This tells the whole story... these numbers are so far off from what they should be that this is not a business, but a charity cosplaying as a business. It's a pity you are going to drop this, I think if you adjust your pricing and become a bit more efficient you can easily make it work. But great you're sharing your numbers, you really just need better customers.
Rules of thumb: 10x on materials, base fee of $3 / hour of print time, $100 / hour design time if < 1000 parts, above that you can start pricing it into the job total.
1. It was never a business for the reasons you brought up
2. The appeal seems to depend heavily on trademark infringement that would make it even less of a viable business long-term
3. I hate to be mean to OP but the print quality of these products look pretty darn low and undesirable. And yes, I do realize the Celtics photo was an example of a "before" result.
So much of the article talks about the printer breaking down and clogging all the time and it sounds like the author's got some really bad equipment or is otherwise doing something wrong here. 50 orders and 3000 hours of runtime doesn't usually get you busted motors and a major need to have spare parts on hand like the article describes.
They seem to have found some high-margin value-add niches in doing large signs, tradeshow displays, topographical maps, etc. Seems like there can be some nice SMB opportunities in the space if you can carve out some specialty services & attract repeat customers.
That's true, but that could be just his choice of printer. I've got a prusa that has done 100 km of filament (ok, it is the oldest one) and 50 bambus, the bambus are insanely reliable.
Agreed that stuff shouldn't be breaking over that kind of runtime. But the article leaves out a lot of detail that would have helped identifying what is going wrong with the printers, but that's not the main reason this did not work, the main reason is a lack of business sense.
Something like 98 to 99% of prints worked out. When I wrote the piece, the moments of failure shaped the process and my approach, and not representative of the average print.
For the most part, my X1C + AMS set up was just plug and play, and I tried to use the Celtics print as an example of pushing that system beyond what it could do, and how struggling through that lead to specific adaptations in the process.
My focus was really getting prints out the door to hit shipping windows, so delays were felt by the customer and the reputation of my partner. Just the overall production pressure, it's a different experience than most prints I do for fun, where a failure is an opportunity to learn, and there's time to try alternatives.
As for the 0.2mm clog, I'm nearly certain it was an issue with the specific roll of filament I was using, Overature Matte PLA in the "forrest" green color they have. Other colors in that print worked. Usually PLA clogs are cooling issues, but optimizing the print profile would have been a big slow down.
All logos were supplied by the customers, and a lot of them were custom logos. The real value, IMO, was the name written in text, which is what I'm censoring out in each of the photos. There's still enough demand using alternative logos, since the "job to be done" is providing a trading card dealer with a way to show off their name/logo in pictures of their wares.
I wouldn't describe the situation as "the printer breaks down all the time". Stuff, like plates, or PFTE tube, or nozzles would wear out and break. It's not a regular occurrence, but it does happen, and it's enough of an issue when you are trying to hit a shipping window that you'll want to take steps to avoid it. From a story/narrative perspective, that's the stuff I tend to remember, not the other 99% of prints that turn out well.
The Bambu X1C is reliable, you just can't run it 24/7 and not run into issues. The most unreliable component is probably the AMS, something about that, plus matte PLA, was causing clogs where you had to take apart the AMS and fish out the broken filament. That happened to me maybe 3 times.
In those 50 orders, most of them were for 5-10 actual card stands, and throughput was enough of an issue that I bought a second printer.
As for the clogs, that's really specific to the 0.2mm nozzle, not the 0.4mm nozzle I used after the jam. Unjamming a 0.2mm is much more difficult, since the hole is so much smaller. I did try cold pulls, and several other techniques, but I do think the root cause was one roll of matte PLA filament. Sure, there was more stuff to try, but I didn't want to sink more than one night on the problem.
As for the quality of prints? I stand by the quality of prints as good examples of what can be done on consumer hardware. Consistent matte finish, even layer lines, bold, vivid logos that matched the input pics.I'm happy to design and print something people want, and my problem was never lack of demand.
Well at a minimum it bought him a new printer so it’s not all wasted. And if the $3352 represents mostly fixed upfront costs, the issue is revenue imo.
> Expanding your plastic filament palette requires upfront investment
Just a guess, but the number includes buying an entire 3D printer which you don’t have to keep doing.
I would amortize it over 5 years. Plus maintenance cost for replacement parts. After 5 it may still work but your competitors upgraded and so must you.
This guy only made 50 sales and 3000 hours of print time. I'm actually somewhat confused at how they need to keep replacement parts stocked up for that kind of low runtime.
This is either a bad choice of printer, some kind of user error, or supreme bad luck.
I don't even know how to get a clog printing with PLA.
3000 hours is a lot for a 3D printer, especially if you're not printing in PLA OR you are doing lots of filament swaps OR you're experimenting with different nozzles and filaments.
