Having a sudden surge in demand for your product is both wonderful and stressful. It’s great to have the new business, but usually growing pains are associated with the added pressure and attention. For maker businesses—especially those who are on their own or part of small teams—this sudden surge can be jarring.

I observed firsthand how one team of makers dealt with this overwhelming surge. The experience provided insight into how these maker groups are handling the jump from product to business. It also gave me a preview of how this whole maker economy might look for entrepreneurs as well as employees.

In March 2012, the Make: blog ran a feature on Adam Ellsworth and Brian Duxbury’s delightful Coin Cube, a yellow box made of laser-cut acrylic and equipped with a sensor array and LED that lit up when you “punched” the bottom. The creation was a real-world homage to cubes seen in the Super Mario Brothers video games. The focus of the write-up was exploring how entrepreneurs and makers meet at makerspaces and go on to create businesses. One of the side effects of the article was a huge jump in attention. The story of 8-Bit Lit and their delightful cube lamps rippled through the Internet, garnering attention on many popular blogs and gaming websites. The orders for their kit increased along with the traffic, and Brian and Adam quickly had more work than they could handle on their own. The problem was compounded by the fact that Brian had recently started a new full-time job, leaving an even larger burden on Adam’s shoulders.

I was working out of TechShop in San Francisco at the time, where a Coin Cube hung over the entrance to the work area as I toiled away on my re-skilling quest and the latest OpenROV prototype. I was fortunate enough to know Adam quite well during that time. I was delighted to see the well-deserved recognition and fascinated to watch the effects that all the publicity (and hundreds of new orders) had on their fledgling business.

I watched Adam and the team from across the room as they slowly (but respectfully) took over almost the entire shop with laser cutting, silk screening, CNCing, and packaging the cubes. A visible expansion took place; we could all see that things were going very well. But what was more interesting to me was the rallying of the TechShop community around Adam’s success, with numerous other members chipping in to help with various steps in the process. During the busiest month, Adam estimated that as many as nine TechShop members and staff had contributed a total of between 150 and 180 man (and woman) hours over the past few weeks. Heck, I even chipped in for an hour of screenprinting.

“We never would have been able to get this done without the community here,” Adam told me. “We got three hundred orders over a three-week period, and only a two-week lead time for delivery. It would have been impossible.”

Of course, this type of situation happens all the time—businesses hire temporary workers to fill surging demand. But this story had a maker twist.

“Everyone is capable of doing any task—silk screening, electronics, laser cutting, whatever. I think that’s specific to the fact that we’re getting people from TechShop,” Adam said. “It’s not that everyone knows everything, but they’re all comfortable learning the different machines. They just learn from each other.”

It wasn’t just a good situation for Adam, either, or just some fluke of goodwill. I talked to some of the TechShop Members who had been on the Coin Cube production line. Sam Brown had been designing and working on a board game, Lyssan, that was recently funded on Kickstarter. While his boards were off to the printer, Sam found himself with some extra time. After seeing a flyer that Adam posted offering hourly work and seeing the growing work area that the Coin Cube was taking up, he decided to join the fun. During that month, he worked over 30 hours for Adam.

“It’s great to be working with other entrepreneurs. Even though our products are in different categories—electronics and board games—I’m still learning a lot from watching him go through this process,” Sam explained. “There are similar issues that I will face, like shipping, keeping customers happy, stuff like that.”

Alex Glowaski joined TechShop less than a week prior to the cube lamp bonanza. Alex was unemployed at the time and had joined TechShop because she wanted to find more hands-on work and also work on her own projects. She had recently finished a cool, wearable transit card and told me about new ideas for some wearable holograms she wanted to experiment with. Because her projects didn’t have a business model behind them yet, she was happy to pick up work with Adam’s team, putting in about 25 hours during that period.

“Pretty much everyone here has a Kickstarter for something,” Alex told me. I think she was right. Almost all the makers I’ve met, at TechShop or elsewhere, are in some stage of the Kickstarter process: planning, campaigning, or fulfilling. Even though the Coin Cube didn’t go the crowdfunding route, the overwhelming demand spikes and the sudden workload that ensues are very similar to a maker Kickstarter project.

The Coin Cube story encapsulates the best features of this world. In the new maker economy, a makerspace membership is the new entry-level job. We’re teaching each other how to make it all work. The companies are collaborative and productive.

The makers are going pro.

Allowing for a Shared Vision

The story of 8-Bit Lit (Adam Ellsworth and Brian Duxbury) began as one of friendship and creativity. Travis Good, the writer who penned the original story on Make:, had an agenda. Travis had spent the previous year traveling around the country to dozens of maker- and hackerspaces, even co-founding one in Washington, DC. His curiosity and passion for the maker movement eventually led to a gig writing for the Make: blog. His focus was on how people meet in makerspaces; how projects and collaborations evolve; and how, sometimes, maker businesses eventually emerge.

Having visited so many different makerspaces, Travis was able to gain a unique perspective on some of the larger trends in this collaborative new world. He decided that these co-creation stories—makers serendipitously meeting and creating projects together—was the most important issue he could report on. Adam and Brian were the first team he highlighted, but it didn’t take long to fill up a list of examples: Phil Torrone and Limor Fried collaborating to create Adafruit; Zach Smith, Bre Pettis, and Adam Mayer creating MakerBot at NYC Resistor; Eric and I meeting through a BioCurious connection; Abe and Lisa Fetterman and their DIY sous vide machine.

The list goes on and on. Of course, there are equally as many examples of makers building something that they always wanted themselves, like Anton Willis and the Oru Kayak, but many of those lone founders would tell you they wished they had had a teammate.

