How do you explain Make to people who don't know it?

Makerhood
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Hello all :wave:

Has anyone ever tried to explain the power of Make to someone who is not familiar with the platform at all? Do you have a favorite way of explaining Make or a metaphor you use when talking about it?

I like to think about the modules as Lego pieces because you can assemble them in various ways and build whatever you need.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, though!

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ohhhh i would be very interested in this topic.

We currently don’t position ourselves as Make “experts”, we approach it from a business operations perspective. We identify their pain points and then offer Make as a potential solution. It is early days yet but we’ve used the same approach before coming across Make and it worked well.

My approach is to look at the “operational and functional capacity” of a business. Not everything can be automated but there is plenty of things that can - by automating/systemising the non-value added tasks it frees up resources to focus on the important work that grows the business. Often we will try and find out where they think they need more staff and why… “if you had an unlimited budget, where would you put more staff, why are they needed there and what would you have them do?”

We also look at existing workflows… and by workflows, I mean “workflows” (I am always shocked at how many businesses have no predefined workflows and even fewer mapped out processes). A common one is “what happens when a new enquiry comes in from your website?” The usual response will be along the lines of “it gets added to a spreadsheet and someone will respond”. The then opens up the conversation to responding, nurturing (delivering appropriate info based on their enquiry), scheduling a call, gathering information, preparing a proposal, sending a proposal etc.

Other questions we might ask are

  1. WHat happens when a new client agrees on a proposal/signs a contract
  1. What happens when a new employee joins the company

Unless we have been specifically asked we try and keep the conversation away from tech - just focusing on what is causing problems then ask if they would like help to fix those problems.

Interested to hear what others have to say.

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Ohhh I love this, makes total sense!

I know! Whenever I see that folks don’t have defined processes and workflows, I’m like “whyyyy :sob:”. I do, however, believe that this is slowly changing and that’s great to see.

Very smart! Technical lingo can, indeed, be quite daunting for those who don’t speak it.


Thanks so much for sharing @IainM, this is an incredibly interesting insight into the way you (and your clients) work :pray: