Lol,
Its sounds like the advice of the 3d printing community is "Whatever you do, don't open a 3D printing business"
No, the advice is to understand the market before opening a business.
]]>Just my 2 cents.
]]>What kind of things do you sell on ebay? Just curious if you are comfortable sharing. I just want to understand what people would buy that is 3D printed? Like jewelry or something?
For myself I am using my 3D printer to prototype an invention and hoping to get it on kickstarter which I will then use the funds to injection mold the parts if I can get at least $50,000 raised.
I sell mounts/cases for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone. I also sell an EVSE mount, GoPro camera cap, some game pieces, a robotics part kit, and fan splines for a Victorian fan (our own design).
The main things people would buy that are 3D printed are "Long Tail" (search Wikipedia for that) items that are not commonly available from standard manufacturers. For example, you can buy GoPro camera caps everywhere, but can you buy a glow in the dark yellow one normally? Nope. Find enough long tail items to sell and you can make some money.
]]>allonschamroth wrote:Does anyone here have a 3D printing business?
I do have a 3D printing business, about $300/month in sales right now across 20 different products listed on eBay. I get about 1 a month custom requests as well.
My suggestion based upon your opening a stand in a mall is have products already printed that a customer would want to buy, whether they are custom license plate holders, phone cases, key chains, toys, etc and offer additional services to have someone provide a design file to be printed or have something that you can quickly change the characters on it.
As others have said, do your market research locally to see if it is worthwhile. For me in the US, it would cost too much for a stand in a mall and customers wouldn't want to wait 1-3 hours for their print to be finished and I'd be competing with mass-produced stuff. My business model is print stuff I would use, offer it to sale for others and keep a fair amount on hand to ship out quickly. PM me if you want to discuss further.
What kind of things do you sell on ebay? Just curious if you are comfortable sharing. I just want to understand what people would buy that is 3D printed? Like jewelry or something?
For myself I am using my 3D printer to prototype an invention and hoping to get it on kickstarter which I will then use the funds to injection mold the parts if I can get at least $50,000 raised.
]]>Does anyone here have a 3D printing business?
I do have a 3D printing business, about $300/month in sales right now across 20 different products listed on eBay. I get about 1 a month custom requests as well.
My suggestion based upon your opening a stand in a mall is have products already printed that a customer would want to buy, whether they are custom license plate holders, phone cases, key chains, toys, etc and offer additional services to have someone provide a design file to be printed or have something that you can quickly change the characters on it.
As others have said, do your market research locally to see if it is worthwhile. For me in the US, it would cost too much for a stand in a mall and customers wouldn't want to wait 1-3 hours for their print to be finished and I'd be competing with mass-produced stuff. My business model is print stuff I would use, offer it to sale for others and keep a fair amount on hand to ship out quickly. PM me if you want to discuss further.
]]>Hi,
We are starting a new business offering 3d printing as a service. Its hard to build the business plan because the truth is we are just guessing at the demand for the models, and we would like to open a stand in a mall.
If any of you similar business owners could share any of your knowledge it would be very helpful. (I'm not from USA or Europe so for most of you I'm not competition, dont worry)
Thanks in advance
Allon
My one piece of advice is to have the machine in your hands before you begin the business. I cannot count the number of folks who have gotten in trouble because they did not understand the machine before taking people's money.
It wont hurt to own a 3D printer, and you will have a better idea of what you can sell, and how fast.
]]>Lol,
Its sounds like the advice of the 3d printing community is "Whatever you do, don't open a 3D printing business"
No, the advice is to understand the market before opening a business.
]]>
There is something I am missing I think. I uploaded a model to shapeways... the price would have been $160 for a small ABS model. I then checked the model on cura which tells me how much material I will use, and come out to nothing... a few dollars at most... Which means shapeways is taking thousands of percent proffit. If I were doing an online business, I looks like it would be so easy just to price them out of the market?
What am I missing?
The tutorials on shapeways that explains that you want to ideally produce a specifically hollow model as the price you where quoted was for a solid block of nylon (or whatever).
http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/crea … ow-objects
When you create an object with Shapeways, the order price is determined by the actual printed volume, and not by the model's bounding volume (except ceramics, which are priced by surface area). An easy way to save some money, sometimes a LOT of money, is by making your object hollow. This short tutorial will explain the basics of hollow objects for 3D Printing with Shapeways.
So yeah - Its not all beer and skittles (or rainbows and flowers if you prefer) - and no, they aren't making 1000's of percent markup - thats the actual cost of a solid model at shapeways (who don't make a profit, and are into their latest round of $30million of VC money....)
Anyway - I was more inferring to examine their business and consumer operation models (and bleeding of cash despite being extremely well represented) - not for you to compare prices - since they offer a superior printing quality based on the very different printing technology in use compared to FDM...
]]>There is something I am missing I think. I uploaded a model to shapeways... the price would have been $160 for a small ABS model. I then checked the model on cura which tells me how much material I will use, and come out to nothing... a few dollars at most... Which means shapeways is taking thousands of percent proffit. If I were doing an online business, I looks like it would be so easy just to price them out of the market?
What am I missing?
You're missing the fact that a Shapeways print looks a whole heck of a lot better than a FDM print. That and the fact that businesses typically have more expenses than just material. At a minimum you'd have to pay off the printer.
]]>What am I missing?
]]>1. Will you be selling already printed parts at the stand or offering custom prints there? If offering custom prints, they might take several hours to print, depending on size, customer might not want to stand there and wait. Hence you want to restrict size or give a good warning/time estimate to clients for real time prints.
2. If you are selling pre-printed items, their cost will be higher than injection molded items, hence the only things you can sell will be custom items that are not injection molded elsewhere.
3. For engineering prototypes printing, you have to keep printer calibrated and have good idea about strength of the prints. Usually layer to layer bonding is the weakest. May want to offer selection of materials (ABS/PLA/Nylon). You won't be able to compete with a place like shapeways, put offering clients the face-t-face personal attention might get you some jobs.