46 replies to this topic

[drtrmiller]

Since becoming heavily engaged with the online antkeeping community in late 2013, I have not only strived to be 100% honest about the uses and limitations of the products I design and sell, but also have, in contrast with my shop-owner peers, given away the secret sauce—be it a recipe, design file, or other "intellectual property" that would enable a user with similar time and resources to replicate, for personal use, the work I and others have achieved with far less effort than starting from scratch.

 

Let's talk about a few of the things that have changed in this community since I began pioneering new ideas back in 2013:

• Days after disclosing the details of a formicarium with a magnetically-held "heated cover," ant shop owners around the world begin integrating magnets into their formicaries in new and fantastic ways.
• Work on Formula Blue 100 results in widespread discussion and critique of ant diets, forcing a local competitor to publicly acknowledge the once closely-kept secret of the ingredients of the food they had been selling for years.
• Roughly a year after being the first to commercialize an entirely 3D-printed formicarium—the iconic GroTube—other shop owners introduce and begin to sell their own 3D-printed formicaries.
• Months after introducing beautiful, naturalistic foraging areas, other shop owners upgrade their existing products with similar, premium decor options.
• Months after first commercially introducing a foraging area with an inset escape-prevention lid to the North American market, other North American shop owners decide to get on the bandwagon and sell nearly identical products.
• Months after publicly releasing the 3D files of the GUZZLER Liquid Feeder—another much-loved original invention—shop owners in Europe begin selling extraordinarily similar designs.
• Honey, sugar water, maple syrup—which is better? SUNBURST Ant Nectar eliminates the confusion and provides a 100% reliable method of feeding carbohydrates and electrolytes to ants. No shop has marketed an ant food product with such an unimpeachable promise before.
• What is the best way to keep ants from escaping? byFormica Fluon Markers are introduced to completely eliminate the guesswork out of applying an effective escape prevention barrier.

Effective immediately, I (as owner of byFormica Ant Products) will join the ranks of ant shop owners around the world who have shunned giving detailed replies when being asked about the secret sauce of their ant foods, accessories, and formicarium designs.  Why?  Because disclosing predigested research and development to the cheapest customers and shrewdest shop owners has never sold anything.  In fact, it's a recipe for disaster:

 

The idea all along was that by sharing the work I have done, referencing the scientific papers of interest that I and others have found useful, and answering questions candidly and openly, the online ant community would flourish as others would critique and build upon that pre-existing work.  In return, I could commercialize those improvements, selling them to anyone who could afford them—and not just those with the abundance of expensive tools and DIY skills needed to build them from scratch.

 

To those ends, I started a wiki nearly a year ago, with the hope of inviting others in the online ant community to participate in the process of describing in detail exactly how ant products are developed.  Over the course of nearly one year, the number of outside contributions to the wiki totaled exactly zero, compared to the 200+ articles I personally wrote and edited.  Indeed, in making such research so easily available, the only people to have benefited—by all appearances—were other shop owners with superior resources in the art of selling things, and far less time to give away how-to guides for how to obtain their products for free.

 

So, while some critics may feel that I overstate the influence I've purported to have had in the online ant community over these past two years—and they may to some extent be right—the frequency and seemingly convergent evolution of others commercializing the same or similar products or product ideas almost immediately after me, as far as I, as a shop owner am concerned, are far too numerous and deafening a coincidence to ignore.

 

Through my personal experiences and observations these past two years, it has become painfully clear that other shop owners—all of whom couldn't care less about the success or failure of one another—have the right idea.  It is a sad and unfortunate reality that patents, trade secrets, high prices, and skimpy details are the things that build a successful ant business in a community of penny pinchers and high customer scarcity.  In the end, when other shop owners can benefit in any way from your R&D, rather than being a contest of who should receive due credit for a product or invention—or even who has the highest quality product—success becomes a contest of who can sell their product better—either by competing on price, or by exploiting pre-existing customer loyalties in a small, closely-knit online community.

Most ant products are made in low volume, by hand, and often by the shop owner him or herself.  Those who compete on price will lose as a matter of well-established economics—there aren't enough antkeepers, or demand, in domestic markets to justify low profit margins.  Ant products tend to be relatively inelastic, meaning that the price has little influence on whether they will sell.  When a shop owner can spend 100 hours making 100 products at $30 profit per sale, thereby making $30 an hour; or one can spend 200 hours selling 200 products at a profit of $5 per sale, thereby making $5 an hour—it's abundantly clear which is the better choice for one's limited time.

 

And so, as anyone who is the least familiar with the online ant community can acknowledge, the winners become those who can create a product and community ecosystem—a one-stop-shop, where customers needn't look elsewhere for either ant products or ant care information or advice, and where the existence of other shops and communities isn't even acknowledged.  In many of these communities, it is forbidden to even discuss other shops, products, or communities that directly compete with the shop owner's interests.  How does this help anyone other than the shop owner?

