tagged: taking stock

how to network in a new town? i schemed going to talks is good, but giving a talk is better. plus it would be a good prompt to develop the definitive version of the ‘taking stock’ talk, the nascent version of which i’d made for the 2014 Mini-MakerFaire we effectively launched South London Makerspace at.

Kickstarter pitches are now part of maker culture, but when do you hear back from the other side?

How did an Arduino hack turn into £50k in pre-orders? How do you get an assembly line going if all you have is a laptop? Four production runs and a retail partnership later, what were the final accounts?

Join Toby Harris as he talks product and dissects a successful run of a maker business.

// About Toby

A product-focussed generalist with a soft spot for python and a CV that includes getting a robot to do stand-up comedy.

– Bristech Meetup, 5th September 2019

there is a recording, though as with makerfaire there was a hitch; this time the audio starts a few minutes in and the video a few minutes after that.

enjoyed the talk before me, too –

diary | 05 sep 2019 | tagged: taking stock · dvi-mixer · talk

Kickstarter pitches are now part of maker culture, but when do you hear back from the other side?

How did an Arduino hack turn into £50k in pre-orders? How do you get an assembly line going if all you have is a laptop? Four production runs and a retail partnership later, what were the final accounts?

Join Toby Harris as he talks product and dissects a successful run of a maker business.

A talk about the *spark d-fuser, which retailed on sparklive.net and has a project page with diary posts here.

project | 2019

it’s common to hear people talk about the beginnings of projects, but rare to witness a post-mortem. doubly so in the world of kickstarter: the pitches are now part of maker culture, but where’s the venue for a summing-up at the end?

i wanted to do that. with what could be called the modest success of the *spark d-fuser, i had something i could be proud about. moreover, and this probably gets to the heart of the issue, without the disincentives of stratospheric success shrouding the business in secrecy or abject failure making me want to crawl into a hole or quietly move on.

and where’s the venue? well, elephant and castle mini-maker faire seemed a good place to get a draft together and punt it out.

it’s still a work-in-progress, to be done when the last mixer is sold and accounts reconciled, but nonetheless it’s great to have the bones together.

diary | 15 oct 2014 | tagged: taking stock · slms · dvi-mixer · talk