Maker Labs

Makerlabs began with a simple idea: we wanted to help clients design and build great products using our founding teams diverse skillsets. We had spent many years working on building products in high growth technology startups and wanted to take the skills we had refined to help others achieve the same success. After a few months of slogging away we... had a few clients on board that were willing to take a punt on us, so we worked closely with each to understand how we could give them the best service possible. We made it central to our way of working that responses to emails would be swift and come from whoever was working on the relevant part of the project (we'd frequently pop over to see clients in person if we needed to go through things in a little more detail). This way of working seemed sensible and was certainly working for us but we took another look at our approach when we came across digital agencies. We had assumed, perhaps rather naively, that they would be larger versions of the structure we had at MakerLabs, but instead we found what were primarily middle men/women (people?) sat between the client and the developers and designers. This position of go-between is clearly a difficult task to do well and this is not meant as a shot at the people in these positions, it just seemed to us that this was a seriously unoptimised way of getting products built. The simple fact that at best, a piece of correspondence has to pass through another person at a minimum (and we have seen many layers of project managers on occasion) in both directions means that everything must be communicated very carefully. This approach may make sense for a large agency that wants to scale to a size that allows them to earn off of the margins, but clearly it is the client who loses out, in both wasted communication time and in value. That's why at MakerLabs, every team working on a project will communicate directly with clients, manage their own time and project timelines, and when needed to go through any design or technical ...Read More