If you’re just getting started, stay open to the idea of joining a team and collaborating to create something bigger than any one maker could accomplish alone. If nothing else, it’s a more fun and engaging way to move along the maker path. I can say without hesitation that working with Eric and the rest of the OpenROV community has been the most rewarding experience of my life.

First Who, Then What

The story of 8-Bit Lit didn’t end at the surging demand of Coin Cubes. In fact, that was just the beginning. During that stressful order-filling month, the team—Adam, Sam, Alex, and Ryan—realized how much they enjoyed working with one another. They discovered that they each brought a different set of skills to the table and that together they composed a well-rounded maker dream team.

They decided that they would continue on as a unit, although unsure of exactly what they would create next. While continuing to fulfill orders for the Coin Cube, they set their sights further. They didn’t want to be tied down to any specific product, instead becoming something of a maker factory for new ideas. Thus, the new venture ProtoTank was born.

The quartet of makers, plus or minus a few part-time helper members for odd jobs, took up a small office in the back of TechShop. They hung a small sign on the door and were open for business. In addition to the Coin Cube order fulfillment, they started tinkering with new projects. They hacked into a Sphero, a small, iPhone-controlled ball, and tried to get it to swim. They attached a smartphone to a six-legged robot toy to create a cheap, remote-operated hexabot. In just a few short months, their office was filled with gadgets and parts from nearly a dozen side projects the group had been working on.

As an outside observer, I couldn’t help but marvel at the group’s creativity and sheer output of doodads and gadgets. I could always walk into their office if I needed a spell of inspiration or if I was missing a resistor or LED. Most important, though, they were having a lot of fun, enjoying each other’s company and feeding off the creativity of the group.

About six months into their maker experiment, they came up with the product that became their sole focus: color-changing acrylic signs. They had been experimenting with a new material, color-changing acrylic, when they discovered that they could create unique signs that used perimeter LEDs to light up a design or word in a clear sheet of acrylic plastic, giving the appearance that the lighted words were floating in the middle of a window. The words were visible when the LEDs were turned on but transparent when turned off. It’s quite an intriguing sight.

The group decided to pursue a patent for their creation and are now moving full-speed into product development and production.

But even if the sign idea doesn’t pan out, the ProtoTank team isn’t worried. They have a long list of product ideas to try next. They are the epitome of Jim Collins’s famous advice in his book Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2001): first who, then what. Collins explains that the best teams are focused on finding the right people first and then deciding what to build and create. Finding the right maker team or partner is no different—it’s all about the people. On the day that Eric and I first met, and he told me the story of the Hall City Cave, we spent almost the entire afternoon discovering our shared values of adventure and exploration. The idea of OpenROV actually becoming a business didn’t come until much later, and only then because we saw it as the best way to share our enthusiasm with more people.

Paying the Bills with Side Jobs

Despite their wide-open development strategy, ProtoTank was very pragmatic in the design of their operation. They gave themselves a runway, a startup term that translates into the amount of cash a company has in the bank and how much corresponding time they have to gain traction with their product in the marketplace. The typical strategy for building a runway is to raise money from angel investors or venture capitalists. ProtoTank didn’t do that.

They built a runway by taking on side projects and contract work for other groups that needed stuff built. Rapid prototyping and making skills are in high demand, and ProtoTank realized they could build a steady stream of income—enough to keep them going indefinitely—by taking on a percentage of the many offers and contracts that seemed to find them.

It wasn’t part of their original plan, either. They thought they would need some kind of venture funding to get the company off the ground, but they were quickly overwhelmed with offers and projects from others who wanted to utilize the diverse talent of the ProtoTank team. They found themselves building large installations—race tracks and robots—for events and conferences. They found work creating LED jackets for companies that didn’t have enough makers on staff. They were even tasked by major corporations to try to “hack” products, taking apart devices in the hopes they could find a new use or purpose for the product.

Although the side jobs were never in the business plan, they have given ProtoTank the freedom to experiment. The team is diligent about keeping a large percentage of their time for their own products and projects, but they can also employ patience in their product development process because it isn’t their only source of revenue. They keep overhead low and costs down by renting space inside of TechShop, and they also use the community as a platform for meeting new clients. ProtoTank is the clown fish of the TechShop coral reef: they’ve become a critical part of the maker ecosystem.

Side jobs and part-time work seem to be the main ingredient in keeping the TechShop ecosystem (and wider maker economy) healthy and dynamic. Normally, such reliance on part-time work would be cause for anxiety, but at TechShop it seems to keep the situation fluid and receptive to demand shocks.

The lessons of ProtoTank are applicable for any new maker, too. As opportunistic as it might seem for the companies and micro-manufacturers, the side gig economy can also be an incredibly freeing opportunity for the temporary worker. With everyone moving around and working where there is demand, the sense of entrepreneurialism is always present. Everyone has his or her own project to work on. If your project becomes big enough to need full-time attention, it’s easy and natural to transition into giving it the time it deserves. That’s when you walk the other side of the maker economy line, giving people work as they learn the skills and get their own projects off the ground. It’s a beneficial cycle of making and helping each other build products and companies. It’s Do-It-Together company-building.

Maker Business School

What started out as friendly advice and support from other maker businesses is quickly turning into a more formal infrastructure. Accelerator programs are springing up that house early-stage startups, providing funding (usually $20,000 to $50,000), mentorship, and access to workshop space to help these makers navigate the uneasy transition from hobby to company.

