Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Building a Maker Business”.
Hi everyone um, my name is zach zappala and i run a company. I run a company called spark io and we make tools for people who are creating internet connected products. All right, sorry, guys, one sec. I think we’re at the end of the presentation. So what i’m here to talk to you guys about, is uh how to build a maker business. So we’ve been around for a couple years now we launched a product on kickstarter called sparkcore, um and uh. We did that in 2013 and the reason that we launched this product, i was really inspired by nest and what they’d accomplished in kind of the internet of things. Creating this really compelling experience around an internet connected thermostat, and it felt to me back in thanks guys. Um back in uh 2012, when that came out, it was really exciting and all of a sudden people are like wow. You can really change these sort of unloved categories of products when you when they’re brought online, and it was this great experience and for a while afterwards there was this feeling like this was just the beginning, there’s going to be a lot more, but at the same Time when people started to sort of follow suit, a lot of the products that were coming out, weren’t that compelling – and we thought well.
Why is this the case? Why is it that one company has figured out how to do this really well, and other companies seem not to quite be able to get that same kind of magic thought? Maybe it’s because of a lack of tools? Maybe it’s because the people who want to create these products don’t have the tools that they need. It’S like the hardware world kind of needs, its ruby on rails, right, the the the tool kit that makes it really easy for people with a with a limited amount of resources to develop something really powerful. We thought – maybe we can help do that and in order to do that, we created this development kit and this ecosystem around a cloud platform, all open source um, and we really sold it to makers.
When we launched this this product and this company, we were looking at makers and saying we want to help. You uh create these connected products, and so what i want to talk with you about is what is it like to create a business around the maker ecosystem and what who are makers and what are they trying to accomplish and uh, and what opportunities are there from A business perspective so uh so yeah, that’s that’s me a couple years ago, slightly less gray. So so, let’s start with the um, the question of who are makers right. So um, oh um, so makers are sorry guys.
Can you go to the next page from here? Thanks um, so i’m a maker myself right. I i started doing this with a with an arduino um in 2012, so it hasn’t been that long. I’Ve only been doing this for like three and a half years, and this is a uh, a picture of my first prototype that i built where i had an arduino with an led, and i had wired it up to my computer with a little javascript application. I could hit a button on my phone and it would uh and it would uh blink the led right and for me that was just such an incredible experience and that was back in uh back in january 2012, 18 months later, i was launching my own product On kickstarter along the same vein, so i’m a maker i feel like i, i think i understand the sort of community, but the maker community is an interesting one, because it’s this composite of a whole bunch of different people that are have a same general ethos. But are trying to do different things, there’s people who are into electronics and there’s people who are into you know 3d, printing and there’s people who are into textiles and all of them fall under this broad group of makers.
So it sort of leads to the question of how do you actually define a maker who are makers really um? So a lot of what we think of as makers is driven by, i think maker faire and make magazine and in particular a lot of people who aren’t makers themselves. Their only interaction with makers is through maker faire. So you can get the first sense of public perception of makers by looking at like this poster from maker faire right, so diy, electronics, robots, there’s all of these sort of projects and things that you can do. There’S a lot of fun involved in this and i think that’s the sort of general perception of what makers are so overall. The simplest definition of a maker is makers are people who build things right, and that seems a little like.
Okay, well yeah, that’s literally what the word maker means, but what are they trying to build? What are what are they trying to accomplish? So i think that there are um. There are a couple different categories of of of makers and one of the things that’s common is the companies and the tools that are available to these makers. So if you think about the the companies that have grown up around the maker ecosystem, you’ve got arduino and raspberry pi and makerbot, who are all creating tools for and 3d robotics we’re creating tools for people to make things and then there’s sparkfun and adafruit and seed Studio who are distributing those tools to people so a lot of what makers are and the products that they buy and the businesses that have succeeded in the makerspace all have to do with tools. Okay, so let’s refine our definition.
A little bit more makers are people who use tools to build things, but again this is pretty broad. There’S a lot of things out there that people might be building. So i think that you can kind of group people into a couple different categories – um sort of major categories, so this is a an image from a maker faire. Um. One of the big categories of makers is people who are building things for fun right um. If you go to maker faire a lot of what you’ll see, is this you’ll see like big art, exhibits and, like you know, an octopus that shoots out fire and all that all that kind of stuff and there’s a lot of like fun and enjoyment around around Making so i think that’s one of the big categories or people who use tools to build things for fun.
The second big category is education, so if you guys saw evan upton uh speak this morning about raspberry pi, raspberry pi was created for educational purposes. It was created for kids to be able to learn to use computers and the whole founding story of raspberry. Pi is all about that and trying to create more technical competence for the inbound students coming into coming into cambridge.
And i think that a lot of the companies that have developed in this space are very focused on education and teaching, kids and stem. And all of that, so that’s another big part of of what it is to be a maker. So makers are people who use tools to build things to learn, and then finally, there’s this new group, i think relatively new, which is people who are building things who are building businesses that are makers – and you can see this on kickstarter – is where it’s most obvious. You’Ve got right now, almost a thousand products in the technology category that are live on kickstarter, so there’s this huge economy of hardware startups people that are delivering products. Many of them are consumer products, but a lot of them are even maker products themselves right. This is the most i took this picture like yesterday, and you’ve got chip and mickey makey are two different companies that are sort of building maker products within this ecosystem.
