I sent the following to another member as a private reply to some questions he/she asked me, but I also wanted to post it publicly, because there seem to be quite a few here with aspirations of making a business out of selling antkeeping products, and my general advice may be helpful. While I didn't specifically mention it, it should be a given that a working knowledge of ants and antkeeping husbandry is fundamental to manufacturing antkeeping products to be used by others.
So You're Thinking About Starting an Ant Product Business?
Despite their inimitable adaptability, the infinite variety of ants in their various sizes—ranging from diminutive to microscopic—spanning the gamut of environmental and behavioral preferences, from arboreal leaf dwellers, to desert-sun navigators—make designing and manufacturing antkeeping products among the most challenging product development endeavors a person could undertake—certainly not a job for the faint of heart.
Firstly, in order to start most any successful manufacturing operation, you must have some control over the means of production. This means you must generally own any tools and hardware used in the manufacturing process, which can include 3D printers, CNC machines, drill presses, screws and taps—anything you might need in order to complete your projects. Further, you must train yourself to be able to use your tools effectively, as even the best tools are useless in the wrong hands.
In contrast, someone who outsources production in small volumes will incur too many costs to effectively sell finished goods at a reasonable price. Additionally, outsourced production means that you will have little control over the fit and finish of parts that are intended to work together, and you will inevitably end up with parts that don't fit and must be discarded. It is often necessary to produce many, many prototypes before manufacturing a final product.
Starting out, you shouldn't expect to have hundreds or thousands of customers. Therefore, as a general guideline, I recommend that an item you sell for $20 should cost you a maximum of $1 to $3 in materials. If a new, amateur ant product manufacturer sells more than a dozen units of anything in a month, you're doing pretty well—and so, if you were to sell a product for $20 when it cost you $15 in materials and an hour or so to produce, you might as well be working for free.
You also cannot copy the work of others. Try to pass off someone else's work as your own in this community, and you will be condemned and not taken seriously. You must rely on your own creativity and inspirations from your own life in order to create original products. This does not mean that you cannot be inspired by the work of others, be it architectural, artistic, industrial, or otherwise unrelated to antkeeping—just don't duplicate someone else's antkeeping products.
I have learned that it is of little help to ask for feedback or solicit ideas from the public, unless you are designing a camel. They say "a camel is a horse designed by a committee." If the people here had any idea about what they needed or how to go about making it, then they would make it themselves (and some do just that!). You must either design a product yourself, and create a need for it, where no such need existed before, or devise a product that addresses a pain point that has stuck the community for a long time, with few or no commercial solutions available. Typically, this means making something that solves a problem you, yourself, have had—or ideally, something that improves upon another commercial product or other established way of doing things with which you have personal experience.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I would encourage you to only continue if you really love spending tens or hundreds of hours making things that will only be enjoyed by a handful of people (or, more likely, not enjoyed), and if you have the financial means to keep going at it without any serious prospect of profitability for potentially years to come. If that describes you, then do more research on your own, don't be afraid to make mistakes and try new things, and do learn how to make things independently, as I and others have done.
All those who have succeeded in making ant products, whether for personal use or for sale, have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Good luck and hard work will get you somewhere, though maybe not to the place you expect, and probably not as quickly as you might want.
Edited by drtrmiller, August 17 2018 - 6:23 AM.
