Published: 2026-04-01

When I helped open Sequoia Fabrica Makerspace in 2023, there was an ever-expanding list of tasks split across 3 Board Members and the Community. Literally everything had to be made from scratch. I was context-switching between building a workbench for our woodshop, programming our website, running member orientations-the list goes on and on.

It was an invigorating time, and I'm so happy to see the successes the space has had in growing from 0 to 50 members. It certainly kept me busy and left little time for exploring down other avenues. I learned a tremendous amount about small businesses, operating physical facilities, and running a community.

The biggest lesson was that operating a small venue is hard. This was purely volunteer work for me, so I had the stability of my day job to keep me grounded. That kept things stable, but my demanding job also meant my free time to bring this makerspace online was limited. The time I did have really needed to be focused on maximizing productivity so I could make sure our space didn't crash and burn.

At the start, I had a "build it and they will come" mindset. I thought if we could provide useful equipment in a well designed facility, people will come out of the woodwork and become members.

This was a total fallacy. Discoverability is everything, and it always has been. How you get discovered has certainly changed since the dawn of the internet, the search engine, and social media. But the fundamental Bullsh*t behind the "build it and they will come" mantra has remained unchanged for as long as there have been small businesses to build. You need to get yourself in front of the public is often as possible. If you are lucky and have a big, local, and supportive clientele, that can happen by word of mouth. Even with our makerspace having an outstanding reputation and many class attendees, this alone has not worked for us.

Our primary driver for events discovery is Instagram. Love it or hate it, that's the truth. It's where people are at. For some it might be Bluesky, Mastodon, a flyer at the local coffee shop, a banner on your street corner. The point remains that discovery takes Small Venue Operators serious effort. I started getting into making digital events fliers for Sequoia Fabrica's Instagram so our classes would fill up. It's tough to do well! That's why SMB owners will hire social media marketers or designers to make their campaigns for them. At Sequoia, we are lucky enough to have many smart people who can successfully manage this campaign work. Much of that, however, is thanks to our status as a community-led nonprofit. That gives us the kind of clout that allows you to convince people to do free labor for you. There's nothing wrong with trying to profit off a business, but it is much harder to find someone to manage your events flyers for free in that situation. So you are stuck either managing it yourself, adding it to the plate of an employee, or contracting it out. That is expensive, and time consuming. And all of that just to get people in to you venue! All that work on top of your actual job, which is managing the facility, running events, payroll, on and on it goes.

Even with Sequoia Fabrica's pool of volunteers, it can be a challenge to crank out quality digital/physical flyers for every class. So I've begun the process of exploring solutions that will automate the task of designing these flyers.

Before building anything, I looked at what was out there today. There is no shortage of tools for creating social media posts. You can use tools like Canva to design your flyers, and they even have bulk templates if you just want to post the same thing with different hero images and titles for each class. That's probably fine for many people. I thought it was boring and monotonous. It might catch a user's eye once, but not twice.

There are also tools like Bannerbear that are geared more toward automation pipelines. You integrate it with whatever tools you already use, and can create new content on-demand by just providing the content to fill out a template. Again, same as with Canva bulk templates, you'll be using the same template over and over, just with different words and maybe a different image. With both these tools the onus is still on you to be the designer.

Lately, I started looking at AI tools for creating content. That market is saturated. Tools like ViralCanvas, The Brief, AIFlyer, Moda, and more. These are essentially wrappers around one of the big AI labs that convert your prompt into an image. You're still stuck being the designer, but now there's an extra layer of abstraction between you and the result. Instead of interacting directly with your canvas, you write a prompt. I'm not convinced this approach will ever provide consistent, beautiful, and on-brand content for small venue operators who aren't designers. We need something that just gets the job done.

So I started seeing what I could build myself. It's never been easier to generate proofs of concept. This week I made some sample projects. For now, I'm calling the project Runeform.

None of my prototypes are where they need to be yet. POC 3 is the closest to something actually useful, so that's the direction I'm taking it. More to come as I build this out.