Maker

Millions of product makers are creating amazing things, yet most are largely invisible. Discovery is their biggest challenge: search doesn’t work, going direct isn’t affordable, and traditional distribution channels expose only a limited set.

Maker (www.maker.me) is building a network to organize the world’s best product makers, and it's creating tools that help them reach a wider audience.

The company has built a publishing platform that allows product makers ("Makers") to create a beautiful online identity, tell the stories behind their products & brands, and easily syndicate these stories across the Internet.

With over 3000 makers and brands on its platform, it's seen these stories positively increase engagement, social shares and, critically, sales conversion.

Maker earns a fee of 10% to 15% of all sales that take place through its platform. It also earns subscription fees by selling access to "Premium" tools for $40/month.

In essence, the story behind a product can help us appreciate these products and makes them feel valuable. We become engaged -- and that drives our desire to purchase.

The company believes that this sort of story telling and "connection" with products is the future of e-commerce.

The company has brought on some impressive investors to help it achieve success. These investors include tech VC's like 500 Startups, as well as the CEO of Motorola, senior execs from Adobe, and the top-notch design magazine, Dwell.

To understand what the company is doing, here are samples from two of its existing "stories."

RUBIK'S CUBE
Invented by a Hungarian architect, the Rubik’s Cube has captivated the world for the past 40 years.

The first time you see one, you intuitively know what to do; but without instruction, it is almost impossible to solve. This fact defines the engaging yet infuriating invention that is the Rubik’s Cube.

Erno Rubik, the son of a poet and an aircraft engineer, was born in Budapest during World War II. He received his first degree in sculpture, and then studied architecture at the Hungarian University of Technology, where he remained as a professor after graduation.

In 1974, the 30-year-old Rubik continued to live with his mother in her small Budapest apartment, and occupied much of his free time creating geometric models in his room. He was teaching a special course on ‘form studies,’ and set out to build a model that would help explain spatial relationships to his students. He first began tinkering with a wooden and paper cube, comprised of movable smaller ‘cubies’ and held together with rubber bands.

The bands quickly broke, but Rubik recognized the possibilities of the cube and proceeded to develop an internal mechanism that required no bands. He painstakingly cut and sanded 26 cubies, marked each side with a color, and assembled his contraption. It immediately fascinated him: “It was wonderful to see how after only a few turns, the colors became mixed, apparently in random fashion. It was tremendously satisfying to watch this color parade.”

The puzzle was well received by his students, and Rubik quickly realized the greater potential of his ‘Magic Cube’ (‘Buvuos Kocka’). He applied for a Hungarian patent in 1975, which was approved in early 1977. The cube appeared in Hungarian toy stores later that year.

Rubik was heavily influenced by artists and inventors Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and M.C. Escher, numerous philosophers and poets, and architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Although marketed as a toy, Rubik always thought of the cube as art: “a mobile sculpture symbolizing stark contrasts of the human condition: bewildering problems and triumphant intelligence; simplicity and complexity; stability and dynamism; order and chaos.”

Despite Rubik’s lofty vision for the cube, he and the toy were initially stuck behind the Iron Curtain. By luck, German businessman and mathematician Tibor Laczi discovered the cube on a visit to a Hungarian cafe, where it was being played by his waitress. He bought the cube on the spot for $1, and approached Rubik with his plan to introduce it to the world.

“When Rubik first walked into the room I felt like giving him some money,” Laczi said. “He looked like a beggar. He was terribly dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands. I told him we could sell millions.”

And sell millions they did: 1 in 7 people on the planet has now played the Rubik’s Cube. At an estimated 350 million sales over the past 40 years, it is the bestselling toy of all time.

THE AERON CHAIR
It took seven years to develop the instantly recognizable Aeron chair, and that development started in an unlikely way:

Bill Stumpf and his design partner, Don Chadwick, were involved in a Herman Miller research project that was investigating what older people needed in terms of long-term sitting.

They discovered that one of the big problems was the heat that builds up between you and your chair when you sit in it for four hours. Three years later, when Stumpf and Chadwick were beginning to think about a new work chair design, that discovery came into play.

There was no upholstery or padding. Its "Pellicle" suspension that replaced the cushions let air circulate, so bodies that sat in the chair for hours on end didn't overheat. There were no straight lines on the chair, because the human form has no straight lines. The curvilinear shape Stumpf and Chadwick developed distributed weight in a natural way that relieved pressure points and kept blood circulating.

Team Background

Bhanu Sharma - Founder & CEO

Prior to founding Maker, Bhanu helped create products at Adobe Systems, Macromedia , Sony, Latitude Communications and Skyfire.

He also co-founded Wanadu, a Web Conferencing and eLearning solutions company, and led the company to an acquisition by Latitude Communications (now Cisco Systems).

Co-Investors

Dave McClure

Founding Partner of 500 Startups, investor in MakerBot, Mint, Credit Karma, Twilio, BarkBox and SlideShare

500 Startups

Prominent seed fund and accelerator program founded by PayPal and Google alumni. Investments include AngelList, Unbounce, and Behance.

Rick Osterloh

President of Motorola Mobility, ex VP Product @Skype, Cofounder @GOOD Technology, Board Member @Lytro.

Lalit Balchandani

Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Adobe. Co-founder at Urbanpixel and ArtistDirect.

Scott Belsky

Founder of Behance

Dwell Magazine

An architecture and design magazine.

Global Brain

Early-stage venture capital firm based in Tokyo with investment activities in the US and Asia. It focuses on E-Commerce, Developer APIs, and Advertising.

Beast Ventures

Seed-stage venture firm. Portfolio companies include Knowtions, Rover and Zenit.