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.
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.
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.
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.
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>.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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: