Mostly Working

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.

In this episode:
- 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.
- 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.
- A relay of CMO, design and CTO agents now takes a new page for Mayku’s website from spec to production.
- Alex’s favourite agent setup is a single, well-organised folder, based on Jake Van Clief’s Interpretable Context Methodology.
- With production getting cheaper, Alex keeps coming back to storytelling, and to finding the fastest, cheapest way to build the right thing.

Chapters:
0:08 — Welcome, and meeting Alex at Mint Digital more than 10 years ago
1:14 — What Mayku does: factory machines for the desktop
2:06 — A free prototype from Wales, and 1,300 machines on Kickstarter
3:09 — From World of Warcraft bath bombs to industrial customers
4:37 — How the FormBox works, Henry Hoover included
5:41 — Microfluidic chips and the lab on a chip
6:47 — Dyson, the Multiplier, and clear aligners
8:45 — Mint Digital, and London’s Internet of Things moment
10:30 — From design engineering to a digital studio
11:32 — StickyGram, and an idea in production within weeks
12:22 — Why a physical product takes 18 months and close to a million pounds
13:45 — Launch day on Kickstarter, and a sushi dinner to commiserate
16:07 — Golem13, and the video that hit 65 million views
17:48 — Why Kickstarter sales are a liability
18:57 — Jonny on Matt Webb’s Poem/1, and suffering the problem you set out to solve
20:08 — Fast-forward to AI
20:54 — Sceptical of AI note takers
21:22 — December 2025, and building the Mayku Brain
24:20 — Mayku Data, and context that stays fresh
25:08 — Tom on the AI x Design meetups and Alex’s isometric illustrations
26:19 — Quotes in a minute, labels from a skill, and Ben’s first improvement
28:31 — A small, partner-based team
29:11 — Why the website was always a template
30:29 — CMO, design and CTO agents that ship new pages
31:48 — A landing page for rubber duck makers
32:25 — Agent harnesses, Paperclip, and fundamentals that stay the same
33:45 — Jake Van Clief’s ICM: many agents in one folder
35:45 — Jonny on OpenClaw, and Markdown all the way down
36:26 — Fundamentals versus experiments
37:20 — Storytelling as the fundamental AI can’t supply
39:28 — Tom on letting Claude sequence his slides
41:23 — Asking AI for more, and the Post-it next to the render
44:12 — Jonny on half-baked work that shipped because it looked ready
47:27 — The fastest, cheapest way to build the right thing
48:22 — Ezra Klein, email, and the missing productivity boom
51:22 — Quick-fire: life after AGI
52:20 — Quick-fire: the product Alex wishes he’d made
53:44 — Where to find Alex


Mentioned in the episode
Alex Smilansky
Mayku
Companies and places
People
Tools and products
About the pod
Mostly Working (formerly the Near Future Podcast) is a weekly conversation with design leaders about what they’re building with AI. Send feedback to hello@mostlyworking.co, and find everything at mostlyworking.co.

Creators and Guests

Host
Jonny Burch
Co-founder of Near Future
Host
Tom Harman
Co-founder of Near Future

What is Mostly Working?

A weekly podcast covering design and AI by Tom Harman and Jonny Burch. We cover both what we're seeing on the ground and industry trends, ways of working and occasional guests from the design world.