The accelerator model for startup incubation has been around for many years. Popularized by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, the hypothesis was that the barriers to entry for software startups are so low that it makes sense to gamble small amounts of money on a talented team with a set timeline to try to gain traction for their product idea. Many popular and valuable software companies, such as Airbnb and Dropbox, have since emerged from these programs. And the success of Y Combinator has created a boom in similarly modeled accelerator programs around the world.

Hardware startups—companies that make real, physical things—were traditionally left out. Investors were scared off by the large capital investment and the myriad things that can go wrong in the manufacturing process. Hardware was just too hard for many investor appetites. But the maker movement has changed that. Increasingly accessible and affordable prototyping equipment coupled with a maturing understanding of the manufacturing process (especially in Shenzhen) and the popularity of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have created a low barrier to entry similar to the one software startups enjoy.

In late 2012, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, described the changing investor perspective:

Investors have a deep-seated bias against hardware. But investors’ opinions are a trailing indicator. The best founders are better at seeing the future than the best investors, because the best founders are making it.

There is no one single force driving this trend. Hardware does well on crowdfunding sites. The spread of tablets makes it possible to build new things controlled by and even incorporating them. Electric motors have improved. Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted. It’s getting more straightforward to get things manufactured. Arduinos, 3D printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware easier to prototype. Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy online.

And right on cue, we’re seeing an influx of new hardware startup accelerators. But hardware scales differently. For a software company, going from a thousand users to a million is a matter of server space and code. For a hardware company, it’s an entirely different process and supply chain. It’s a dramatically different company. As such, the hardware-focused accelerators are providing different services than their software-based counterparts. Lemnos Labs in San Francisco offers up to $50,000 in funding to their startups, much higher than the typical accelerator seed amount. Their thinking is that prototyping hardware is more expensive than just feeding and housing the engineers. Real prototypes take real materials, which takes real money. Haxlr8r has based its program in Shenzhen, betting on the fact that being close to the beating heart of global manufacturing will give its entrepreneurs a leg up on the competition and a head start on the manufacturing process. Bolt, a Boston-based design accelerator, is helping its entrepreneurs license their products in addition to just building companies around them—a different take on business opportunity.

Even major league manufacturing companies are betting big on maker startups. In 2013, PCH International, one of the global leaders in supply chain and product development consulting, opened a new 30,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco. With most of its operations based in Shenzhen, the new space in California was created to give entrepreneurs in the United States the same consulting and design services that PCH normally offers to clients in Shenzhen. The space boasts a 7,000-square-foot state-of the-art rapid prototyping lab as well as a full staff of development and design professionals. It serves its Fortune 500 clients, but also serves as an accelerator to help maker businesses scale up production.

As much as I appreciate the human scale of the new artisans, sometimes this type of scaling is what these maker businesses need to do. When your Kickstarter project soars above 3,000 units or you have a demand from a large retail partner, there’s suddenly a lot more on the line and a very real pressure to produce, and produce quickly. These accelerators and incubators are a great bridge to go from maker to manufacturer. Of course, there are going to be growing pains and challenges, but at least there’s a group of mentors and advisors who can help you cross the most turbulent waters.

When I talked to Lisa and Abe about their experience with Haxlr8r, they couldn’t say enough good things about it. It was difficult and stressful, of course. Starting a company always is. However, this was exactly the kind of pressured environment they needed in order to move from a DIY kit-selling side project to a full-scale (and full-time) business. It gave them the opportunity to make the leap.

And it might be a good opportunity for you to make the leap, too. Again, from Paul Graham’s essay on hardware:

So if you want to work on hardware, don’t be deterred from doing it because you worry investors will discriminate against you. And in particular, don’t be deterred from applying to Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we’re especially interested in hardware startups.

We know there’s room for the next Steve Jobs. But there’s almost certainly also room for the first <Your Name Here>.

Applying to a Hardware Accelerator

What’s it actually like applying to one of these programs? Is it like applying to college or like applying for a driver’s license? What skills are they looking for? How refined should the idea be?

I asked Cyril Ebersweiler, the co-founder of Haxlr8r, what he looks for in an application. After seeing their demo day in San Francisco, I found it difficult to piece together any trends in the different companies, other than the fact that they were building hardware. After our discussion, I realized I wasn’t very far off. It’s a moving target for Haxlr8r as well; the company is still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Instead of “choosing” projects, they see themselves as partners. They look at each situation and project how much value Haxlr8r would be able to provide, in terms of help with product design, preparation for Kickstarter, or setting up supply chain partners.

Even in the amount of time they’ve been experimenting, Haxlr8r has learned some important lessons. Those lessons are an important lens in how they evaluate the different applications. Here are some pieces of advice that Cyril gave me:

1. Have a team. Haxlr8r has had two companies that consisted of just a sole founder. And although Cyril said they would consider possibly doing it again, it would have to be an extreme case. It’s just too difficult to go through this process alone. When you’re growing and, more important, iterating quickly, there is so much parallel processing that needs to occur. It’s very difficult for one person to manage this by themselves. Eric and I can attest to this, too. There’s just no way we could have gotten OpenROV off the ground if we hadn’t had each other (not to mention the support of the entire community).
2. Know your skills. You can’t just put together any team, either. Cyril explained that Haxlr8r also looks for diversity among teammates. They want skills that overlap: software developers, mechanical engineers, business-minded people. It’s the blending of the unique abilities that sets great teams apart. The self-knowledge to recognize what each individual is good at combined with the ability to divide the work into those domain specialties is a hallmark of a high-functioning team. Nonetheless, it’s also important to be flexible. Cyril likes to see overlap on different responsibilities, so different team members can pick up the slack whenever work piles up in one area. So even if your specialty is mechanical engineering, you also need to have a handle on the business side of the company, and vice versa as much as possible.
3. Understand the intersection of software and hardware. In terms of product ideas and industries, Haxlr8r is smitten with the interaction between hardware and software. The “Internet of Things” has become a popular term among investors referring to devices, household and otherwise, that are being built to connect to the Internet. It is creating an entirely new class of devices. The Nest Learning Thermostat is one of the best examples: it takes a device, in this case the household thermostat, and completely reimagines its capabilities. It remembers your habits and preferences, can be controlled from anywhere through your smartphone, and automatically adjusts when you’re away. The technology creates a more pleasant environment as well as significant savings on energy bills. And that’s just one example of the Internet of Things.
4. Brad Feld, a partner at the Foundry Group, commented that his fund is very interested in “software wrapped in plastic” when explaining his investments in maker companies like MakerBot. The same intersection of software and hardware that is enabling so many new makers is also catching the eyes of investors.
5. Robots Cyril also said that Haxlr8r is interested in anything and everything robotic. In the same vein as the software and hardware intersection, there are powerful forces at work driving a new era of robotics. Driven by the demand for smartphones and tablets, sensors and components are becoming commodity items, easily reconfigurable into new and exciting uses. The booming personal drone market is a perfect example of an emergent and derivative industry, stemming from the price pressures on smartphones and tablets.

Résumé Builder

Freelancers, free agents, creative class, independent workers—whatever you want to call them, you know the type. Maybe you are the type. Working in and out of coffee shops, chasing down clients, jumping from project to project. It seems like more and more people I know are making their living as some type of a contract worker. Some of them do this by choice, like web or graphic designers, because they like the flexibility. Others have been thrown into the fray due to the turbulent economic climate.

For the past decade, I’ve been in awe of these people. I always envied their freedom and resilience, and confidence in their creative abilities. I always wanted to be able to put web design, graphic design, Photoshop, and other creative skills on my résumé. I still do, but I’ve never been confident in my ability to create anything myself, let alone ask someone else to pay for it. The freelance economy is too competitive for me to try to get this type of work. I am certain my skills are far enough behind the average freelance designer’s that it would take me years to catch up.

But imagine learning web design in the ’90s. The web was so young, so new. The opportunity was immense, but it was also fairly straightforward to learn all the skills you needed to play in this new sandbox. The tools were trivial compared to the complex and competitive Internet economy we have today, and you could basically learn on the job because everyone was getting up to speed. Today, many of those same skills are seen as prerequisites. The people who took advantage of that moment in time—those who learned the digital skills that underpin the Internet economy—were able to create tremendous opportunity for themselves. Whether or not they knew it, they had opened up the doors to all sorts of interesting career options, whereas those of us who didn’t have been racing to catch up.

Now I finally have one skill that puts me on the cutting edge of freelancing: rapid prototyping.

I once heard my friend Andy Lee, a design engineer, describe rapid prototyping as a fancy term for quickly trying a bunch of ways to do something, most of which won’t work. The goal is to use as little material and time as possible to try to hit on an idea that works or solves a problem. Then, when you find a promising solution, you continue to prototype and evolve a design.

The goal of rapid prototyping is to show a physical proof-of-concept. The skills and knowledge you develop by following the steps laid out in this book have already put you in the top one percent of rapid prototypers in the world. Harnessing powerful tools (3D printers, laser cutters, basic CAD design software) and knowing how to navigate the DIT maker world (finding designs on Thingiverse and collaborators at local makerspaces, utilizing online forums) can amplify your productivity to a point that would impress any employer or client.

The next few years are an incredibly opportune time to pick up these skills and add them to your résumé. It’s akin to the early ’90s web developers and designers. It was very difficult to see just how far-reaching and door-opening that suite of web skills would be at the time. It’s similarly difficult to predict where this maker movement will go and what opportunities it might inspire.

Here are some ways to give your résumé a MAKEover:

1. Add skills. The easiest way to show off your new skillset is simply by listing them, right next to speaking Spanish or video editing or kiteboarding or whatever else you put in that section of a résumé. I’d list it like this:
   1. Rapid Prototyping (Physical Products) Working knowledge of digital fabrication tools like 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, CNC Machining, 3D Scanning.
2. Of course, only list something that’s true. Adding this dimension—the skills to make actual, physical prototypes—will certainly make your résumé stand out from the rest of the digital natives.
3. List your projects. The big problem with résumés is that they only show what you’ve already done, not what you’d like to do next or what skills you’d like to continue developing. Whether you’re just graduating from college or trying to make the switch from an entirely different career, it can be difficult to know how to effectively convey what you’d like to be doing next. Having the right experience can be a “chicken or egg” problem—you can’t get more of it, because you don’t have enough of it.
4. Fortunately, if you want to transition into a maker job, there’s a way around this outdated formality: start making things! List the projects that you’ve worked on and completed instead of talking about previous “responsibilities” you had at a job. In the new maker economy, it’s much more impressive to list what you’ve created rather than a title you’ve held.
5. No one is stopping you from starting a new project. And it doesn’t have to be a big, Unknown Project like we talked about in Chapter 3, “The Maker Mentality.” Even the kits and Known Projects you’ve worked on are an impressive thing to list. If you’ve put together an OpenROV, built an ArduCopter, or built your own RepRap 3D printer, put that down!
6. Under-development projects count, too! I noticed one characteristic of makers very quickly: they have a dozen side projects going at any given time. Projects that are on the back burner. Projects they recently started. Projects they were working on months ago and have been meaning to get back to. Even the completed projects usually have a final tweak or follow-up coming. Nothing is ever finished; everything is in a constant state of “becoming.”
7. If you’re working on something and have made any sort of measurable amount of progress, don’t be afraid to talk about it or list it. As someone who’s looked at résumés for makers, I can tell you that I look for a breadth of different projects.