If you load your printer with one 10kg spool of PLA, odds are good you'll go a while without issues.
I run a similar "hobby business" - at least that's what I call it. I've posted about it before on here; I refurbish and resell old electronics, mostly laptop computers.
As of today, I've sold more than 800 machines at an average of $80 per machine and an average profit of $30 (approximately). That's around $24,000 of profit over the last three years or so. It covers all the costs of its own inventory, parts, losses (e. g. some machines just never make it to sale), and it's built a lot of fun community relationships. Plus, I've helped a lot of people get access to a working computer at a low cost!
This would never, ever scale beyond me doing it. The moment I had to employ a person, pay rent on a space, or start offering warranties and free returns and so on, that profit margin would vanish. That's why it's a hobby, not a full-time job. I do it on nights, weekends, and in between working my day job (e. g. I'll have a Windows install going in the background while I code).
But it's fun, it's valuable, I've learned a lot about running a business, and it's paid my car payment a few times. It's also nice to have a 'job' that is very different from my day job: much more hands on, not as much complex thinking required, and more immediately rewarding. (At least for me. I just love when a broken thing starts to work again.) The hardest part is the customers, especially when things don't go well (e. g. are my fault) or they are in a bad mood.
I think more people should do things like this. It doesn't have to be the thing that gives you the money you live on to be valuable.
I wrote this after running a small 3D printing side business for ~8 months. It worked in the sense that I got steady orders and revenue, but every part of the process required me (design, printing, assembly), so it never really scaled beyond my time.
I'm interested how others think about this boundary, at what point does something go from “side project” to “business”? And how do you tell if it’s worth trying to scale vs just leaving as is?
From what I gathered from the article, one of your problems is that you didn’t understand the economics before you launched, and therefore your pricing was disconnected from the true costs. Next time, try to anticipate these by breaking down the various input factors (material, machine wear, design time, desired profit margin, etc). You may get an answer that convinces you it’s not worth it before you invest time.
I have a 3D printer, and I've definitely seen people at local art fairs & such selling 3D printed stuff.
It all looks ... well, it all looks sort of cheap. Unless you're printing at incredibly high quality, you can always tell that it was 3D printed, and half the people selling things don't even bother to do much clean up of the print after the fact - a little sanding would go a long way, but they don't bother.
It ends up just being cheap plastic trinkets that I wouldn't buy even if I didn't have a 3D printer of my own.
Just something to watch out for, should anyone here be inspired; you might think your print looks good, but you need to run it by someone who's willing to tell you to your face that it looks crap.
I wish I could just start a business fixing 3d printers and helping people set up really nice plex servers with hardware transcoding, but there's this pesky mortgage...
Howdy from a former Somervillen (inferred from the photos)!
If you have any interest in doing custom B2C instead of B2B, there's Somerville Open Studios. I did that one year (2019) before we moved to Vermont just before things went to shit in 2020. I also noted that Somerville Open Container Day (aka Porchfest) would be a great time to have something going (a demo maybe?) at our house given the huge foot traffic. I think you'd get a lot more folks passing by rather than the folks already committed to visiting art and craft studios specifically.
Don't let your likely lousy space be a barrier. We had my furniture on display in our living room (aka: our furniture) and I gave people tours of our basement which had my bench, my table saw, and damn little else. People kind of dig it. Small and scrappy is kind of expected for these kind of events.
Good luck if you try to give a go at it from another angle! And if you stick with software, that's cool too.
I have a small side business selling 3d prints, creeping up on 2 years old. It's roughly break even, but that's mainly because I rented a space for a studio to do the work in. I mainly sell others' models (either open licensed, or commercially licensed, and intentionally steering clear of others' IP). Slowly I'm building out additional automations to facilitate scaling, but I'm really in no rush. (Day job is great)
I enjoyed this writeup. It was interesting to read the perspective of someone starting a 3D printing business without first researching all of the countless 3D printing businesses and trying to duplicate their work. They discovered why doing custom designs and low volume orders doesn't work, but it was more interesting than reading yet another 3D print farm story.
The current meta is to license (or steal) 3D toy models and then market them relentlessly on social media. It's a marketing and social media game most of all. These shops have tens of printers set up in a room printing plates full of little toys, a web shop or social media shop to pick colors, and then they spend their days monitoring printers and packing up orders. There's not much 3D printing or design fun in the job because it's mostly a social media and logistics operation.
i too wanted to purchase 5-6 3D printers and start a business - basically my version of goose farming after i leave the software dev space for the greater good of mankind :)
I would argue that they didn't. 25$ per hour for custom design work seems very low, I understand maybe trying to get a customer base but at that rate you are just going to get repeat customers who want the same low cost labor. Where 3d printing is great is if you can create truly custom things, not knick knacks that can be copied and mass produced by someone else. Selling the plastic itself is a no go, you have to go mixed materials, mixed colorways, things that take time to assemble, and then charge out the wazoo for custom work because the people that really want the custom stuff, will find a way to pay for it.
