Q: I’m developing open source, low cost drones for conservation. How to do financially sustain the development of open source projects, and build a community around them. (Spain)

I think there are a couple of ways to financially sustain your project. You might want to look at grant funding to get it off the ground. There are a lot of people in this forum who are much more experienced than me at finding grants, but if you collaborate with a specific project that has funding attached, it might fund the research and development of your drone project.

The "low cost" part of your question is a bit dangerous since it sets up expectations. Unless you have a factory behind you, or even own the factory, you won't really be able to compete in the low-cost drone space. If you look at companies like 3DRobotics, they got eaten alive by DJI and other low cost Chinese drone manufacturers. I go into more detail about low cost manufacturing in this post. To really go low cost, you actually need to be very well versed in the Chinese wholesale markets, either own your own factory or work extremely closely with one, and know all the tricks that low cost drone makers use to drive down cost. Truthfully, it's not really worth it and people/orgs/projects are not as cost sensitive as you might think. What they want is something that solves their problems. 

Everybody has a different concept of low-cost so rather than using an ambiguous term, perhaps focusing on the benefit it provides to wildlife conservation might be better. Something like "drones specifically designed for conservation technology" or even more specfic, "drones designed for monitoring large animal poachers", or even super specific like "drones designed for monitoring elephant poachers". Then you start by focusing on this super specific niche and outfit the drone you are working on specifically for them. 

For instance, elephants don't like the buzzing sound of drones so perhaps use extremely quiet rotor motors. Or if your users have to cover large amounts of space, perhaps a plane-based UAV might make more sense for them. Focusing on a sub-niche that isn't used to being catered to, really listening to them, and providing equipment based on their feedback is a sure way to build both community and superfans for your products. You can then slowly expand outward, focusing on other groups like "drones for monitoring big cats", "drones for monitoring rhino poachers", etc. 

Regarding financial sustainability of your products, assuming you plan to sell your products, you'll need to understand your costs and margins. How much does it cost you to make your product and how much should it sell for. I generally set a rule of thumb of 3.5x to 5x as my ratio between retail price and materials price. This is different depending on the product, industry, and company. 

Once you determine all this, focus on building your product and also educating your target user base on how it can be used to solve their problems. This is where you write like your life depended on it (and if you become a manufacturer, it probably will). This is documentation, case studies, user stories, how-to guides, and videos. 

As your following and reputation grow, you'll find that your sales will also. It takes time but if you're targeted and focused, you can achieve a lot more in less time and energy than if you're scattershot and generalized. 

Hope that helps.

Akiba

Q: How do these low-cost tools achieve scale and/or are funded (USA)

I think Alasdair and Arribada Initative provided a good example of a business model to fund and also scale a conservation tech product. Initially find an unfulfilled need, talking to community around that unfulfilled need, having it funded by a grant to kickstart the development, rallying the community around group purchases to mitigate risk, and then having it manufactured by a contract manufacturer to scale.

Understanding the marketing and setting up communication with the users needs to come first so it's important to get that conversation started as early as possible, often earlier than starting the design. As you understand the users and the potential demand, scaling is actually not that difficult. By working on the marketing, you should get a feel for the demand, and hence the amount you'd make for your first production run. 

If this is murky for you, perhaps you can do a crowdfunding campaign like Kickstarter to verify demand and lock in sales. Then you can start on the production. Or if you don't have resources to scale for a production run, there are many contract manufacturers like GroupGets that can handle crowdfunding and manufacturing. Or if logistics and fulfillment is your weak point, CrowdSupply handles crowdfunding and fulfillment. You give up part of your margin for these services, but you also save a lot of time. 

Alternatively you can scale it yourself by working with factories directly. These can be either locally or overseas like in China. I normally go this route since I've been working with factories for a while but if its cost prohibitive to do this, then perhaps contract manufacturers or local factories make more economic sense. 

Akiba

Q: How do groups using open-source make reproduction of their products feasible for others? (USA)

I'd like to clarify this question slightly. It sounds like you're asking how open source projects handle reproductions of their work? I think if it's open source, it should be feasible to reproduce your work. If it's not, then it's probably not open source. Open source is neither inherently good nor bad. Making that choice is a decision each person/company needs to make to fulfill their goals. In some cases, like if you're venture funded, it's not a great decision since VCs historically prefer some type of customer lock-in. Or if it's a social enterprise where mission is more valued, it might make sense to have things open source to build a community around that product and mission.

So I think the question is how do you compete if you're designing something that everyone else can make. This comes down to the real question: "who is your target audience and how much do they value your work". If you compete just on price, you attract customers who only care about price. If you differentiate based on features for a specific user, then you attract users that need those features. Of course you also need to reach out to those users to let them know about your product though. 

If you create some technology widget that caters to population surveys of small mammals in forest areas, then reach out to those people and work with them to tailor your technology to them, there's very little chance that a Chinese (or any other large, cheap) knockoff manufacturer can come in and completely undercut you. They are interested in selling volume and set up to cater to large, general markets that don't require a lot of software support, documentation, or customer interaction. Actually the Chinese knockoff manufacturers mostly don't speak English. I know many of them and actually work with them on some projects. 

If you find yourself competing with another company in the market for conservation technology for population surveys of small forestry mammals, and they have better support, documentation, and software than you do, then you probably have a problem. Either move to a different niche, or determine if it's worth the effort to compete in a niche of this size. If it is, differentiate your product and start working closely with the community to figure out their needs and educate them on how your product can help them do things they need. Otherwise, perhaps move to conservation technology for population surveys of small desert mammals, etc...

Akiba

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