After a year of beta testing with over 1500 firms, MakerOS is now publicly available for subscription.
The interesting startup produces a very powerful cloud-based service designed to vastly simplify the management and administrative activities encountered by typical small and medium sized design and making firms.
Essentially, it’s a way to automate your design and/or making business by including these and many other key features that any such business would require:
- An instant quoting system, embeddable on a website or within invoices for common file types
- A product manager to track products and services through all lifecycle stages, including inventory management, costing and time tracking
- Project management functions to track activities associated with a client, including access by team and client, discussions, file sharing and more
- Billing system to create and issue invoices to clients for work or products and track records
MakerOS also provides ways for you to easily integrate all of this and more into your website or other communication channels, such as Slack, cloud storage or social media. And it works from all platforms, too.
It’s a very powerful package that MakerOS makes available for only USD$20 per month, which I suspect for most people would be far less than the cost of hiring someone to keep track of all this stuff and build the required interfaces. It’s a no-brainer if you’re in this type of business.
And that’s why I think this is important: many readers of this publication are in fact, makers. You may be making things at work for a big corporation, or you may be making things in your own workshop for fun.
If you’re the latter case, why not make it a business? Why not take those skills you’ve been developing and try to make some money through 3D design and printing capabilities? If you’ve ever considered selling your services, MakerOS could be a way to instantly professionally organize what you’re doing at very little cost.
MakerOS also offers some additional services at extra cost, but one that piques interest is what they call the “overflow” service. This service provides an ability for you to offload your extra work to others in their network seamlessly. It can instantly make your small company appear to be a lot bigger by being able to handle jobs you cannot.
Who knows where such a venture might lead, but you might create an entirely new career and join the ranks of many small local and regional design and print firms that provide great service to local businesses.
Via MakerOS