I'm in Europe and ordered some dungeons and dragons figurines from ironshieldarmy based in Poland. They print them to order, optionally do the required assembly and base layer of paint.
I had the impression that they're busy full-time but I have no idea really. They have some nice designs though.
I'm surprised they're completely focused on DnD though. Hopefully they have another business doing war hammer, etc. (although maybe everything in war hammer is copyrighted?)
I get it, you already had a job. And this sounds like a job with a fragile profit margin, so not as good as your main job. But still, discovering a way to trade your work for money is a good thing.
Eh honestly I would always recommend someone just buy a bambu a1 mini for like 150£ and keep it around for odds and ends
It's basically at the point where it's plug and play.
But then again some people can't reason their way out of a paper bag. Like people who struggle to put together a computer...yes, the green colored square shaped plug goes in the green coloured square shaped socket! Wow.
I think you have a business here in this space if you focus exclusively on bomb drones and scaling production to 1000s of units per month with near 100% duty cycle.
129 comments
- $3666 total revenue
- $3352 in expenses
- ~50 orders fulfilled
- ~3000 hours of logged print time.
This tells the whole story... these numbers are so far off from what they should be that this is not a business, but a charity cosplaying as a business. It's a pity you are going to drop this, I think if you adjust your pricing and become a bit more efficient you can easily make it work. But great you're sharing your numbers, you really just need better customers.
Rules of thumb: 10x on materials, base fee of $3 / hour of print time, $100 / hour design time if < 1000 parts, above that you can start pricing it into the job total.
1. It was never a business for the reasons you brought up
2. The appeal seems to depend heavily on trademark infringement that would make it even less of a viable business long-term
3. I hate to be mean to OP but the print quality of these products look pretty darn low and undesirable. And yes, I do realize the Celtics photo was an example of a "before" result.
So much of the article talks about the printer breaking down and clogging all the time and it sounds like the author's got some really bad equipment or is otherwise doing something wrong here. 50 orders and 3000 hours of runtime doesn't usually get you busted motors and a major need to have spare parts on hand like the article describes.
They did crowdfunding via Wefunder, so their financial docs performance is available online: https://wefunder.com/whiteclouds
They seem to have found some high-margin value-add niches in doing large signs, tradeshow displays, topographical maps, etc. Seems like there can be some nice SMB opportunities in the space if you can carve out some specialty services & attract repeat customers.
Agreed that stuff shouldn't be breaking over that kind of runtime. But the article leaves out a lot of detail that would have helped identifying what is going wrong with the printers, but that's not the main reason this did not work, the main reason is a lack of business sense.
For the most part, my X1C + AMS set up was just plug and play, and I tried to use the Celtics print as an example of pushing that system beyond what it could do, and how struggling through that lead to specific adaptations in the process.
My focus was really getting prints out the door to hit shipping windows, so delays were felt by the customer and the reputation of my partner. Just the overall production pressure, it's a different experience than most prints I do for fun, where a failure is an opportunity to learn, and there's time to try alternatives.
As for the 0.2mm clog, I'm nearly certain it was an issue with the specific roll of filament I was using, Overature Matte PLA in the "forrest" green color they have. Other colors in that print worked. Usually PLA clogs are cooling issues, but optimizing the print profile would have been a big slow down.
All logos were supplied by the customers, and a lot of them were custom logos. The real value, IMO, was the name written in text, which is what I'm censoring out in each of the photos. There's still enough demand using alternative logos, since the "job to be done" is providing a trading card dealer with a way to show off their name/logo in pictures of their wares.
I wouldn't describe the situation as "the printer breaks down all the time". Stuff, like plates, or PFTE tube, or nozzles would wear out and break. It's not a regular occurrence, but it does happen, and it's enough of an issue when you are trying to hit a shipping window that you'll want to take steps to avoid it. From a story/narrative perspective, that's the stuff I tend to remember, not the other 99% of prints that turn out well.
The Bambu X1C is reliable, you just can't run it 24/7 and not run into issues. The most unreliable component is probably the AMS, something about that, plus matte PLA, was causing clogs where you had to take apart the AMS and fish out the broken filament. That happened to me maybe 3 times.
In those 50 orders, most of them were for 5-10 actual card stands, and throughput was enough of an issue that I bought a second printer.
As for the clogs, that's really specific to the 0.2mm nozzle, not the 0.4mm nozzle I used after the jam. Unjamming a 0.2mm is much more difficult, since the hole is so much smaller. I did try cold pulls, and several other techniques, but I do think the root cause was one roll of matte PLA filament. Sure, there was more stuff to try, but I didn't want to sink more than one night on the problem.
