Please save Hacker Lab
tombetthauser.github.io
tombetthauser.github.io
I so wish this wasn't true. I want to open my own to inspire young inventors to learn and build (because I wish it had existed for me).
A few weeks ago I was talking to the founder of a wildly profitable coworking chain in Ohio.
He broke the code...
don't sell memberships, sell the foot traffic to towns (and malls).
A few local towns even gave him $1 rent on beautiful buildings because the downtown needed more foot traffic. Or $750k non recourse loans for remodels.
In short, he's a damn fine businessman... and he's the one to say that he can't figure out how to make a maker space profitable.
It truly breaks my heart to see maker spaces go under again, and again, and again.
Clearly the standard business model of memberships + classes + fees doesn't carry enough margin. I just wonder what might as I'd love to see a makerspace in every city.
These seems like spaces with significant public benefit, and I’d love to see public funding for these kinds of spaces (maybe even folding into the mission of public libraries)?
Once you are done learning the basics which takes about a week, you still have to participate in class and do "class" projects. These classes are not convenient to begin with and access to the shop ends when the class is over. You could buy a small contractors table saw or cheap flux core welder for the price of one class in my area. Not worth the price of admission imo.
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/using-the-library/comput...
...funding and implementing operations of a municipal school system, making a community space for learning and meeting (libraries), and other outcomes that go with education, or revising zoning, reviewing proposals for building and housing development, protecting wetlands and land (conservation commission), or guiding proper installation of septic systems, placemment of wells, inspection of food production, or for elders providing community resources from meals on wheels, to social workers, and another kind of community space and service (council on aging), or maintaining roads and streets (and in winter causing them to be plowed for snow)...
...your views on capability and actual work of government are nihilist compared to what they actually do accomplish towards making municipalities personally growthful (educationally), safe, and acceptable even vibrant locales to live in.
We trust the general public to operate a table saw unsupervised, so I think it would be completely imaginable for the government to offer a supervised space and equipment (and safety training).
It’s absolutely not hard for me to imagine that at all.
Maker-oriented kids can also go to the city-run Adventure Playground (https://berkeleyca.gov/community-recreation/parks-recreation...) and hammer or saw away to build their own play structures (though they just have hand tools, no power tools that I've seen).
My father added a deck onto his home using power tools he checked out of the library.
In a city where I lived recently, you could check out wifi hotspots for a month at a time, with free service.
It's a good point though, if my rent was $1 I feel like it'd be hard to f that up but these institutions are clearly more complicated than they seem like they should be from the outside : /
friend is successful at "co-working" space, and believes that "maker" space business is hard to make profitable.
Seriously thanks for sharing this, would love to know the name of the chain. Ohio seems like it's got a lot of excellent stuff going on.
a) by using the equipment you commit to providing a small percentage of profits from the job(s)/products/services that wouldn't have happened if the space/equipment/services didn't exist.
b) attracting foot traffic proportionally subsidizes the rates in (a).
The current model provides open-ended access to equipment for a fixed monthly rate. So any measurement of the value the equipment provides in terms of learning, experience, etc is basically being discarded. This makes a lot of sense from a purist "here's a giant pile of lego, go see what you build with it without any strings attached" perspective... but is it really the end of the world to wind the boundary on that margin back a few millimeters? For example Unity only imposes fees once revenue/funding is over $100K/yr - and (last I checked) this is only the case for interactive content, you can render (and profit off of) as much noninteractive video as you like. There's a recognition of the value of the product in there, alongside some *very* generous margins that arguably provide more than adequate "here's a pile of lego, go have fun" room to get lost in. Perhaps the argument is that the flat-rate subscription only works at eg Spotify's scale.
I can't think of a decent way to calculate or enforce this. If I use a drill press at a makerspace to help build a prototype that I pitch to investors and start up a million dollar business, do I pay the makerspace a portion of my million dollars, a portion of the ~$100 I would have had to spend to get my own drill press, a portion of the $15 I would have had to spend to rent one, or a portion of the scummy feelings I would have gotten from buying one at home depot and returning it when I'm done for no cost to myself?
If you just expect people to self-report how much value they feel they derived from the makerspace after the fact, then there's no real "commitment" happening and the whole situation is pretty identical to the current situation of good-will charity. If you don't, then you need some mechanism of reliably determining the outcome of the future given different conditions in the past.
They could be sponsored like meetups by big employers too.
Sustainability makes more sense. Maybe more of a co-op model?