But so this category is potentially it’s one, that’s not necessarily often associated with makers. It’S makers are people who use tools to build things for profit, but that’s not what people think makers are. That’S.
That’S engineers right aren’t engineers, people who use tools to build things for profit and uh, and that raises the question of. If that’s the case are makers, engineers are makers and engineers the same group of people or are they? Are they different groups? And it’s it’s definitely true. I think that the public perception is that these are two highly different groups, and you can see this just if you do a google image search for maker. This is what you get right, so it’s very colorful, it’s very bright, even without looking at the pictures. Specifically, you can tell there’s a lot of fun and activity in the perception of makers, and this is a google image search for engineers, which apparently you have to wear a hard hat, to wear an engineer but to be an engineer um. But it’s very like business and working, and it’s not fun right, like it’s, it’s very much about trying to accomplish something and wearing a hard hat. So we had this hypothesis when we started our business, that these two groups of people are maybe only different based on how they’re marketed to rather than who they actually are, and this or at least some of them right there, these highly overlapping groups, and we felt That way, because of what we saw in the software development world, so software developers there’s a huge huge community of software developers out in the world and there’s not really such a thing as a hobbyist software developer or it’s not at least a term that people sort Of think about too much, because i think it’s common knowledge that hobbyist software developers are pretty much just professional software developers on the weekends right, and so you don’t necessarily have these two groups of people. You have one group of people, but you’re either talking to them on a tuesday when they’re at work and they’re a professional or on a saturday sunday when they’re at home, and they are a hobbyist right and building a side project. And so we sort of thought.
Well, what if this is true of makers? What, if makers, are engineers or a lot of makers are engineers but they’re engineers on weekends, and so the schedule of a maker looks like this right like during the week you’re an engineer and you go to work and you do productive things. But on saturday and sunday you have your projects and you and you leave, and you and you do your own thing, and so, if that’s the case, we saw an opportunity as a business to say. Well, there’s these three general groups of engineers of or sorry of makers, um, there’s those who do it for fun, there’s those who do it for profit and there’s those who do it for education and i think, a lot of the existing ecosystem around and around makers Was in this overlap between fun and education right – and this is where i think in particular, arduino and raspberry.
Pi have been very focused on this area where it’s education and the goal is to teach people. But you want to make it fun, because if it weren’t fun, then kids wouldn’t want to do it, and it would be much worse at being at being educational right. But what about the overlap between fun and profit? Where it’s fun? Because a lot of these products and these ideas start as weekend projects right it you you build something for yourself and you build something at home and you hook up your blinds to the internet right and you say: okay, this is cool and you invite some friends Over and they say, that’s actually really interesting what if people wanted to buy that right? Would you would you sell it and that’s what causes people to say? Maybe i’ll, maybe i’ll make a kickstarter campaign. Maybe i’ll develop a product right? Maybe i’m actually going to try and build this into a business and for that particular segment it didn’t feel like there were really good tools, because a lot of the prototyping tools, kind of drop you off after your prototype and say like okay, now you got to Like go back and rebuild it from scratch, so we thought this was a great opportunity for us and we did this kickstarter campaign for the sparkcore.
So this is back in 2013 and we raised almost 600 thousand dollars for the sparkcore and we had 5000 people that we were shipping them to. But didn’t really know anything about those people. And so we did a little bit of research and tried to find out who these people were, and we learned that 60 of our backers had engineer in their title, and so we thought it’s it’s starting to look like this is true, and maybe it’s just our Particular slice of the maker of the maker world – maybe it’s not true of the ecosystem overall, but the people that we’re talking to definitely do fit this hypothesis and um and that’s caused us to continue to develop our products with those people in mind. So we recently we’ve been developing the sequel to the sparkor, which is called the photon it’s shipping later this week and it’s basically taking the same thing and making it cheaper and faster and better for professional purposes. We’Ve also, and we’re also trying to make it easier.
So there’s going to be a book available soon, um getting started with the photon, which will help people uh and thanks to simon, monkeys out there for writing this um uh that’ll help people get started with this book with, with with with the photon we’ve also had A dozen different companies launch products on kickstarter that are powered on our platform and here’s just a few. Most of these were on kickstarter a little bit on indiegogo and finally, we decided that we wanted to build something for people who wanted to create cellular connected products, because this professional group was often just hacking. These things like agricultural products using wi-fi networks and we’re like shouldn’t that be cellular connected. It was too hard. So we tried to solve that problem as well, but all of this comes from conversations that we’ve had with our customers. So my sort of overall message for how to build a maker business is talk to your customers and and when you do don’t focus on what they do but focus on, why they do it. What are their aspirations? What are their goals and, in a sense, that’s not really about building a maker business? It’S just about building a business right.
This is true of any group of people and makers. Are this really interesting, unique uh, passionate group of people um but they’re, just people and uh, and so a lot of the rules of business apply right, is talk to your customers and find out what they need. You .