As for the quality of prints? I stand by the quality of prints as good examples of what can be done on consumer hardware. Consistent matte finish, even layer lines, bold, vivid logos that matched the input pics.I'm happy to design and print something people want, and my problem was never lack of demand.
> Expanding your plastic filament palette requires upfront investment
Just a guess, but the number includes buying an entire 3D printer which you don’t have to keep doing.
>
Well at a minimum it bought him a new printer so it’s not all wastedIt got him way fewer new printers and more work compared to working at McDonalds and buying the printer with the salary. Opportunity cost.
This is either a bad choice of printer, some kind of user error, or supreme bad luck.
I don't even know how to get a clog printing with PLA.
If you load your printer with one 10kg spool of PLA, odds are good you'll go a while without issues.
Still, six figure income, but what is the margin?
Looks very good though. And: very, very hard to injection mold that product (internal structure is something 3D printers excel at).
As of today, I've sold more than 800 machines at an average of $80 per machine and an average profit of $30 (approximately). That's around $24,000 of profit over the last three years or so. It covers all the costs of its own inventory, parts, losses (e. g. some machines just never make it to sale), and it's built a lot of fun community relationships. Plus, I've helped a lot of people get access to a working computer at a low cost!
This would never, ever scale beyond me doing it. The moment I had to employ a person, pay rent on a space, or start offering warranties and free returns and so on, that profit margin would vanish. That's why it's a hobby, not a full-time job. I do it on nights, weekends, and in between working my day job (e. g. I'll have a Windows install going in the background while I code).
But it's fun, it's valuable, I've learned a lot about running a business, and it's paid my car payment a few times. It's also nice to have a 'job' that is very different from my day job: much more hands on, not as much complex thinking required, and more immediately rewarding. (At least for me. I just love when a broken thing starts to work again.) The hardest part is the customers, especially when things don't go well (e. g. are my fault) or they are in a bad mood.
I think more people should do things like this. It doesn't have to be the thing that gives you the money you live on to be valuable.
I'm interested how others think about this boundary, at what point does something go from “side project” to “business”? And how do you tell if it’s worth trying to scale vs just leaving as is?
It all looks ... well, it all looks sort of cheap. Unless you're printing at incredibly high quality, you can always tell that it was 3D printed, and half the people selling things don't even bother to do much clean up of the print after the fact - a little sanding would go a long way, but they don't bother.
It ends up just being cheap plastic trinkets that I wouldn't buy even if I didn't have a 3D printer of my own.
Just something to watch out for, should anyone here be inspired; you might think your print looks good, but you need to run it by someone who's willing to tell you to your face that it looks crap.
Anyway, these posts always make me think of this https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/142eg6r/...
If you have any interest in doing custom B2C instead of B2B, there's Somerville Open Studios. I did that one year (2019) before we moved to Vermont just before things went to shit in 2020. I also noted that Somerville Open Container Day (aka Porchfest) would be a great time to have something going (a demo maybe?) at our house given the huge foot traffic. I think you'd get a lot more folks passing by rather than the folks already committed to visiting art and craft studios specifically.
Don't let your likely lousy space be a barrier. We had my furniture on display in our living room (aka: our furniture) and I gave people tours of our basement which had my bench, my table saw, and damn little else. People kind of dig it. Small and scrappy is kind of expected for these kind of events.
Good luck if you try to give a go at it from another angle! And if you stick with software, that's cool too.
The current meta is to license (or steal) 3D toy models and then market them relentlessly on social media. It's a marketing and social media game most of all. These shops have tens of printers set up in a room printing plates full of little toys, a web shop or social media shop to pick colors, and then they spend their days monitoring printers and packing up orders. There's not much 3D printing or design fun in the job because it's mostly a social media and logistics operation.
I would argue that they didn't. 25$ per hour for custom design work seems very low, I understand maybe trying to get a customer base but at that rate you are just going to get repeat customers who want the same low cost labor. Where 3d printing is great is if you can create truly custom things, not knick knacks that can be copied and mass produced by someone else. Selling the plastic itself is a no go, you have to go mixed materials, mixed colorways, things that take time to assemble, and then charge out the wazoo for custom work because the people that really want the custom stuff, will find a way to pay for it.
I had the impression that they're busy full-time but I have no idea really. They have some nice designs though.
I'm surprised they're completely focused on DnD though. Hopefully they have another business doing war hammer, etc. (although maybe everything in war hammer is copyrighted?)
> It’s not a scalable business, it’s a job.
Oh no!
I get it, you already had a job. And this sounds like a job with a fragile profit margin, so not as good as your main job. But still, discovering a way to trade your work for money is a good thing.
But then again some people can't reason their way out of a paper bag. Like people who struggle to put together a computer...yes, the green colored square shaped plug goes in the green coloured square shaped socket! Wow.