$1 rent sounds like a good start to sustainability.
Maker space membership and other charges come during the most cash sensitive period - the very beginning of an idea, the period where angel investment is required instead of charges. I.e. maker space acts opposite of incubator, and thus it is no surprise that while incubators are profitable the maker spaces aren't.
May be with the growth of all the massive condos around people lacking garage workshop would provide maker spaces a second chance, though i'd bet more on the people just losing the habit and skills of making instead.
Perhaps as a loss leader towards eventual sales/services if people find success.
Even a very successful space I used to visit closed doors back in 2018, as some of the exotic tools became more commonplace.
crazy enough, they let me and everyone have full access to the shop with minimal to no formal training on the tools
They could use business-centric projects to subsidize service to the others. But this is long-term capital gain, not revenue. Now this idea might be too late for Hacker Lab...
How do companies do it? They either CAD up the work and contract it out to a machine shop (expensive and unfulfilling) or they are a machine shop (and understandably don't want to moonlight the same thing as their day job). Occasionally a university or corporate R&D lab will have decent machines on site. When this happens, it is magical. If you have access, you are a very happy person, and when you lose access you become a very sad person who wishes they could rent access again.
Places that can afford full-time employees have someone keeping the machines and equipment in fair condition.
We thrived on donations (a lot of donations from members who had extra to give to help support the space and help students or those who couldn't afford our membership), and didn't receive much local help.
A few years ago the hive grew to the point where we couldn't expand it any more, and we moved locations. We're still going strong. We spend money by voting on project, and even when projects aren't funded, the community finds a way to make it happen anyway.
We didn't try to run it for profit: memberships are $50/month or $100/month (if you can afford it) or $13.37 (if you're a student or can't afford it).
The hive is still on great footing, financially speaking, and it competes with maker spaces from the Cincinnati Public Library as well as a commercial makerspace in Sharonville.
Maker spaces do work, but, it takes a lot of time, effort, and quite literally blood to make them work well.
Big question: Why?
I remember when I canceled my hacker space membership. What triggered me was a poorly-planned expansion. The expansion was triggered because the hacker space was essentially turning into a below-cost co-working space, and the whole thing smelled unsustainable.
A few months later I got a "save the hacker space" email. Turns out that, with their expansion, the city they were in decided they were too big to exempt from ADA. They couldn't use the new space that they needed more memberships for, and they couldn't afford the renovations to meet ADA.
I didn't like being put on the hook for poor planning to subsidize what was turning into a below-cost co-working space, so I just lost interest in the community.
I would probably be able to afford most of the tools and machines I use on a regular basis but there's simply no place in my appartment to put any of these not to speak of dust and other debris when working with wood for example.
I was part of another volunteer run hackerspace for nearly 5 years but decided to leave and start my own after experiencing several issues.
We’re focused on digital fabrication and may eventually expand to include a woodshop and/or metalshop. The most important things I’ve found is that you need to focus on what tools etc actually matter to people and keep them working well. Most non profit makerspaces seem to focus on acquiring as many “new toys” as possible rather than focusing on the important “core” stuff like keeping tools working well and the culture/ongoing member experience. This combined with a great on boarding and tool induction process is essential and where I feel so many spaces do poorly.
We’re not profitable yet, but on track to cover all operational costs in about 2-3 months. It was important for me to be fully independent so we don’t rely on any grant money or discounted rents etc. It’s hard work, but I feel like our current trajectory can be summarised as growing slowly but consistently. My gut feeling is our business model is sustainable and I may end up being able to quit my full time software engineering job in a couple years. So it’s not all doom and gloom everywhere. :)
P.S. I also maintain an open source membership portal with integrated billing, payments and RFID access system built by me specifically for makerspaces: https://github.com/membermatters/MemberMatters
Look at the books, at the numbers, make some form of concrete or possible plan for recovery. Don't just beg for assistance from governments or mysterious angels.
Even places that went through renovation or were funded by an angel happened for a reason. Maybe that was for good PR, because they had some personal memories there. Or it was funded via their charity for a tax break.
People beg too much these days and don't think for themselves. Why?
If I had the money I'd pay their rent in a heartbeat. If I had the time I'd volunteer for them 5 days a week. I was just bored at work with a text editor open and feeling bummed out.
They are most certainly trying to think and do what many of us have too much pride to do. It brings a twinkle to my eye that our gem of a sanctuary compels them to do so much in such a short amount of time.
