MakerBot’s founders: Adam Mayer, Zach Smith and Bre Pettis
Manufacturing has long been the realm of big business. The little man lacked the resources and machinery to make their imaginative innovations come to life, and tycoons were left to call the shots.
3-D Printers?
3-D printers are machines that use hot plates and malleable materials, such as plastic, to manufacture three-dimensional representations of a design.
This is done by layering materials atop one another, shaped by moving parts, such as robotic arms, to form a solid mold.
Want to create your own action figures? Too bad. Dreaming of a plasticine replica of Mount Rushmore in hot pink? You’re out of luck.
But MakerBot Industries is trying to change all that. The Brooklyn-based company produces open source 3-D printers, machines that may very well turn the manufacturing imbalance into a thing of the past.
“One of our mottos is ‘We play well with others,’” says Bre Pettis, one of the Brooklyn-based company’s founders. “We’re open source, so our community helps us make improvements.” And that open source ideology courses through every aspect of MakerBot’s business plan, from marketing to the supply chain.
MakerBot first started as a hobby for Pettis and co-founders Adam Mayer and Zach Smith. The men wanted a 3-D printer of their own, and employed their respective engineering backgrounds — Pettis helped create the NYC-based hacker space NYC Resistor, Smith worked in robotics and Mayer in programming — to make their dream a reality. And with their machine’s completion, the men realized what they had to do: deliver MakerBot to the masses.
MakerBot, a “rapid prototyping machine” whose “Cupcake” model starts at $750, remains one of the most affordable 3-D printers on the market. You simply need to buy the machine, upload your designs to their computer, and set it to print, a process MakerBot accomplishes by heating plasticine materials, like high-density polyethylene, and molding them into the desired shape.
But MakerBot’s more than a toy. It’s an entire community: users can share their products, patterns and ideas on the company’s Thingiverse site, thus fostering not only friendships, but businesses and reputations.
For example, a man built a following by selling the 3-D code for camera parts, while the women at Design Glut created egg-shaped salt and pepper shaker program for the public. This all-inclusive community also keeps MakerBot’s assembly line in motion.
When MakerBot was founded in January of 2009, the founders relied on ordering parts from outside factories. “We first got money from friends and family, and took that to buy parts,” explains Pettis. “And then spent the money we made for more parts. I know it sounds like a crazy business model, but it worked for us.”
Demand proved to be too high, however, and the company adopted two new approaches. “At some point, we bought all the parts,” explained Pettis. “So now we have to get things like stepper motors, custom manufactured for us.” And what the MakerBot team can’t make or buy themselves, they receive from their loyal community, currently 2,000 strong and growing, who use their own machines to make parts others need.
Of course MakerBot’s founders, who currently employ 10 people that include two full-time bloggers, realize the risks involved, and, according to Pettis, discuss them on a daily basis. “Decision-making remains a daily conversation. We discuss what will work, what won’t and move from there.”
MakerBot’s open source philosophy also facilitates rather painless marketing. Pettis explained that most of the marketing energy has been spent on building on Twitter, Facebook and other virtual connectors. “Our marketing plan is to make friends,” said Pettis. “We’re doing everything to make connections. And our community helps, too.”
And Pettis also credits his company’s communal attitude for keeping MakerBot ahead of the competition, made up mostly of big players like Stratasys, Inc., whose machines start at about $15,000. While there are projects similar to MakerBot, like RepRap, which also sells reasonably priced printers, Pettis has no worries. In fact, he welcomes the so-called “competition.”
“Our goal is to democractize manufacturing. In term of competition, the more 3D printers the better. We want to get the technology into as many hands as possible,” says Pettis of MakerBot, which is as much a public service as it is a business.
MakerBot Industries’ story reads like a Utopian dream, and may be a bit intimidating to other start-ups, but rest assured not everything runs smoothly. Asked for a horror story, Pettis recalled a bit of an international incident: “We’re almost entirely American made, except for electronics that come from China. Turns out there’s a month in spring that’s Chinese New Year and we couldn’t get parts.” The lesson here? Pay attention to other nations’ bank holidays, because it may impact your business.
Pettis also offered two pieces of advice. First: “Have a good relationship with your shipping company.” And the second: never be afraid to ask other entrepreneurs for guidance: “Basically, we’re engineers and had to learn on the fly, and turned to friends who told us about things we have never considered, like having insurance.” Pettis cited Wired editor Chris Anderson and the team at another open source company, Adafruit Industries, as huge influences on MakerBot’s early success.
Sharing and community are the rules of the game in new world of business. “Open source software is growing into open source hardware,” says Pettis. “I feel confident that open source is inevitable in business, and the lines of communication need to be open. If you’re not doing something open source, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Startup Tools
Startups need tools to organize themselves. Here’s what MakerBot uses behind the scenes.
- Customer Relationship Management: Custom software.
- Accounting: Quickbooks and Paycycle.
- Project Management: The old fashioned way, says Pettis: “we talk.”
- Cloud Computing: Amazon S3
- Internal Communication: N/A
- Site Analytics: Google analytics and WordPress stats for blog.
- Email Marketing: Mailchimp