 

All of the above ramblings lead me to announce that the latest version of the GroTube will be my final public release.  In a matter of days, I'll publish the files on Thingiverse.com, and will sell accessory kits to allow anyone with a capable 3D printer to be able to manufacture the formicarium for just a few bucks.

 

This message is a simple word of warning for any would-be idealist who thinks they have great ideas, or anyone who might enter this industry thinking they can hold hands and sing kum ba yah with other well-meaning hobbyists—people like dspdrew, who has his own aspirations to sell ant products one day.  People will be inspired by what you do.  And so, your success or failure in this business has little to do with the quantity of your contributions, or the quality of your products—and everything to do with who you can convince to buy your stuff, and how many rabid fans you can create to boycott your competitors.

Edited by drtrmiller, February 6 2016 - 3:16 PM.

[Ants4fun]

It's a shame that you had to resort to seclusion. I know that your contributions where very revolutionary. My hope was that the rift between different ant keeping businesses would close, but alas we lost another one. Imagine of we could all contribute. Tar heel ants special mixture that makes extremely textile yet hard formicariums such as the talus, ByFormica's revolutionary 3d formicariums and there famed ant keeping diet, and Ants Canada's fan base, we could do some pretty awesome stuff. RIP:ByFormica's public designs 2-6-2016

[Subverted]

Best of luck with your future products, Terry. I have always been a bit skeptical of your approach to that side of your business, hopefully we will still get a little bit of a peek at your new ideas, but I don't think this is a bad idea at all.

 

Also...I had no idea people were allowed to edit your wiki, it seemed like it was intended just for ByFormica products/projects...

[drtrmiller]

It's a shame that you had to resort to seclusion. I know that your contributions where very revolutionary. My hope was that the rift between different ant keeping businesses would close, but alas we lost another one. Imagine of we could all contribute. Tar heel ants special mixture that makes extremely textile yet hard formicariums such as the talus, ByFormica's revolutionary 3d formicariums and there famed ant keeping diet, and Ants Canada's fan base, we could do some pretty awesome stuff. RIP:ByFormica's public designs 2-6-2016

 

Indeed, the companies you mention do great work designing, manufacturing, and selling their products.  The main reasons people can't work together are the limited amount of money in the market as a whole, and people's egos when it comes to receiving criticism for bad ideas.

 

Also...I had no idea people were allowed to edit your wiki, it seemed like it was intended just for ByFormica products/projects...

 

That's very possible!  The new store I'm designing will be very obvious that anyone can participate—an experiment in product evolution following selling.

[Alza]

I don't get it.

[Subverted]

I don't get it.

He hasnt been making much money because it is/was too easy for people to steal his ideas, going forward he is trying to change that.

[drtrmiller]

 

I don't get it.

He hasnt been making much money because it is/was too easy for people to steal his ideas, going forward he is trying to change that.

 

 

It's not that I'm not making money—that's not accurate at all.  It's more the fact that people, mainly outside this community who don't know me very well, expect that because I claim that certain products (i.e. Sunburst Ant Nectar) are "scientifically based," that I should just hand over the recipe on account of the fact that I've had great success selling it, and customers love the product.

 

In fact, Sunburst Ant Nectar and many other products I have commercialized, are not new inventions at all, but are based on information easily obtainable on the internet or through other literature.  When I find something that works, regardless of whether or not I "invented" it, and I spend a great deal of time researching, refining, developing, manufacturing, and advertising a product to sell—it is incomprehensible that some random person, with little or no scientific background, would question the integrity of my claims just because I refuse to hand over all the research I've performed to be able to sell the product—an act that could very well allow that or other individuals to exploit for commercial gain the success of my R&D at no cost to them.

 

This happened recently on Facebook, and quite frankly I'm tired of it.

 

Anyone questioning my integrity need only look at the fact that I discontinued selling Formula Blue 100 due to the fact that, in nearly two years of research, I haven't yet figured out how to guarantee a 5-star customer experience with a complete ant diet.  All other products I continue to sell have 5/5 star ratings.  People love them.  This isn't going to change unless I change the products.  Ratings and reviews are one metric I use to gauge whether the products I sell are making a positive difference in this community, or if there is a problem that needs to be addressed.  I could very well continue to sell Formula Blue 100 to the public and make lots of money doing so.  But I refuse to do so, given the very small number of people who have trouble using the product (it had a 4.5/5.0 star rating when I decided to discontinue selling it).  I have very high standards for this stuff.  When people have problems, I want them to tell me, so that hopefully in the future others won't have that same issue.

 

And while I'm on the subject, if anyone tells you there is a good, working, all-in-one diet, they are simply wrong.  There are two primary considerations with ant diets—receptivity: will ants eat the food—and efficacy: how well does eating the food contribute to both short- and long-term development? There are still many critical issues that have not yet been addressed when it comes to synthetic ant diets. And while no individual customer may adequately represent the totality of the user experience of any synthetic diet in a short review consisting of whether their ants ate the food or not, you can not even address efficacy until you nail receptivity, which is my current focus.

 

When it comes down to it, I want to make products that most people love.  I'll continue to do that, regardless of whether I publicly share every resource I utilize to develop the products I sell.

Edited by drtrmiller, February 6 2016 - 1:09 PM.

[Alza]

Yea..this is beyond me, I don't know what you guys are talking about.

[Ants4fun]

Will you still be working on a synthetic ant diet similar to blue 100?

[ctantkeeper]

terry, the wording of your messages is proving a little challenging for me to understand. are you still going to create and sell new products, or is the business done for?

[drtrmiller]

Will you still be working on a synthetic ant diet similar to blue 100?

 

Sure. But there's a lot of original R&D to be done, which is both time-consuming and costly.

 

My latest experiments involved buying lots of expensive and difficult-to-acquire chemicals.  The experiments didn't go very well.  The only thing I did learn was that Sunburst Ant Nectar beat everything under the sun in receptivity tests.  But it is only carbs, which works decent for a genus like Camponotus which hosts the intracellular endosymbiont Blochmannia to produce much of their own food from sugars, but not other species that lack Blochmannia.

 

As it turns out, most of the scientists studying ant food preferences have different goals than keeping colonies in captivity forever.  I have a very hard time believing that any scientist has been able to keep captive colonies alive and flourishing for long periods exclusively on holidic or meridic diets.

 

For example, as frequently as the infamous Bhatkar-Whitcomb diet is referenced in countless scientific journals, there is little to no evidence that it is effective at rearing colonies in captivity, despite the author's claims that all manner of species were able to rear colonies to reproductives on nothing but the diet (those claims were never elaborated, and no testing conditions were given; simply an observation of the authors from over 3 decades ago).

Edited by drtrmiller, February 6 2016 - 2:18 PM.

[dspdrew]

I have noticed this sort of activity a lot. Do you think this is unique to the ant keeping community? I think it would probably be like this in any hobby community this small.

[klawfran3]

From what I've seen, it's extremely more prevalent in the ant community than in most other small hobbies. I am active in the tarantula community, another niche hobby, and the atmosphere is completely different. People are trading ideas and coming up with new ways to improve our care for the spiders, and very few people have patented their ideas, let alone try lawsuits against others. The community focuses on the animals and their husbandry and doesn't care about monetizing their inventions since it will only hurt the hobby in the long run. Spider egg incubators, enclosure plans, and other products are all shared communally and their information is given out to the best of the creators ability, since the animals care is priority and monetary gain is further back. If it hadn't been for some of the big named spider keepers releasing some of the techniques and things they've found work for them well, the hobby would basically be non-existent. People wouldn't be able to raise many species efficiently because of the lack of information we have on the more exotic ones, so when we all work together and share our experiences we help the hobby grow together.  I believe this is because there are a lot more hobbyist sellers than there are professional sellers in the tarantula hobby, and that hobbyists are able to more easily sell their stock then we ant keepers can do. With less professional competition it means we are more easily able to share our ideas without someone stealing them or patenting them. At least, those are my two cents.

Terry, I have bought multiple products from you and have 100% satisfaction with everything I have. I am a big fan of your work and inventions, and it is a shame that it has come to this conclusion. I will continue to purchase products from you and support your endeavors, and I hope that one day you will be able to share your ideas with everyone once again.

Edited by klawfran3, February 6 2016 - 6:20 PM.

[Okeedoke22]

Hello,

 

While I'm new to ant keeping, I do read these forums quite often and you always help people with ideas and are always very forthcoming with your products.  You are right to be mad at Vendors/shops that profit off your ideas. You also have the right to protect your ideas and inventions. I know in most cases you give out details of your products to help out keepers who can't afford to buy your products. I definitely understand your frustration with other shop owners profiting off your products, especially since they don't contribute outside of profiting. I feel that is your biggest issue. 

 

As far as formula blue being rated 4.5 out of 5 stars. I'm very surprised you would take it off the market.  Its really impossible to make everyone happy especially when the product has so many variables. Who is to say they are using it correctly? 

 

Anyway really enjoy your new inventions so hopefully you keep coming with them. 