That said, I can concede all the criticisms I'm reading in the discussions here, but again, _please_ don't take a shit on our fellow's efforts. Thank you!
However, it would be nice to know why they failed from financial standpoint. There were couple of tech shops around me that closed their door over the last few years(even before pandemic), but I think there was enough/some interest. And eventually I would be interested in starting/helping with something like this at a smaller scale in my area.
This is why I am curios what could have been done differently to make it sustainable? My theory is they were more ambitious with the variety of equipments, programs and space they have, but would live if someone has more insights?
Not sure if that take-away is true or not, but it's almost always a bad idea to run a business that relies on charity[1] to stay afloat.
There's some outliers, sure, but if you are planning a business, make sure the plan includes getting people to give you money in exchange for something they value more than that money[2].
[1] That includes investment for current operational expenses.
[2] I was, in 2009, on a panel once, distributing seed money to startups. I remember the one pitch we had from a pair of founders. They brought charts, graphs, all their numbers, current and projected. They had launched with a single investor and a runway of maybe 6 months. They were in month 3, IIRC. It was a labour intensive business (Tourism, so each customer just bought their ticket once, and may never want to go on that tour again.)
They needed more money to keep their operation going (mostly just paying themselves and a few staff members).
I asked about what happens after month 6. They replied that they were actively pursuing investment to make sure that they had another 6 month runway.
I looked at their income and mentally divided it by the number of customers. I asked about how they were planning to get to profitability after 12 months (after all, the purse holders wanted some possibility of return). They replied that at the 9 month mark they would pursue further investment.
I double-checked my figures; each customer was costing more to service than the customer was paying.
Okay, so at the 12 month mark? "We'll actively pursue further investment".
After 5 years? "We assure you, we'll be continuously getting new investment".
At which point do you raise your prices? "We can't do that, we're already so high that there aren't enough tourists willing to pay anything more".
How do we get a return on this? "It's an investment, you don't get it back. It's in everyone's interests to have more tourism. We will all benefit eventually".
The most surprising part of all of this is that both were extremely recent university graduates. I know this, because they proudly presented their humanities credentials at the start of the pitch.
When this revenue shortfall occurs a space will likely close, unless the membership of the space can close the gap. Running a nonprofit community space is hard, your constantly trying to grow membership to cover costs while experiencing churn amongst your members and their use cases for the space.
Many makerspaces/hackerspaces are founded by an idealistic person, and when that idealism (and the persons ability to cover the gap in rent) runs out, the space will close.
Can you share more from your experience?
Looks like moved to Arkansas.
I would also be fascinated to hear about this story.
I just moved to Lakeland, FL and they have an incredible maker space that it a non profit. It's mind blowing how good it is. And sad that my hometown of Portland would never be able to build something like that now.
I had been renting a space, but the owner wanted more than we were paying, so I tried to move into a house I owned. We were there for about a year while I was trying to acquire a 65,000 sqft abandoned jail that was owned by the city. They tore it down instead of letting us buy it, and told us we couldn't run a "business" in the house I owned. So then we were stuck in about 400sqft renting for a couple of years until I just couldn't keep paying the rent.
fast forward to finding a huge warehouse in Arkansas! https://youtu.be/qdkLzioUiAE
The price was so low, I thought it was a typo. I called the agent who confirmed it was accurate, and I immediately told my dad "We're moving to Arkansas!!"
I bought the building, and thought my troubles would be over with no landlord to worry about. The zoning seemed fine, and the planning commission even approved most of what I wanted to do. But then I ran into hostility from the city zoning and inspection department. I have had so many problems trying to fight the city.
I can't get permits for anything. I can't repair the building. They keep changing their story about what is needed, and I'm not the only one. The city seems intent on running everyone out of town. I know of at least 3 other major business efforts that either never got running, or shut down because they couldn't get through the red tape here.
Just today, a potential crypto-mining facility was denied at the planning meeting because some people from the church across the street were worried that it would be too loud... not that it was too loud, or couldn't be made quieter, just outright denied because of a worry about noise. Side note - This is in a well insulated building where they used to run newspaper printing presses, and there is an active railroad track right next door. They've been delayed since December of last year, and this was the last straw for them. They're leaving town.
I don't give up so easy, and I'm currently in the process of suing the city because of these delay tactics.
