The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
by Andrew ‘[bunnie]’ Huang
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The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
The electronic manufacturing market in Shenzhen is a fantastic place to source parts if you’re a hardware manufacturer or hardware entrepreneur. There’s just one slight problem: finding your way around them can be very intimidating – especially if you aren’t familiar with the language or how business works!
The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen is a book aimed at non-Mandarin speakers who need a little help and guidance navigating the markets. Right now the book is raising funds on Crowd Supply where it has already exceeded its $10,000 goal by a large amount (at the time of writing, the project has raised $23,880).
The Book
The Essential Guide to Electronics provides simple and easy translations for phrases like ‘how much’, and ‘Do I need to leave a deposit?’. This includes both the phonetic translations as well as the written versions and all of the terms are organized simply to help you find the sentence you need on the fly.
‘How much for shipping?’ for instance is ‘Yun fei yao duo shao qian?’.
Other sections include negotiating, tooling, and the best ways to negotiate with vendors for the best deals. Backers will receive information on how to find the parts they need and how to secure them for a fair price without embarrassing themselves. Everything from diodes and displays to injection molding is covered.
Maps are included too, as well as extensive areas for note taking, and it is intended to serve as the perfect complement to more general travel guides.
The Creator
The Essential Guide to Electronics is the brainchild of Andrew ‘[bunnie]’ Huang – a hacker who has been visiting the Shenzhen electronic markets for over a decade now. He has blogged about the experience in the past and introduced many people to the area – even giving tours to MIT graduates and a number of VCs and business executives. He describes the book as the guide he wished he’d had when he was being shown around and so set to work completing it himself. Here’s a video in which Andrew has better explained how his book can help hardware entrepreneurs who wish to source parts, but struggle with the language barrier.
The project has already been featured by The Next Web, Hackaday and Boing Boing. If you want to get involved, then head over to the project page and pledge your support. Also, do subscribe to receive the latest in crowdfunding news.
