I worked for them as an instructor, course developer, and general staff mentor for a while at one location. My opinion is that this isn't a failure of the model as much as it is a failure of strategy, management, and opportunity exploitation.
They flat out saw the tools as their only asset which was an almost criminal mistake. They utterly undervalued the potential of their educational group and bled them dry out of a misguided attempt to focus on a core competency that was already not working. It left new people with limited ability to develop new projects and the use of new tools as they learned new competencies. They provided a service that too few people new how to make value of. They waited for the world to come to them, and it never did in sufficient numbers.
Can you expand on your thoughts on the following? "They utterly undervalued the potential of their educational group and bled them dry out of a misguided attempt to focus on a core competency that was already not working. It left new people with limited ability to develop new projects and the use of new tools as they learned new competencies. They provided a service that too few people new how to make value of. They waited for the world to come to them, and it never did in sufficient numbers.".
How were they undervaluing their potential educational groups?
How were they bled dry? Were classes just too expensive?
Why was it misguided to focus on core competency? Why wasn't that working?
How else would new and/or novice members get 'checked out' to use use a dangerous tool safely?
I'm genuinely curious and hoping that you/anyone have some better insights. I've worked with makerspaces in the past and I've seen a lot of these same arguments and problems but I haven't seen many sustainable solutions the would allow a makerspace to run, grow and keep members safe and happy.
What would you of done differently if you were in charge of TechShop?
That is a question for everyone. We all love our makerspaces and are sad to see a behemoth like TechShop go under. It doesn't bode well for other makerspaces.
How do you make a makerspace not only sustainable, but profitable enough to add new tools and the instructors to go along with it?
>How were they undervaluing their potential educational groups? How were they bled dry? Were classes just too expensive? Why was it misguided to focus on core competency? Why wasn't that working? How else would new and/or novice members get 'checked out' to use use a dangerous tool safely?
Briefly, the problem I saw was that classes were entirely of the mindset of enabling people to use the tools. It assumed they were already members, already bought into the Makerspace/Techshop mindset, and already knew which tools they needed to use. That isn't an absolute but it was common. Everyone knew about that 3D printers were cool, but nothing empowered them on projects...just on tools. The education was not used to extend the value of Techshop to members, it just served as an impediment to them using certain tools.
>What would you of done differently if you were in charge of TechShop?
I'm honestly hesitant to Monday morning quarterback them and regret my original (somewhat emotional) post a bit. A lot of good friends became unemployed yesterday and I reacted. What would I have done differently? grow differently, grow with a different mindset, understand my users better.
>We all love our makerspaces and are sad to see a behemoth like TechShop go under. It doesn't bode well for other makerspaces.
I had an interesting conversation with someone at another makerspace about techshop one time. I think they serve two different markets, and I think the Techshop problem was that it found itself stuck between them...one is the hardcore makers the other are more of the general public. Noisebridge is and will always be Noisebridge. I don't think you are gonna get people in off the street to stay all that often. Techshop wasn't trying to be that, but they didn't have the mindset that really let them be something else.
I think a major portion of their revenue model was based on classes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does box out members who have a lot of skills in a particular area from sharing that knowledge in some sort of structured way. For example, it might have been more engaging to members to set up a recurring event such as "machining monday" or something where people interested in a topic could gather and either share experience and knowledge or at least help each other figure things out. Instead, they focused on classes that were $40 - $600 a pop. They also had a hard time retaining instructors that had professional experience. When the shop I was a member of first opened, they had a lot of instructors that were working part time at the shop and worked full time in a related field (machining, woodworking, etc.). Over time those instructors slowly drifted away and were replaced with younger and less experienced staff. It is a little difficult to learn a complex skill like welding from someone who has only been doing it for a few months and cant really offer any knowledge outside of the packet provided with the class.
I recognize that there needs to be some sort of minimum knowledge needed to operate a machine safely and think that the class model isn't a bad method for that goal. However, I think the problem is when your revenue model depends on people continuing to take more advanced classes which is difficult to sustain.
The "birds of a feather" type meetings would be one way to further member engagement, get people interested and gain the confidence to use the tools, and wouldn't have cost much if anything for the shop to implement.
I think another issue that TechShop had that I am not sure other makerspaces have to deal with is the conflict between people that ran businesses out of the location vs. casual or hobby members. There were a lot of occasions where a small (3-4) member company would reserve a particular tool for an entire day (sometimes multiple days) and box out the casual users. I don't know the best method to combat that, perhaps you can limit the number of reservations an individual or group of individuals can make in a month, or shorten the reservation times in the evenings. Maybe it would have made sense to structure the memberships differently and charge less for a nights and weekends membership than a daytime membership or something. I can say that it was frustrating as a user who showed up a few times a month to see people that camped out on a particular table or area of the shop and not being able to find space to work on my projects or get time on the machines.
Let's stay in touch if you're interested in keeping the bay area maker community together. I started a slack group, maybe we can all coordinate. More details here:
I know a number of people, artists, machinists, hackers, entrepreneurs, some who became friends who have used Techshop to jump start their livelihood, startup, or bootstrapped business. I'd like to see the community workshop live on.
Edit: Our group is growing quickly! If you have a need for tools, equipment, or have them available for use you should join. Members of Wood Thumb, 695 Space, and others in the community are active.
Thank you everyone!