The reasons I didn't were mostly financial + time investment. Membership fee was decent ($99 month iirc) though not extreme. On top of that though, most of the equipment required an additional course just to use specific equipment. Those courses were $300, and would take a few hours, just to use equipment that I already know how to use.
For me, with my limited time, it was tough to validate ~$2000 for the first year membership + classes, vs spending that money on my own equipment and space. If I have to pay $600 to use a CNC machine and then a laser cutter, I'd rather purchase a 3 in 1 hobbyist tool.
There are a bunch of clever solutions to keep going, but it doesn't seem to me that the people running it tested different options. A cheaper membership for infrequent use could have been good, as well as a way to opt out of classes and just "use the equipment" with a test or something.
Onboarding new people seems like it needs the most attention imo.
I'm not what one'd describe as holding my breath over what's happening, but I'd like to do what I can to prevent this from unduly disrupting my anonymous-to-me companion's campaign.
While the monthly membership fee is actually a little higher than you remember, all the classes I've taken were either $20 or $40, and probably $60 today; I just haven't taken any recently.
I just asked the front desk. Our priciest equipment class is/was [e: less than half the aforementioned figure] for a two-hour session for members.
Anyway, as far as the campaign (that I'm otherwise not involved in) for something dearest to me goes, I mainly took issue with the misleading implication of the these statements placed together (and thank you for asking for clarification in a sibling post):
> [M]ost of the equipment required an additional course just to use specific equipment. Those courses were $300[.]
Why not instead name a number? What is needed? I am sure crowdfunding the proper sum is easier than finding a benevolent millionaire
Corporate Sponsorships are likely their best bet. I'd wager their membership fees don't even come close to breaking even for operations and equipment maintenance, let alone new equipment.
Consolidated Communications was generous enough to provide a free symmetrical gigabit fiber connection to their Sacramento location. They need money though, from the sound of it... not free gear and services.
I wonder if they explored or approached Intel, who has a significant campus in the Folsom area. VSP is another major player in the Sacramento area.
"contact us" is good for when you have a high pressure sales tactic to use, or want to gauge how much money you can extract from a client, not when you are (De facto) begging for a reprieve from death)
[0] https://www.al.com/news/2021/05/kyle-sandler-explains-how-he...
I couldn't figure out a way to get historical data but I'd be really curious to see if your hypothesis can be validated by this API
While it may be "real-time", I wonder how many of those "active" spaces are now dormant or struggling to stay afloat no thanks to the pandemic, and how many of those 360 "planned" ones are actively being discussed.
I can’t offer that, but this situation reminds me that things don’t have to be this way. There are alternative land use strategies that hold land in trust for the use of communities so that land use doesn’t have a monetary cost associated with it, or costs are managed as a community. Most prominent in my mind is the way the city government of Vienna Austria buys land and builds housing to keep prices low. We absolutely should have community spaces for our communities, but our notion of land as a private investment makes land super expensive, and in an unequal society regular people can’t afford commoditized land prices. Instead we all end up working as hard as we can to meet ever rising rents. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Hackerspaces all over the place have gone through this exact cycle. There's always some hope of "well we're all the grassroots of the tech cycles. Surely the ultra wealthy in our tribe will toss us a few scraps!"
But no, they won't, and it breaks my heart.
Here in St. Louis, we have a very similar Makerspace that basically rose out of the ashes of a failed TechShop. It's called MADE and one of Square's founders funded its move and reopening/rebranding:
https://hecmedia.org/posts/made-makerspace-opens-in-st-louis...
Bluntly: your business failed. That really sucks, but also: why wouldn't you run this as a 501c3? If I'm a benevolent billionaire, those yearly 990 filings actually matter to me because I want to know how you're spending the money.
I would love to be part of MADE but it is just too far for me, now that I no longer work in the City.
They also have a 'Custom MADE' service that local companies often use to build large and unique objects (like custom soccer goals for STL CITY soccer facilities).
Coworking area was boring, but this comes with the territory. Private offices make the bulk of their revenue but also consumed the bulk of their space. This was not a community, however. Everyone did their work and left - which is fine, but this was the front-of-house thing that everyone saw and was not super impressive until you saw the back. The Coworking area did serve as a meetup space which was nice at least.
In the makerspace area, at the beginning, a ton of people brought their tools into the space and made their own little dens and nobody was really allowed to touch those tools. Early members often did not pay membership but monopolized so much space with their clutter and tools that were useless to anyone else. This was a huge drain on the ability to get up and running but nobody wanted to have the hard conversations with these “foundational” members. This created a lot of social debt that had to be repaid/reorganized that, quite frankly, held them back a tremendous amount. A few “members” that seemed to be there all the time but we never saw working or making things, were actually homeless people just sleeping on the couches after everyone left.