No Experience, No Problem

Whatever you do, don’t pretend to have skills or knowledge that you don’t actually have. Don’t even slightly exaggerate it. You’re only going to get yourself into trouble. You’ll almost certainly find yourself in an uncomfortable situation where you’ll be expected to know something you don’t.

But more important, you’re missing out on what is potentially your biggest asset: inexperience.

Instead of thinking about inexperience as a disqualifier, try framing it in terms of a competitive advantage. If you’re clear and transparent about your lack of knowledge and you can articulate a desire and a plan to try to learn, that can be a powerful asset to a maker business. Every maker business is trying to reach more people. Oftentimes, those new customers are going to be just as inexperienced as you are, so seeing the product or community from the perspective of a complete newbie can be wildly useful.

This is how I got my start with the Zero to Maker column. Instead of hiding my insecurity about my manual illiteracy (which terrified me) and staying on the sidelines, I turned that into my story. I freely discussed my desire to learn from scratch: What should I learn? Who should I talk to? What don’t I know?

The process was illuminating for me, and it gave me a great foundation on which to build new maker skills. Coincidentally, the process of blogging and writing about my journey created a resource and map for other new makers to follow.

The same strategy can be used for anything: 3D printing, building and programming drones, welding. Whatever you want to learn, there is probably room for a resident newbie in the space. It might not always be a job opportunity (or even directly lead to a position), but it will certainly give you a platform on which to learn and give you a better chance at getting a job in that domain. I’m willing to bet that this type of DIY education will end up costing a lot less than any traditional program you could attend.

Maker Businesses Need More than Just Maker Skills

As products or projects make the transition into actual businesses—increasing sales and demand, successful Kickstarter projects, or even venture capital investments—makers are having to “go pro.” Running a business efficiently and effectively can be much different than making a product or prototype. In many ways, a maker business is a lot like a traditional business, whether retail, corporate, or startup. Skills and responsibilities such as customer service, managing shipping and fulfillment, accounting, blogging, and social media are all roles within maker businesses, too.

As I’ve discovered personally with the OpenROV project, these more traditional business or job skills take up a lot of the actual work you must do every day. For many makers-turned-entrepreneurs, this is the type of work that we’re not particularly good at (and therefore need the most help with). Not coincidentally, this need creates an opening for someone who is looking to build a career in the new maker economy to get a foot in the door.

Your sales experience or office management experience can be your ticket into a new maker career.

Here are some of the most useful skills to apply to a job in the new maker economy:

1. Writing If you look behind the curtain at the fastest-growing companies in the maker movement, you’ll likely find a writer or media person behind it. Chris Anderson, founder of DIY Drones and CEO of 3D Robotics, is a writer at heart, having spent over eleven years as the editor in chief at WIRED magazine and writing three books during that period. The skills he honed as an editor, generating and filtering content from a community of contributors, turned out to be directly applicable to open source hardware development. Instead of blog posts and magazine articles, the outcome of this curation has been the technology suite of flying drones and quadcopters.
2. DIY Drones isn’t unique. Phil Torrone, creative director at Adafruit, is a writer who has written for Make: and also started the website Hack a Day (hackaday.com). Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot, is fluent in new media and has spent a lot of time generating how-to project videos for the Internet.
3. We experienced this growth in attention firsthand with OpenROV when I started blogging about my Zero to Maker experience. Writing about my quest—the process and the tribulations—was the genesis of much of the attention and growth. It helped us gain attention, but more important, it helped us to refine and effectively communicate our message to the world. We learned how to tell our story.
4. If you have a bent toward writing and communicating, there is space for you in this maker world. Making is 50 percent building and 50 percent sharing and communicating. Every maker project, from pre-Kickstarter prototype to fast-growing company, has room for someone who can help them communicate more effectively.
5. Customer Service The number one surprise (accidental) entrepreneurs discover during successful Kickstarter campaigns is overwhelming customer service demand. Britta Riley, the creator of the popular Windowfarms project, commented on one of my Make: blog posts:

   When you have customers numbering in the thousands, it is most assuredly a different story from packing boxes and answering emails in your garage. You start to need things like enterprise level software for data management because the crowdfunding sites do not provide basic ecommerce support. We are a company that is committed to transparency and lives by the motto, “release early release often,” but at some point we were faced with the realities of the $$ cost of transparency and frequent publishing. Updates on Kickstarter take someone’s time and energy to craft and you really want to be certain about what you’re promising. We found that every time we made a post, it created huge customer service loads. With each post, we would get a flood of hundreds of emails from people who wanted to change their address, ask us a question about their specific cases, or even just rant about how awful we are as a company for being late and let us know they were reporting us to the [Better] Business Bureau. Customer service became a full time position that we had no way of estimating in advance.

