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
Eink, E-paper, Think Ink – Collin shares six segments pondering the unusual low-power display technology that somehow still seems a bit sci-fi – http://adafruit.com/thinkink
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
