Bellingham, Washington gets a new makerspace: The Foundry | Hacker News Reader

Bellingham, Washington gets a new makerspace: The Foundry

bellinghamfoundry.com

29 pointsfrankcohen16 comments

If you visit Bellingham, you'd do well to visit one of the best brewpubs on the West Coast: Boundary Bay Brewery, home to award-winning IPAs (often available from the cask) and a surprisingly-solid menu.

With a university and proximity to Seattle and Vancouver, I'm not too surprised to see a nascent techie scene. A little stimulus would be good for the local economy, which has been quite depressed.

And one of Seattle's maker spaces, Makerhaus, is about to close down.

Let this be a lesson to folks. Sales matters. The clear disdain, lack of respect, or perhaps just disinterest for building a solid sales process/pipeline at makerhaus led to it's demise.

What are the economics of a makerspace? are they business, no profit or clubs?

Usually you pay membership fees in exchange for access to the tools and stuff.

Clubs mostly, generally the vast majority of Makerspaces' income is solely the membership dues. There are a handful that are run more like businesses. Techshop is one and there's non profits like The Geek Group up in Michigan which has full time employees and a goal of each department/lab paying for it's own existence. Probably more but those are the ones I know of.

Boundary Bay's pub has sadly gone downhill, and while their beers are still excellent, I'd highly recommend folks checking out the array of other good options in town: Kulshan Brewery and Wander Brewing, especially.

Bellingham has been the base camp for Mt Baker and Ski-to-Sea for years now - pick a season of the year, and you're apt to see adventurers from Seattle and Vancouver grabbing snacks, equipment, and beer before/after heading into the wild.

That does look great. Makes me all the sadder that Seattle just lost Makerhaus. Hands-on access to a laser cutter has been incredibly useful for some of my projects and prototyping.

Makerhaus was a good example of how not to do one of these ventures. Priced out hobbyists, and reportedly not very well run. Lots of glitz and glam without a sound business plan or market analysis. See comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2e0tv4/makerhaus_in...

Looks like a great space and selection of tools. Going to check out the open house this Saturday! 5pm to 10pm for anyone else that's interested and in the area.

Bellingham seems up and coming. I was there earlier this year my gf was helping open the new H&M at the mall there. Very religious town from what I could tell.

I live here. The city of Bellingham is very much not religious, they are mostly left leaning hippies, maybe “spiritual” in the hippy sense, but not religious in the Christian sense. The surrounding county on the other hand is much more religious.

Oddly enough, our only real tech company in town, is one of the world’s largest creator of Bible software: https://www.logos.com/

When I visited Bellingham (Bham) recently, one of my first thoughts was "man, this is a place I could come hack for a while!"

This. I randomly picked Bellingham as a quiet place to go to for a week and do some self-teaching plus vacationing.

Decent food, friendly people, nice coffee shops, great areas to go trail running in. I'm not sure I'd go there for an actual vacation, but for just getting away and trying to learn some new things, it was a great place.

There's a reason they call it "the city of subdued excitement."

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