A Handbook of Strategies, Tactics, & Tips for Starting a Maker Company
Makers Going Pro is a book for makers that want to start a company and take their passion, dream, or hobby to the next level and earn a living from it. If you’ve been thinking about starting a company around your maker skills, this book will highlight how other makers have succeeded and how they did it.
In Makers Going Pro, I’ll interview leading maker company founders and other maker movement experts for insights and inspiration into how maker companies succeed. In fact, I’ve been conducting interviews for the last 2 months and plan to have a sample chapter up within a week.
Just for reference, makers are do-it-yourself types, fixers, hackers, inventors, entrepreneurs, indie craftspeople and artisans. The makers who are successful at creating a company have something to teach us. Some maker companies are fairly simple, but they have leveraged innovative marketing, sales, and operations tips and techniques to get profitable. Others are more complicated and can teach us about patents and legal hurdles to avoid if you have intellectual property to protect. Many have gone the path of open source and I’ll share some of the pros and cons of open vs closed source.
I’m interviewing some of the best known maker companies out there and compiling their ideas, philosophies and tips for starting and running a maker company
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