6. It’s all the little things that you need to consider: How much will shipping cost to this or that location? Can your product do this? Would I have any trouble if…?
7. If a project attracts enough attention, you can be certain that a steady stream of comments and questions is going to follow. There are a number of ways to help cope with the flood, but there will always be a segment of people who don’t read the FAQs or don’t have the patience to post the question to the community forums.
8. Many maker entrepreneurs and fast-growing maker businesses are struggling to keep up with the customer service demands that their product is generating. Even for projects that rely on an active and engaged open source community like DIY Drones or OpenROV, the questions about shipping, kit availability, and some technical issues are always going to have to be solved by someone on the business side.
9. The same customer service skills learned at a previous job can be directly applied to a job with a maker business and will give you a financially sustainable opportunity to spend more time around makers.
10. Operations—Shipping/Sourcing/Inventory As much as a maker business might start to look like a traditional web startup, running it is still a function of operations. Supply chain management is the backbone. With small-batch manufacturing, any excesses in inventory or supply costs can quickly run an operation off the tracks. No matter what quantity you’re making, as soon as you get over 100 units, all sorts of challenges and unexpected setbacks start to kick in.
11. With OpenROV, I knew it was going to be a challenge, but I never anticipated it would be the entire challenge. Our margins were small enough that any significant mistake could have seriously derailed us. Luckily, we had a superhero come to the rescue. Zack Johnson, the same TechShop Dream Coach who helped guide me through the first few classes and skill-builders, turned out to be an ideal ally in our battle for supply chain victory. At the time, Zack was running the retail store at TechShop and was managing all the relationships for parts, supplies, and materials for the shop and all the classes. He had built up a network of the best resources in the Bay Area, and he could navigate a Grainger catalog or Digi-Key website like nobody’s business. Zack knew about local acrylic suppliers we had never heard of, and he was on a first-name basis with them. He helped us get better materials, with shorter lead times, and at a lower price. In all, he probably saved us about $15,000 on our bill of materials. This is not insignificant when you consider that our entire Kickstarter raised $110,000.
12. Managing inventory, running a shipping department, or working on an assembly line are all skills that can help a growing maker business.

Licensing

Inventing or creating a product is very different from starting and running a company. And building a company isn’t the only way to bring your product idea into the world. In fact, it’s probably the more difficult route. Licensing your product idea can be a much more lucrative and effective way to go about the process. Licensing involves “renting” your ideas to companies that pay you a royalty on every sale made. Stephen Key, serial inventor and creator of recognizable names such as Laser Tag and Teddy Ruxpin, wrote One Simple Idea (McGraw-Hill, 2011) to share the lessons he learned in his 30-plus years of inventing and licensing. Key has successfully separated the creative and (sometimes) lucrative aspects of product creation with the stress and headaches of running a business by finding the point of leverage in the licensing process. His book is the best resource I’ve found for navigating the process.

Key’s formula is straightforward and accessible, but I believe it’s getting even easier. With new online platforms and communities, we’re entering a golden age for invention—a process so easy, even my mom can do it.

Actually, my mom is no stranger to trying to bring a product idea to life. About five years ago, she, my dad, and a family friend had given the invention process a go. Their idea? A toilet seat with a built-in fan. Seriously. I had no idea they were working on it until I got a phone call from my mom on their way to a meeting with a patent attorney (apparently there was already a working prototype by this point, but I never saw it). Of course, the attorney had gladly taken their deposit to run a preliminary patent search. And guess what? Nothing came up! It wasn’t until he ran a more extensive search (and took even more money from my parents) that he realized it was already patented. My folks felt conned.

That’s been the process for a hundred years. The road of invention has been rife with hurdles and predatory opportunists ready to take advantage of vulnerable makers.

But now, it’s different, as I explained to my mom. To give her an idea of the new maker reality, we decided to walk through the process together using her latest big idea: a steel wool scrubber that was basically a tiny vibrating S.O.S pad. We spent a day making, disassembling, and prototyping her idea, trying to find the shortest route from crazy daydream to “Hey, this might just work.” This was a great opportunity for me, too, because I was distilling all the Zero to Maker lessons I had learned into one morning with the least likely maker of them all: my mom.

By the end of the morning, we took apart a Sonicare toothbrush as well as an electric nail polish remover and rebuilt them with new steel wool heads. We tried to clean off dirty pots and pans, and then went back to refining our device. By the end of the morning, we had a hacked electric toothbrush that worked surprisingly well.

But we didn’t stop there. As I explained to my mom, building and creating is only half of the maker process. The other half, sharing, is equally important. So we took a few photos of our creation, wrote a description of what we had done, and put her idea on Quirky (quirky.com), a social product-development platform. On Quirky, anyone can submit an idea, whether an actual prototype, a CAD rendering, or a back-of-the-napkin sketch. After it is submitted, the Quirky community of over 300,000 members begins to vote on and provide feedback to the idea about everything from form to function. After the initial community vetting process, the Quirky team selects a handful of projects every week to continue on to the development stage, bringing in their product and industrial design expertise. The community stays involved as styling and names are chosen. By the end of the development process, the products are offered for sale through Quirky’s online store as well as through their retail partnerships with Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, and over a hundred others.

Within hours of posting our project, we had racked up several votes, received comments, and revised our idea. My mom became entranced with the nearly instant feedback loop.

Our project wasn’t selected for future development, but the entire experience was a success. I had given my mom the maker bug. I showed her how easy it was to take an idea and set the wheels of creation in motion. It flipped the switch for her. After giving her a tour of The Mill, a makerspace near her house in Minnesota, she now has enough information to make (almost) any idea a reality: prototype, share, repeat.

Also, it only cost us a morning of experimentation. We didn’t waste any money on patent attorneys or wonder what might have been if we didn’t pursue the idea. Between the active community and the team of professional designers, the feedback we got from Quirky was the market research we needed to know our project probably wouldn’t work.