Also, HackerLab is a B-corp, but not a tax-exempt nonprofit. I firmly believe getting tax-exempt status under 501(c)(3) is the only way to run a successful community space as we can align the organization’s mission with what makes communities great to be apart of.
I was part of a small group that splintered off in 2016 to form our own smaller makerspace focused on desktop fab. We suffered a similar fate in that everyone on the board/admin side of things were makers. We didn’t want to do stuff like fundraise, go after members, equipment, or organize periodic events. We still did fine but made the decision to cease operations when the stay at home order started.
Now, I’m involved with Shop Class on Stockton Blvd at 14th ave. The guy who started it is my across-the-street neighbor. I found out what he was doing and helped him get connected with some people who were interested in this sort of thing. I’ve helped him organize as a nonprofit org and we just found our education coordinator, operations manager (myself), an (interim) events coordinator, and a community manager, but we’re still looking for a treasurer/ accountant. I’m helping Chad do everything right here from what I’ve learned over the years. We are current getting funding to build out the facility and possibly purchase the building.
Running a hackerspace for profit is most likely a dead-end.
It might work in the US, where it's possible that donations to charities get huge tax breaks, but I don't think it matters as much in other parts of the world.
One problem with being volunteer-led is that if your core is allowed to weaken, or if there aren't policies in place to "manage" or exclude bad members of the community, one or two bad eggs could be enough to cause people to get tired of their antics and quit (which, as I've read, is a problem that Noisebridge has time and again).
I think this post [1] sums it up quite well:
> Ask anybody who served on the board of our nonprofit hackerspace HeatSync Labs over the past 2 years, and they'll tell you they spent approaching 0% of their time envisioning and executing on what kind of awesome nonprofit we should be and instead spent all of their time babysitting and psychoanalyzing a CONSTANT (albeit minority) population of angry members.
> Why are they so angry at this person, their project, or the way they they were spoken to? Have they tried talking to them? Have they tried not yelling at them? Have they offered to help? Were they broken up with recently? Are they having problems at work?
Volunteer-led ones would work better if more of them had a constantly-renewing team of 2-3 volunteers specifically trained in community management and dispute mediation, but unfortunately most spaces might not have such privilege.
Source: I'm involved in one such struggling non-for-profit hackerspace myself. :)
[1] https://citizengadget.com/toxicity-inclusivity-and-community...
I don't know how you could make something as spacious as what is shown in those pictures work with my understanding of US real estate. No matter what you do, sticking a donut chain in there would probably be more profitable, and thus the rents will show that.
Small cynic in me: when I saw the size of the desk area, my immediate feeling was "chop that in half". Do you really need to be paying a bunch of rent and offering a subpar coworking space along with your hacker space? But I imagine that staff costs are also an issue.
A hackerspace like this might be able to find cheaper rent in a more industrial area... but then convenience and safety for members becomes an issue.
Reading a book about the art-music explosion from Athens, Georgia a few decades ago — someone in the book suggested that art needs cheap rent. A sleepy college town in the dirty south was just the ticket.
Maybe maker spaces need to find their home in the low-rent areas.
Though really you need a good-sized community, and for rent to not absolutely destroy a place. There is a local bar in my area, its customer base is (roughly) the same 50 people that cycle through it on a regular basis. It's a small enough place, and it's run by 2.5 people. But rent can be cheap cuz it's on the first floor of a multi-floor building.
The fact that Hacker Lab is next to a tramway line, and there are not even any 3-story buildings anywhere within view in that area, and yet rent is probably a component (though tbf staffing is also a large cost I bet) probably makes this issue even more acute.
Disclaimer, I've never been here, I don't know what it's like, don't know anyone involved. But I do see four 3D printers nearly touching each other on a benchtop. If you're setting up a printer and you accidentally bump into another while it's running, you misalign it and ruin someone else's long-running print job. This crowding, compared with what appears to be an expansive and sparsely furnished co-working desk area, raises questions of how effectively the space has been managed for its community's needs. If each desk gets a lot more use than each printer, someone please tell me I'm wrong.
I aspire to start a simple, affordable, FLOSS-oriented co-working space someday, so I want to learn from cases like this.