I've been a member since forever and learned so much just by working on my projects next to other people and chatting. I had tried unsuccessfully to create online meeting places (FB groups, subreddits, bulletin boards) to connect with other makers I met there but because of the hands on nature, most people were too busy to be chatting somewhere online. A lot of makers were also a bit older and weren't into social media. There were so many resources like the San Jose corkboard that had lists of local raw parts suppliers that I just could never find online and now it's all gone...
I was one of the small-time investors in TechShop and really believed in their mission. I still do, and I'm sad that they weren't able to get a sustainable business model. I learned a lot at their Austin location and made some pretty neat objects. They had said in their last investor meeting that they were trying to pivot to provide services for non-profit makerspaces, but it didn't happen fast enough due to their cash position.
I looked at joining a couple of months ago, but it seemed kind of expensive for a hobby-level interest of mine, something I might come in and use on a weekend several times a year (that's probably a difficult market to serve). Its really too bad, I liked the idea of that place a lot.
It is sad to see them go so completely (chapter 7 is liquidation not reorganization) but I also think they informed a lot of questions about what it takes to run such an operation.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask Jim the next time I see him. But to speculate based on my own experiences and those of others that I interact with socially there were a couple of huge challenges;
* When you had a project it was "easy" to justify the monthly cost of membership, when you were between projects it was not.
* Scheduling vs flow - you could schedule an hour on a machine tool to make a part, spend half of that hour just getting the machine trammed again from the previous inexperienced user, then discover you needed a small change that you could sit down and make and come back, but the next available time on the tool was the next day. It really interrupts your flow when that sort of stuff happens, and wasting "your" time tramming was always annoying. I and a number of other people suggested that there be 10 minute breaks in the schedule so that when the previous person's time was up, a 'pro' would come over and make sure everything was ready for the next person to start.
* Space to keep things in progress was always tight. If your project was half done, and you need to leave it there over night, that wasn't too bad unless someone decided to come over and have a look at it. There were also some issues where people would bring in some of their own tools and other members would see them over by a project and assume they were Techshop tools. Never a good outcome there.
* Instruction isn't a P/L center. It bugs people to pay to be given the safety lecture, many felt that the lecture on how to use the tool should be part of the monthly membership not an add on. When you go to the gym they don't charge you extra to explain how to use a machine, they do charge you extra if they are consulting on your training program. Similarly at Techshop (and this was more true later) the money is in having someone consult on the aspects of a problem they are more expert on than you are.
* Meetings and outreach, there is a opportunity for a "low cost" membership in a center where meetings can be held for groups of 30 - 100. When the robotics club was meeting at Techshop it was valuable but not everyone wanted to become a full time member just to go to a once a month meeting. A $10 - $25/month 'attend meetings here' sort of membership would have worked well for a lot of those folks.
Those things just sort of pop out easily. The challenge of being too flexible is an interesting one (if you can do any number of things, its hard to support any one area as well as you would like). It gave me a bunch of ideas for my "Prototype Electronics" store idea :-)
Pretty much that a conventional retail experience in makerspace form is economically impossible. Every space was staffed by two people during open hours. They had large capital costs and real estate costs. And few people were willing to pay the real cost of being a member. 150$ per person/month was pretty steep, so you would not just keep the membership going unless you were specifically doing a project.
That is why they were trying to pivot to being more a consultant and service supplier for corporate and municipal makerspaces. They just ran out of runway to make that happen.
Hardware is hard. I was a TechShop member back in 2013. I thought it was a great idea, but I noticed that the laser cutters/engravers seemed to be the only machines that were regularly booked up. I wonder if a model of ‘kinkos for laser cutting’ could have succeeded?
I toured the Techshop in Pittsburgh, and took an industrial sewing class to see how their instruction was.
I have my own workshop with a full-size lathe, mill, etc.
The part of techshop that I thought was fundamentally flawed was the tooling provided. Yes, every section from woodworking to welding to machining had beautiful machines. But that's all they had. There is so much other support tooling and semi-consumables required, particularly, in metal work. You never just use a Vertical Mill to do a project. Where are your cutting tools? your myriad clamping solutions? Your various measurement gauges? That stuff really adds up, too, in price and in quantity.
So when I toured Techshop I was thinking, "none of that is provided, so what? if I came, I'd have to wheel a 300lb dolly of parts and bits to enable me to use their beautiful machine?"
And, no, I don't think the solution was for Techshop to provide that stuff. Just a simple dial indicator or calipers is going to get lost, broken, stolen in very short order.
That's why I went away thinking, "what a shame -- a good idea in theory, but the reality of machine work makes this model of "man walks in off the street and builds a robot" pretty impractical, or at least not nearly easily as a casual daydream would suspect."
Not that it changes your argument, but Techshop did actually provide some of those things, dial calipers, gauge blocks, dial test indicators. You just had to check them out, and not everyone know what/where they were. As far as work-holding tooling, it did seem pretty random and probably varied depending on the location.
Really sorry to see this resource go away. I was one of the early members at the Menlo Park shop. I built devices there that I couldn't have done otherwise, and it was inspiring to see many others doing the same 24/7. I learned a lot from other members. RIP.
They flat out saw the tools as their only asset which was an almost criminal mistake. They utterly undervalued the potential of their educational group and bled them dry out of a misguided attempt to focus on a core competency that was already not working. It left new people with limited ability to develop new projects and the use of new tools as they learned new competencies. They provided a service that too few people new how to make value of. They waited for the world to come to them, and it never did in sufficient numbers.