How I turned 3D Printing into my full time business.

all right everybody i wanted to talk just a little bit about how i turned one printer into about 30 plus printers and put them into a storefront in five years so uh this will be a very quick video i'll try to keep it under five minutes but as i was laid off from general electric about five years ago i knew i wanted to be self-employed um so i bought my first 3d printer it looks very similar to the one in the back it was a custom build printer from someone who built it locally didn't know what to do with it after two three months of printing it breaking it fixing it um i knew i wanted to make some money with it but i didn't know how um so essentially i i didn't know what item i wanted to print i knew a bunch of other people printed items and then sold them and some of them did great and you know some people are selling mouthpieces for instruments or gun parts or you know some type of little hercules clip or whatever um i didn't know what to make i'm not like an inventor from i just hadn't turned that creativity on yet so i offered my 3d printer as a service and um through just a little bit of free advertising slash marketing um i'll keep at least one secret um in this video out if you watch enough of my content you you can get everything that i've done here and i and i intend on sharing everything but in this video i'm gonna leave out the main thing that got me started and uh comment below if you think you know what it is but um that was after i got that first listing and and really started advertising i did a little bit of advertising on facebook nothing paid all just you know posting something on marketplace and or saying hey i can do this um after about six months and a couple good orders um you know enough to pay off my my first printer and buy another one i had someone challenge me and be like hey why don't you have business cards and it's like oh yeah i guess this is a business i should get business cards so i got some cards after another six months of having cards i was busy enough that it that i was actually asking for money to get a setup like this i wanted i knew that it was going to take 30 something printers to be full time i knew that two printers wasn't full-time money at least not unless you have that golden egg item um so i sorry blank for a half second i was asking for money and anybody that was talking to me was like hey your bit your business doesn't exist you don't have an ein number you're not a taxable you know a tax anything so you have no business credit to get a loan and a couple of people had said to me hey just bootstrap this you know just just go a couple prints at a time to the point that you can get um you know the business going so that's essentially what i did is i just kind of kept going went from one printer to six to ten to fifteen i took it from you know four rooms moved it all into one room and sat there and then moved all of that into the garage how to add a little bit of power into the garage and i've been in the garage for the past what two years i believe year and a half um until the point that i filled the garage up and it was really starting to get claustrophobic in the garage so i was i was having a hard time keeping track of things keeping things organized finding a place for everything so there were some people that had been offering me opportunities to potentially move into their space one of them was a flower shop another one was a music store but my buddy aaron here when i told him that he's like hey man you need to come up to the maker space and let's talk about you possibly moving in here where i'm at now and the tarrant county maker space where it's a small space and it hadn't really been set up fully as a as a functioning profitable maker space it is a good space it does have a bunch of extra tools and i was able to move in here now how how did i get there to this point it it's literally from just printing something every day and i'm realizing this isn't going to be a five minute video so we'll keep going after the five minute mark but talking to customers doing my best to not turn down jobs um i will say that's going to come with stress though because as some of the jobs came in um and i wasn't able to do them or wasn't able to fill them to the customer's expectations you know you're going to get upset customers you're going to get customers that wanted something sooner than you can provide it sometimes something says it's a day or two print and you print it and it fails on 18 hours and then it fails on 10 hours and it fails on you know 20 hours and you know what you might have told the customer is going to take two days ends up taking a week and a half or two weeks um so there's there's a lot of struggle that comes out of this but you know with that you can you can move forward and and that's essentially what i've been forced to do is through a lot of my repeat customers through new business coming in it's just like okay you know when you stumble and you lose a little money on one or two projects you know you just got to make sure restructure and uh get more and more so one thing to talk about would be when i first started i didn't know how to price and pricing is probably one of the big key things that a lot of people who get started in this don't know how to do and you don't need complex pricing i don't do complex pricing i do print by the hour when i first started i was doing two dollars an hour i went up to three an hour for an hour i'm up to six an hour right now somewhere past 6 and 10 an hour print hour that is so if something's a four hour print i'm gonna charge them four times six somewhere past ten is pretty expensive in my opinion that's where prints start getting pretty pricey but at six dollars an hour a lot of people are fine with what these prints cost and that covers my electricity that covers my plastic that covers a couple fails and i've got to make some money i got to keep the lights on i have to pay a bill i've got electricity um you know at the house as well not just electricity here so you you have to build all that in you can't just think okay this only cost me 50 cents so a dollar fifty is like asking too much it's really not if it costs you 50 cents you should probably be making six to ten dollars on it um just being straight up with it so you