If you’re harboring a big idea or have a quick fix for a problem or nuisance that you encounter every day, the Quirky route might be right for you. If the prospect of starting and running a company seems daunting, a social development approach can pay off.

Gary Ross, a graphic designer living in Naperville, Illinois, was one such unsuspecting inventor. After becoming frustrated with his wine glasses breaking in the dishwasher, Gary knew there had to be a solution. He submitted an idea to Quirky for “Tether,” a simple, flexible plastic rod that acts as a kickstand for wine glasses in the dishwasher. The community agreed and supported Gary’s idea, giving feedback on price and usability. Then, Quirky design and production teams jumped into action, redesigning the product for manufacturing and securing retail partnerships. The product launched in December 2011 and is currently being sold by Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Amazon.

Gary was paid nearly $35,000 in royalties over the first year. If he had tried to go it alone—paying an industrial designer, dealing with the administrative issues with starting a company, creating production tooling—Gary easily could have been in the hole for $35,000 or much more. And there would be no certainty that his product would be picked up by major retailers.

If you know where to look (and how to share), it’s a golden age to be an inventor.

Protecting Your Idea

So far, I’ve only talked about ways to share and promote your idea. With making and inventing, though, there’s another important side to the equation: how exactly should I protect my idea?

I’m biased. I think the sharing of the idea is the more rewarding (and ultimately productive) route. Actually getting people to like and adopt (or adapt) and use your product is a monumental challenge. I’ve seen so many makers come into TechShop with “big” ideas that they won’t talk about. They make everyone sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) before they will show anyone what they’re doing. I think this is short-sighted. At the early stages, the odds of someone ripping off your idea are much smaller than the harsh reality that people might not be interested in the product. Keep in mind that it’s those early users who give you the feedback that gets you to the next level.

Eric and I took the exact opposite approach when we got started, opting to share our original designs as widely and freely as possible. And it has made all the difference. The open source nature of the project is what lent it life and gave a spark to an entire industry of makers of micro-ROVs who relied on our experience to get their own designs off the ground.

But this isn’t always the best option. Some products and ideas are better served going the traditional route of filing a patent, so it’s worth knowing about how to approach them. Even for OpenROV, as we got further along as a company and developed the Trident, we also developed intellectual property around the design. The competitive environment had changed. We’re still sharing all the original OpenROV kit designs as well as many of the new features—but not everything. Some aspects of the Trident that we developed internally didn’t allow for open licensing, and others allowed us to keep a defensible hold in the marketplace. You have to find the right balance between helping push the community forward and keeping the company going. Open and transparent communication with your community is the key.

I’ve enlisted the help of Andrew Rush, CEO of Made in Space. He’s a highly qualified patent attorney who also knows the reality of maker and DIY projects. Andrew has shared his list of the most important things to think about in terms of patents and how they relate to your project. I thought his framing was excellent, even (and especially) if you plan on making your design (or parts of it) open source.

Here’s what Andrew has to say:

