Selling Your Homemade Tool Plans on HomemadeTools.net

[Jon]

Workshopshed - agreed, we should have some sort of system in place where people can add reviews of plans. We might just do this in a dedicated forum discussion for each set of plans, or only allow purchasers to review plans, so that people can't just anonymously downrate or uprate plans. I'm sure we've all seen questionable 1-star and 5-star reviews on Amazon, and we want to avoid that here.

C-Bag - That's a really good question. So I think what you're asking is, for example, what if I take Frank S's Chicken Tonight Guillotine, add, say, a bottle opener to it, and then submit it as "my" Chicken Guillotine Plus Bottle Opener plans. Something like that we wouldn't allow. Unlike other sites, we would be manually reviewing all tool plans prior to offering them for sale, and we would reject something like that. There's also a legal protection layer in place; people are free to build others' tools, and are also free to be "inspired" by others' tool builds as they write their own plans, but it's not legal to significantly copy others' plans and claim them as their own. So we would enforce that law, and we would also reject any tool plans that were suspiciously "similar" to existing plans.

Of course we would allow significantly different plans for similar tools (for example, multiple different plans for different kinds of workbenches). And if someone made plans for an improvement to an existing tool (for example, motorizing it), we could allow that on a case-by-case basis, especially if it encouraged a purchaser to buy the original plans. For example: Tube Bender by User1: $20, Motor Add-On for Tube Bender by User2: $5, Wheeled Transport Case for Tube Bender by User3: $10, etc. User1 would still have an advantage here: he could advertise his accessory plans in his original plans ("To purchase add-on plans for this Tube Bender, click here"), and, as the original plans builder, he would be more trusted by the user. This is similar to how any company can sell an iPhone case, but only Apple can legally sell an iPhone. And if Apple had a great idea for an iPhone case, they would have an advantage over third-party sellers.

Paul Jones - Good idea. Something like: "Interested in plans for this build? Click Yes/No". Then we could notify the builders when there were 50 or so plans requests. Another thing people can do is look at our All-Time Most Popular Tools, and see which tools would have the biggest markets for plans. You can see that metal benders, belt grinders, and power hammers top the list. You can also see on that page that tools whose titles include the word "Plans" (even if the "plans" are minimal) have much higher click rates, which further suggests the users' desire for detailed plans.