How I bootstrapped a hardware business on very very little money that's now 6k MRR (Yes, hardware IS possible with very little money)

Hello! What's your background?
My name is Gustavo but most people call me Gus. My background is in structural and software engineering ( I know.. very different). Throughout the last few years in different industries I was always tinkering after work with hardware and specifically 3d printing which brought me to the creation of Makergadgets, a maker company.

Hardware... are you nuts?!
I didn't go in thinking "I'm building a hardware business". I went in thinking, "I'm going to build this product and do it over again multiple times until it works really well." I would offer it to folks wherever and whenever and see what they said. If they said it was crap but they liked the idea, I did it again. If they were not happy, I found a way to help them get happy (free gear, a promise to make it better, lots of support .. the list goes on).

What motivated you to get started with Makergadgets?
I tinkered with different hardware ideas I had. I used cardboard, borrowed machine time from friends in university labs, got hold of a 3d printer, and JUST tried things. My extruder jammed, so I ordered an upgrade from 3 different companies. None of them worked so I thought to myself, "why don't they work?". I took a caliper, measured them, and redesigned them in CAD. Printed a few and put them up online. I sold the first one and realized.. "Okay, let me ask that person what they thought about it".
I iterated.
After the first year I sold about 500 then it started to fade since it was so niche and the margins were very small. At this time I lived in Florida so I vented stinky 3d printer air out the window. But then I moved to New England ... having a window open in the winter didn't quite work anymore.
I needed an enclosure.

What went into building the initial product?
I built a box out of some plastic panels I had stacked in a closet from a while back. I slapped them together with rivets and some wood dowels then put a small filtration unit in there and literally smelled it and put my hand in to see how hot it was. I lit matches inside it to see if the smoke was moving in the right direction. It did!
At this point I got stuck and asked a friend who knows a bit of everything how to make a nice box. He and I headed over to Home depot and cut out 6 nice panels slapped a window on it and installed a makeshift filtration unit I designed. It was complicated with PVC pipes and lots of nonsense. It looked okay, but did not work well. I didn't quite understand the fan mechanics so I called up a HEPA filtration vendor two towns away and asked if I can come in and ask him a bunch of questions. He was really cool about it and gave me printouts of fan spec charts and calibration stuff, explained how filtration and airflow works. With this clarification I did more research designed a new unit, ordered 50$ worth of hardware and tried again. This time the smell/match test worked! Now I had to do actual tests to see if it made sense. I bought a bunch of air quality testers--VOC sensors, chemical specific monitors, anemometers for airflow, temp, humidity sensors. I then asked a chemistry major friend to test things out himself and he got great results too.
All this took about 6 months, but I wasn't counting. I was on a mission to make the thing that worked.

How did you sell the product?
At the time it started I used a free online website builder--it was horrendous. The site was just informational so sales transactions were on Ebay. I communicated very closely with customers and they practically became friends after all of the back and forth. I was hand cutting each box, sanding, painting, drilling. I had a piece of crap printer so I would polish the parts up that went on the box. These were long nights and long weekends..
As we progressed, Andre began taking better and better photos, editting them and making things overall easier to understand and read. He created graphics and charts and we pushed through various channels--Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, YouTube, Ebay, and a big push on our website.

How did you go from 1 enclosure a month to many more?
It's funny, there wasn't a deliberate plan. If you are under pressure, you'll be compelled to make the right choice to stay afloat. I asked my friend Ed to help me build them, we worked any non-work hour to make them by hand. We constantly communicated with customers and at some point it was pretty apparent (around $3k per month) that we couldn't keep up. I found a local laser cutting facility, met with them, and told them the story. I invested a few thousand of my money to keep the laser costs down. Then I got home and sold more. I re-wrote the website myself and hooked up Stripe. It was better than the old site, but not great--any variation had to be hard-coded since I didn't have time to make it modular. I took paypal payments, Venmo, cash, whatever. Things got more hectic but luckily in come the next two key players to bring us to the next level. Andre automated all of our financial tracking and payments, Todd automated email notifications for customers and created a modular website so we can support more products.

Were margins any good since hardware is expensive?
We looked ahead at what the company would reasonably look like in the near future. We didn't worry so much about the margins at that point, but focused on what they would be soon enough.
The margins were very small since we would purchase only 25 fans and 25 of each electrical component, 25 shipping boxes, etc.
As we sold and accrued a little more cash, I would talk to vendors directly on Ebay, Alibaba into the late evening telling them our growth and interest in working with them. I video called, phone called ... built the relationship. I ordered larger batches from abroad and from vendors nearby. I purchased broken printers and fixed them and converted them to work horses.

How have you grown your revenue?
We invented more products by listening to what people needed. We also looked at major expenses and increased our purchase volume. We called Fedex to get better rates based on how much we were using them. We switched from individual shipments to bulk shipments, containers, freight forwarders, customs agent. All these things lowered costs and let us operate with very few people. We redeveloped the website to make it more modular, then scrapped it altogether and used Squarespace to make it more polished and to get Todd away from html/JS so that there was more time spend on product development.

What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome?
The biggest challenge was how to keep doing it all without burning out. At some point you realize that you are a bit good at many things (you're entrepreneurial after all) but you're not great at everything. For every skill I had there was someone far better at that one thing. As I came to grips with this concept I pulled in the right people to support the business. I brought in a very smart finance and analytics friend, Andre, to straighten us out as a business--luckily he's also great at graphic design! I brought in a tech guru customer, Todd, who loved our stuff to build more sophisticated parts of our tech that I simply didn't know how to do. I brought in a friend that's really good at process, Roberto, to look at the operation and tell me how to make it more efficient. He had me literally break down walls to maximize how I can do all the things necessary to get a box out the door. Another customer, Brandon, jumped in and helped us figure out marketing, another customer prettier designs. The biggest challenge was to remove myself from being the "star" and to allow the business to take my place.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?
Always tinker and don't limit yourself to groundbreaking ideas
Think about simple things that people need help with. As you work on a simple idea, it becomes more complex; it becomes sexy. In time it inspires new ideas.
Don't dwell on margins
Don't worry about margins on day 1 or day 2. Heck, don't worry about them on year 1. Look at hardware costs by volume and calculate what your margin would be at some future date. See how much of your product you have to sell to get there. Give yourself a roadmap.
See what a big company does
all of the components--freight logistics, manufacturing, automation, software, finance. Copy them to a small and attainable degree. Do it in increments.
Don't freak out about the "what ifs"
What if you get too many orders and can't keep up? That's a GOOD thing. When that happens, take a moment to understand where the stress mostly comes from. Is it because handcutting something takes long? Look for someone with a machine to do it. Is it because parts are too expensive? Look for a vendor to cut a deal with on a promise for repeat business. Is it cash? Document your growth, ask for a loan since you want this thing to be yours and not an investors.

Finally, remember why you are doing it. Remember that you just wanted to shake things up a bit and its hella fun.