 

Thanks 

James

[john.harrold]

Howdy Terry,

I must admit that I've always been a little confused by your business model. Though I did enjoy reading through your wiki, as I find R&D interesting, and I do appreciate the open source approach you were taking. It's very difficult to take an idea that works well in a limited setting and turning that into a product. That is something affordable to the consumer, performs well under real world conditions, and turns enough of a profit to keep your belly full and house warm. I think very few people appreciate this (Dunning-Kruger raises its head everywhere). The devil is indeed in the details. And once those details have been worked out, it's trivial to take them and fold them into other products. I think this is true everywhere, and the ant keeping business is no different. I've purchases a lot from you and I will continue to do so in the future.

I'll leave you with a couple stories:

My wife listens to my occasional ramblings about ants with curious interest. I described the GroTube as the Apple of formicarium. There are just so many little details that it's difficult to appreciate how they all fit together.


Over Christmas I left town for three weeks and had to give my ants to a colleague form work. He knows nothing about ant keeping and the market for products. But after he dropped them off he commented on how nice the GroTube and Arena were, remarking on both the aesthetics as well as the quality.

John

Edited by john.harrold, February 7 2016 - 4:58 PM.

[Vendayn]

The ant keeping hobby seems like a vastly different atmosphere in Europe than it does in the US. Granted, I have a VERY hard time understanding anything not English and google translate sometimes doesn't work properly. Plus it tends to make it sound weird and hard to understand. But, when I was doing research into keeping Leafcutter ants, they were very open in sharing tips/information/designs and what not.

 

I think a big part is, because there aren't many laws in Europe about trading ants and what not. So finding information on certain species is far easier. People get ants from everywhere, and I find there is FAR more info on various ants there on their forums than I can ever find on US based sites. With that said, this forum is definitely great and the best English/US based forum (definitely most professional and pretty open), and there is now (pretty recently) trading with local ants. So, that is a big improvement. But overall, here in the US, the laws don't really allow exotic ants like in Europe (and that is definitely understandable) and trading local ants can still be iffy depending on county/city local laws. In Europe, its far less cut throat and blackmarket-esque than it is in US, and a lot more friendly to the hobby overall. So I find that their information on keeping various ants is far more open than what you can find on US based sites. Plus, at least with Leafcutter ants, in Europe its far more common to keep Leafcutter ants than the US (but at least Drew sells his colonies, so like I said, that is a big improvement, which overall allows more information and people to figure things out), so Europeans being more likely to have Leafcutter ants, for them in particular that makes it a lot easier to find information. That is just one species example, but that is because that is what I mostly researched on various European ant forums.

 

Now maybe this post doesn't relate, but if I understood the topic right, its about information, coming up with designs and moving the hobby forward. And Drtmiller's designs have been being stolen. Did I understand correctly? If so, then yeah Europeans are far more better at sharing things (in terms of what I found with Leafcutter ants) than most what one can find on US based forums. With that said, like I said, this forum is great and there is a TON of info shared. And Drew shares all his designs he comes up with, so I'm not saying there is NO info here. I just find that more people are willing to find new ways of keeping ants (Leafcutter ants) and a bit more friendly/less aggressive of sharing new things than things in the US. Of course, Drew (and a couple others) have given me (personally) great ideas on various Leafcutter ant designs and information on raising them.

Edited by Vendayn, February 7 2016 - 3:13 PM.

[yen_saw]

Frankly, i care less about others criticism if I know my product works. If you like this hobby enough and enjoy helping the community, you would share it with everyone. Competition helps producing better products, it is the same everywhere. You will find it frustrating if you continue to think of it the way you are right now. It is probably easy for me to say since i don't do this for a living, it is purely a hobby for me. I was able to create a product that helps improving praying mantis fecundity in the mantis forum. I was happy to share it with everyone in the mantid forum. A dealer even branded that product using my name, of which i get nothing out of it but i am just proud that people are using it. All in all, i just want to say that anyone thinking of making a good living out of a hobby should be mentally prepare for this type of frustration unless you are willing to do this for fun as a hobby in a small community.

[Mdrogun]

http://imgur.com/gallery/jXteH

[drtrmiller]

http://imgur.com/gallery/jXteH

 

That's easy for a billionaire at the head of an industry-leading corporation to say.  Tesla also got $4,900,000,000.00 in government subsidies, which never hurt anybody.

 

I started my R&D and manufacturing products after my competitors had 3-5 good years in the North American market with virtually no other competition.

[iXvXi]

The fact that you made information and designs open source, shows your motives.

You clearly stand by your products and the information you provide freely. Due to your great contributions, I know myself as well as others;greatly benefited from you.
(And I'm a newcomer!)

Putting the community first, over personal benefit is something you just don't see anymore unfortunately.

Thanks for your contributions! I certainly don't disagree with your decisions either. People profiting from your dedication is a slap in the face to you and the community alike.