A few things about Neal.
- He’s a flashlight enthusiast who knows how they work internally.
- Speaks both Chinese and English.
- Lives within driving distance of Shenzhen China where most of the flashlight manufacturers are located.
- He’s a translator between us and the engineers, etc… in the factories.
- He has gone to the factories on many ocassasions to supervise aspects of a flashlight build, worked on the packaging and trained people to do quality control checks on the lights.
- He knows several ways to reduce shipping costs for both the buyer and seller and a lot of times can avoid the buyer from having to pay additional taxes or import fees.
- He helps to arrange and run group buys.
- He helps customers track their packages.
- He deals with warranty related issues. (Better than the company does, usually)
- He wanted a website to promote his items and teamed up with M4D M4X since he already had a website.
- Overall a nice guy and trustworthy.
Sometimes the team working on a big flashlight design will negotiate a tiny percentage, like 1%, with the manufacturer to be equally distributed among the team members or to maybe go into a collective pot that can be used for future projects, etc… The same goes for M4X and Neal. They do get a percentage of the sales that they bring in. Nothing to be ashamed about. I know that their good deals have certainly gotten me to buy lights I normally wouldn’t have. Lol. M4X has also contributed a lot to getting warranty issues settled as well as making lots of review videos. You can check them out on youtube here.
Guys like Lexel, Texas_Ace and others can sometimes be hired by companies to design a driver for a particular flashlight. They usually get paid a set fee, not a percentage, for their work.
I don’t think the software guys like Tom E and ToyKeeper make much or any money off their UI’s. I’m sure they could get paid if a company wanted them to customize a UI for a specific light. I assume, but have no real knowledge, that ToyKeeper made some money from Emisar when she made RampingIOS for their lights. It was built/customized to their specific needs.
Take everything I say about money with a grain of salt. I may know some details, but there’s a lot I don’t know. People like to keep money details private. You know how it is. I believe everything I said is public knowledge, though.
Ps, I hope TK gets a little monetary compensation from this project for all her efforts. It will never be enough to match all the actual work she is doing. Most folks put in all the hours on these projects just for the fun of it, to see it through to a final product. For the passion of it.