Decompressing from Maker Con and Maker Faire
Whew!
The last couple of weeks have been a mad dash to prep for and execute two major events - Maker Con and Maker Faire. Maker Con is a two day conference for businesses like Flutter that serve the maker community, and Maker Faire is a huge three day exposition for makers and the community at large to see what makers and maker businesses have to offer.Flutter had a booth at both events, and Katelynn and I both prepped all last week for it. She worked on our brand new website redesign, which is a complete website rewrite now at FlutterWireless.com, and I worked on building Flutter demos for our booth, creating artwork for signs, and attending Maker Con (with a booth).
On day two of Maker Con I went plain clothes for once - no Flutter Shirt!
Maker Con was a lot of fun for me, despite the almost two hour drive up to and through the city both mornings. I took Scout with me everywhere for two days and got a lot of people interested in Flutter and our robots. I also spoke to a lot of other people about running a business like this and got some good feedback on what we are doing. Chris Anderson gave a great talk about drones and robots that I learned a lot from, and in general it was a great event for networking.
Scout made some friends at Maker Con.
Then this past weekend Katelynn and I both hoofed it up to San Mateo for the Maker Faire, carried booth supplies from a distant parking lot (note for next year: bring a cart), and ran a booth for two days. Katelynn did most of the work this weekend - keeping me sane, arranging demos and pushing out flyers to everyone. We brought 500 flyers and ran out just on Saturday, only to find Staples weekend hours meant we couldn't get more. Luckily we had 1000 business cards and didn't hit the last one till late Sunday.
Katelynn ran the booth at Maker Faire while I "helped".
Sunday Kate ran the booth by herself for much of the day while I went out and spoke with 3D printer manufacturers and electronics vendors, checked out new super strong 3D printing materials, and explored the other techie DIY booths.By Sunday evening Katelynn and I had both been working for 8 days straight daytime and evenings, and we were exhausted!
It was a lot of work for us to do but it was great to show Flutter to hundreds of new people and learn more about customer needs. SO many people do a double-take when we tell them about Flutter's 1 kilometer range. Well it's not magic, just Flutter!
Thankfully, we don't have any new events planned for a while. They're fun but very tiring.