1. The Open Source Hardware Community Many people in the maker and space communities are building really cool stuff with the idea that they’ll figure it out, build it, and then release the plans to the general public so that others can duplicate their designs. The important thing to note about open source is that just because you open source something, it doesn’t mean that it is not infringing on a valid patent. If you design and build an infringing device and then release the plans on the Internet, all those people building those devices are also potentially infringing.
2. This is called “secondarily liable” for patent infringement and you can be liable for inducing someone else to infringe (even if you had no idea it was patented). To put it another way, you might be liable for not only what you do in your garage, but also what others do in theirs.
3. This is an important fact because lawyers tend to get involved as soon as there is a lot of money on the table. If the open source hardware movement gets big enough and is built off of patent infringement, it is entirely possible that legal issues will put a serious damper on an otherwise healthy movement.
4. Ensuring That Your Design Remains Open Source Occasionally, a patent will be awarded for an invention by mistake. Although the patent office does its best to ensure this doesn’t happen, occasionally it does. Imagine this scenario: person A invents something, discloses it, and it gets written up in a small unknown journal or thesis and gets filed in a library somewhere. Five years later, person B invents the same thing and files for a patent. After a thorough search the patent is awarded because they couldn’t find the small journal or thesis sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere. Person B’s patent is technically invalid because the thing was actually invented five years earlier by person A, but the document is still legally binding.
5. Why is this an issue? Pretend you’re person A and you’re using the technology that you invented. Person B comes along and threatens to sue you because you’re “infringing.” Except you invented it. The only way for person A to invalidate it is through the court system—the really expensive court system. An issued patent has a presumption of validity and it is difficult (and expensive) to overcome that presumption even if you have the proof.
6. Long story short: If you invent something and want it to remain open source, publish it as publicly as is legally possible so that the patent office cannot possibly miss it. Establish prior art.
7. Creating Patents from Patented or Open Source Hardware In the United States, there are currently over 8 million patents issued, and the vast majority of those (95 percent) are not pioneer technologies. A pioneering patent would be the world’s first patent on 3D printing or the Wright brothers’ patent on powered flight. Most patents are just incremental improvements to already existing technologies. They’re a slightly more efficient aileron for a plane, or a 3D printer that prints a little more efficiently. Most of them are just tiny improvements.
8. If there’s an open source rocket engine design, and you come along and invent an improvement for that rocket engine design, you can patent it. This is where licensing becomes important. When you release a hardware design to the public, you can use a license to stipulate how the technology is used and whether incremental improvements can be patented. For example, you can use a license that requires all technology built using your design to be released under the same license. This effectively halts the ability of someone to patent an incremental improvement based off of your design. Ladyada has a great resource on Open Hardware Licenses (ladyada.net/library/openhardware/license.html). Also, by publicly disclosing your design, this keeps anyone else from being able to file a patent on it.
9. Officially, You Need to Worry about Patents On the legal front, if there is a valid patent on an invention and you reproduce that invention without permission from the owner, you have committed infringement. In the United States, there are no “fair-use” exceptions (like satire for copyright-protected material) to patent infringement. So technically, from a strictly legal standpoint, any copying or reproduction is considered infringement. This means in theory that the owner could sue and collect “reasonable royalty,” which is the penalty for infringement. Damages get worse (three times worse) if you’re found to be “willfully infringing” on the patent; i.e., you knew about the patent and deliberately violated it.
10. The Reality of Patent Infringement Does this mean that the patent owner would come after you? This is where it gets tricky, even assuming they know you are violating a patent. Because of the high cost associated with patent litigation, the patent owner (often a business) needs to decide if it’s worth the cost to take you to court. Defending even the smallest of infringement cases can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. And the bigger the case, the more expensive it gets. Remember the Apple and Samsung battle?
11. There are provisions in the law to collect legal fees if you willfully infringe, but most hobbyists and small businesses don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around. So, there’s often no point in trying to collect.
12. However, they have another option, one that is used extensively by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA): send letters to alleged infringers requiring them to pay a fee in order to avoid a legal battle. At the moment, though, this option is rarely exercised in the patent arena. However, patent trolls have been known to use it with organizations and not individuals. Because again, individuals tend not to have stacks of cash sitting around. So even if you are infringing, from a business perspective there are several reasons why nothing will happen. Consider it a sort of “Russian Roulette” for patents.
13. When to File a Patent US patent law has what is called a novelty requirement. To get a patent, your device has to be new. The word “new” in the patent world means something different from the word “new” everywhere else. Basically it means that if you invent something, you can’t get a patent if it’s been invented before, and you can’t get a patent if you publicly disclose it and then don’t file a patent application for more than a year. You have a one-year grace period from your first public disclosure to enforce your patent rights. If you go to a conference and present your rocket engine design but don’t file a patent application on it within a year, that disclosure becomes public.
14. Before March 16, 2013, the United States was a first-to-invent jurisdiction. Here’s how it works: inventor A invents a widget and six months later inventor B invents the exact same widget. Inventor A waits 11 months to file the patent, whereas inventor B files the patent immediately after creating it (thereby filing five months before inventor A). In a legal situation, inventor A would be considered the inventor of the patent. This is an oversimplification of the process but you get the point.
15. This “first-to-invent” process, while nice in practice, led to some serious legal headaches because it often became a court battle to prove who had the first “a-ha” moment. The rest of the world took a different approach: “first to file.” Basically, in the preceding scenario, inventor A would be out of luck because he or she waited too long to file. This simplifies the patent process (and the legal issues) but it also tends to favor well-funded organizations who have the money and the patent attorneys to apply early and often. This could squeeze out the smaller, independent inventor who wants to be absolutely sure this widget is worth patenting before paying the expense of filing a patent.
16. Patents as a Learning Tool Patents can serve as a great learning tool for building hardware. Essentially, it’s a blueprint to building a “nonobvious” invention with the inventor receiving legal protection for disclosing the invention. A patent is written from the perspective that a person having ordinary skill in that technical field is able to read it and then build, make, and use that invention without any undue experimentation.
17. A propulsion engineer should be able to pick up one of Boeing’s patents about their propulsion technology, build it, and use it without having to invent a bunch of stuff to successfully do so. That’s very powerful because patents only last 20 years from the date the application was filed. After 20 years, that technology becomes public domain. Anybody can use it and exploit it however they wish. If you want to build an Apollo F-1 engine, you can do that since all of the patents have expired (assuming you have the money). Although patents are dry and boring, so is every other instruction manual.
18. Where to Look for Expired Patents The first place that you can look is Google Patents (google.com/patents). Google periodically combs through the United States Patent and Trademark Office database for issued patents and published applications. They also do the same thing for the European Patent Office.
19. Finding expired patents is relatively simple because you can constrain the results it will give you based on the issue date or filing date (for example, patents issued 20 years ago or more from today’s date). There is one caveat, though, and it’s called a Patent Term Extension. If the issuing Patent Office dragged its feet on the application, the Patent Office will determine how much longer it took than was necessary and add that onto the time limit. If it took 6 months longer than was deemed necessary, the patent would expire 20 years and 6 months past the date it was filed.
20. Prematurely Expired Patents When a patent is issued, you have to pay a nominal issue fee, but there are maintenance fees at 3.5 years, 7.5 years, and 11.5 years. The fees start at $500 and go up every year depending on the size of your organization. If you don’t pay them, the patent expires and the technology becomes public domain. One of the most famous expired patents in the space industry is the Canfield Joint. It was issued in the ’90s and should still be a valid patent, but the patent holder didn’t pay the maintenance fee and it became public domain.
21. US Patent Office Search The patent office has a system, called the Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR), that reveals the history of the patent. It will let you know whether it has expired, if it’s in force, if it’s an application, if it’s still pending, or if it’s been abandoned. New patents and published applications are released every Tuesday and Thursday. Unfortunately, Google only checks periodically, so if you want the most up-to-date listing of patents, you have to go directly to http://uspto.gov. It’s not as intuitive as Google Patents, and it’s harder to get PDFs of an interesting patent out of the system, but it is the most up-to-date source.