For those who do not know, Tindie is a marketplace for makers. You can think of it as the Etsy of Hardware tinkerers. It is the online shop for your electronic projects.

So after digging up some history, I found out that the people behind Hackaday have bought Tindie back in 2015. As a member on Hackaday I am very excited about this news. I wish I came out from under the rock a bit earlier, but it is comfortable here. Supplyframe, the now owners of both Hackaday and Tindie are looking at ways for integrating both sites together.

In a Blog post, Aleksandar Badic the CTO of supplyframe says:

Naturally, the question that’s on everyone’s mind is, what happens next? Are we going to mess things up? Paint Tindie in black? Change the fee structure? While we have ideas on things that we could help with, our main goal will be making sure that the Tindie community continues to thrive. The only changes we’re interested in are the ones that make the community stronger. We are fascinated with the challenges surrounding the supply chain and will be looking into tools to help sellers improve margins and ship better products. Hackaday.io and Tindie combined represent the world’s largest repository of (working) Open Hardware products, so we will be looking into more closely integrating the two. We will also make efforts to grow the overall Tindie audience, as every new buyer helps move the community forward.
All of these are some of the ideas, but we’re ultimately looking at you for guidance: things we should do, problems we should attack, dreams of future capabilities.

Hackaday is one of my favorite online Open Hardware communities. Once the two websites (communities) are combined the makers would be able to start a project, get all the support and help from the Hackaday community and post the project for sale all from one place. If the project catches the eyes of the Hackaday blog writers, then congratulations on the huge free marketing.

P.S: Do not forget about their Hackaday Prize which is running right now. It is your chance to win BIG money.