{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Mostly Working","title":"Ep #24: Alex Smilansky (Mayku): Desktop Factories, a Company Brain, and Building the Right Stuff","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3297,"description":"Tom and Jonny sit down with Alex Smilansky, co-founder and CEO of Mayku, the company shrinking factory machines down to the desktop. They hear how a Kickstarter that nearly flopped sold 1,300 machines in a month, unpack the Mayku Brain and the agents that now build its website, and dig into why building the right thing matters more than ever.\n\nIn this episode:\n- A Kickstarter that looked like a failure on day one sold 1,300 FormBoxes in a month, and Alex explains why those pre-orders were really a debt.\n- The Mayku Brain is a GitHub repo of shared Claude skills, where anyone on the team can propose an improvement and an agent opens the pull request.\n- A relay of CMO, design and CTO agents now takes a new page for Mayku’s website from spec to production.\n- Alex’s favourite agent setup is a single, well-organised folder, based on Jake Van Clief’s Interpretable Context Methodology.\n- With production getting cheaper, Alex keeps coming back to storytelling, and to finding the fastest, cheapest way to build the right thing.\n\nChapters:\n0:08 — Welcome, and meeting Alex at Mint Digital more than 10 years ago\n1:14 — What Mayku does: factory machines for the desktop\n2:06 — A free prototype from Wales, and 1,300 machines on Kickstarter\n3:09 — From World of Warcraft bath bombs to industrial customers\n4:37 — How the FormBox works, Henry Hoover included\n5:41 — Microfluidic chips and the lab on a chip\n6:47 — Dyson, the Multiplier, and clear aligners\n8:45 — Mint Digital, and London’s Internet of Things moment\n10:30 — From design engineering to a digital studio\n11:32 — StickyGram, and an idea in production within weeks\n12:22 — Why a physical product takes 18 months and close to a million pounds\n13:45 — Launch day on Kickstarter, and a sushi dinner to commiserate\n16:07 — Golem13, and the video that hit 65 million views\n17:48 — Why Kickstarter sales are a liability\n18:57 — Jonny on Matt Webb’s Poem/1, and suffering the problem you set out to solve\n20:08 — Fast-forward to AI\n20:54 —...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/DQbx92WsPLEetVRjQ1jDmzGQo-63kvktRkfvWgcuqaY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zMjhj/MzgzYThjOWNmN2Iz/NDcwZWRkMjA0ZjBh/N2E0Yy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}