Last year, Jacob Marsh was 23 years old and in the final year of his Civil Engineering Masters degree at Exeter University. He hadn't previously shown any entrepreneurial zeal and was set on a relatively safe and straightforward career building bridges.
But on 29 February 2012, the Raspberry Pi Computer went on sale and Marsh's life was changed forever. His company, ModMyPi, turned over £867,000 in the year leading up to March 2013 and he's on course to hit £1.3 million this financial year. "I wasn't a business person when I started," he tells Wired.co.uk. "I'd probably call myself a business person now."
Now 24, Marsh's story demonstrates the transformative power of technologies like the Raspberry Pi and the crucial need to support small businesses and young entrepreneurs, and not just in Silicon Roundabout.
," says Marsh, with obvious admiration (ModMyPi donates 5 percent of profits to the Raspberry Pi Foundation).
He and his friends at Exeter were typical techies and the Raspberry Pi captured their imaginations, in the same way it did for millions worldwide. Their discussions quickly led to the fact that the Pi ships as a bare circuit board and within weeks Marsh had designed and prototyped a case, and set up a website for pre-orders.
The first prototype case was 3D-printed on a friend's £300 hand-built desktop 3D printer. "All the parts [of the printer] were also 3D printed," he notes.
Despite recognising the obvious demand for Raspberry Pi Computers, Marsh didn't fully appreciate the demand for such a simple idea like a case. "I thought we're going to sell 20," he remembers. "In the first two days [...] we had 300 pre-orders."
3D printing is definitely a miracle of modern technology, but what it definitely isn't is a tool for mass-producing anything.
Marsh was out of his depth.
Without business mentoring, without support and without a better way of making his cases, his business was going nowhere. Luckily for him, Exeter University is part of SETsquared, a business support network formed by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey. "I went to them and said, 'look I've got a product here, people are already buying it, help me'," he says. He joined SETsquared's incubator programme, found a company that would create the cases by injection molding, and by summer 2012 was shipping his cases internationally. "All the support I had available was key to moving me from just having an idea in my head to having a product to being able to sell it on a proper platform."
Marsh now has three full-time and two part-time employees, and ModMyPi does more than just selling cases. "[The market has] become saturated now -- we've moved away from manufacturing [cases]. We've built a distribution platform around the Raspberry Pi."
It's almost 18 months since the release of the Raspberry Pi. Marsh is a business person instead of a civil engineer, and as well as a company built off the success of the Pi, he has three Raspberry Pis at home.
He uses one as a home media centre, another he uses to test the third-party products he sells on ModMyPi.com and the third he's set up as "a little retro gaming console". "I've managed to get Doom running on it," he says. "Quake as well." "Running a business like this is a hobby as well as a job," he says.
Now read: The life of Pi: how Britain's biggest hardware hit for a generation came to be
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