know make sure you've got a good pricing some some print companies do minimum orders so it's like nothing's under 20 or 50 bucks or anything that i start is a an immediate twenty dollars then it's three dollars a print hour then it's two dollars an hour on post processing removing supports i include the sports in that six dollars an hour so that's probably why it's a higher print hour but you know i am removing supports for people um so you know it can be a wash one way or the other on how you do your pricing but i think you need to average above three if you're gonna start that's where i really started feeling like i was making money was above three dollars an hour and around the five and six i was like okay this is actually sustainable as my full-time job as long as i've got more than 10 to 15 printers running and you know you can count here i think there's somewhere around 30 actively running right now i've got a handful in the graveyard still back at the house that i haven't moved over here we've got uh three more king runes coming but i can fit another three on top of that so six more can fit in in just that shelf alone we'll see if the power will handle it but um another thing would be um complementary avenues of revenue so one of the first ones that i knew i needed because i was well the very first one is modeling you know if someone comes to you and they need something 3d printed they say here's my logo it's a picture i need this 3d printed you can't 3d print a picture you have to turn that picture into a 3d model so if you're not a 3d modeler yourself i would say become one you know you don't have to be able to do everything but if you can you know at least put text and make a square and a block if you can use tinkercad then you're going to be able to get started i do probably 10 to 20 of my orders that come in for 3d modeling on tinkercad myself and that's 100 profit on the modeling that i get to make so something that takes me 30 minutes to an hour and a half to model on tinkercad i get to charge a customer 60 to 150 bucks he's not paying too much in modeling i'm getting to make well over what my hourly rate would be at least for for that time and um you know that's really nice now the second thing would be if if you're not an excellent modeler you need to get one so there's lots of places to find good modelers you can probably find one locally in your city sometimes local people can be more expensive especially if you're in the us comparing to like india or bulgaria or somewhere over there i ended up video gaming with a guy for a long time uh over a year and he got interested in the 3d printing just for me talking about it on video games and i drank one of them yeah i saw those two yesterday and after a year of talking with him um he was like hey check out this model i made check this out so he started showing me some stuff and i was like hey try doing this so i gave him a couple jobs and he ended up becoming my full-time modeler so i truly believe that if you're going to have a full-time 3d printing service business where you're printing as a service if you're trying to copy what i'm doing you're going to have to have a full-time modeler on top of that other services and the nice thing with that is if my modeler quotes me a hundred dollars for a project i'm gonna charge 150 200 because that's my consulting that's my in the middle that's me talking to mandar that covers my time and hours communicating with the model or making sure it's right because sometimes he'll do something off and i understood the customer more than what i first initially explained it to the modeler and i can fix that so all that needs to be kind of built in there and then from there um just other things you know i occasionally get people calling wanting a 2d print if you want to have a 2d printer in here and provide 5 10 copies for people you definitely get a little bit of business from that but that's not full-time income the next thing would be the 3d scanner i'm actually looking for where i put mine um all right let's see where i put it where do we put the scanner slightly oh no it's over here so i've got a 3d scanner under here and i would say the key with this is this one is a thor 3d calibri it's a good mid-range scanner it can do like if i wanted to scan this barrel i could scan this barrel pretty easily and it would all come in pretty nicely it likes medium to big size objects i would say me this is a medium object you know something like that might be big it's all relative you know a building is much larger obviously or a car but um it does like seven feet down to like a few inches so you know like i could get the outline of this remote but it wouldn't really give me super definition on the buttons and all this other stuff you know it would be hard to get this curve at the bottom with it like this it'd be able to pick up the curve here but um there are some limitations to scanners especially the really small cheap ones anything under a thousand two thousand i don't think is really worth it i think you really need to be spending upwards of three to six thousand on a proper scanner maybe over time they'll get better just like our cell phones have gotten better but there's no cell phone 3d scanner that works worth a damn none of them so don't be fooled by that type of stuff if you need a 3d scanner they are nice because that 3d scanner i charge people 150 an hour to 3d scan something so when they come out they say hey i need the scanned 115 hour for the scan then another on top of that to clean that scan up but a lot of the times that's a lot faster than if someone just gave me something and said okay you now need to recreate it from photos and i've got to either measure it or only use photos and guess and fix things and there's generally a whole lot of edits and repairs that have to go into here's just a photo make it exactly like that a scanner can really help catch a lot of those smaller details that you might otherwise miss when you're just staring at a photo another one that i just recently got into is this laser engraving so laser engraving is a great um extra you can see i actually have it i pause because i'm i'm looking at something but the the height of the glove is too high over there it needs to be further down the focus point of that laser is lower um but these are neat so you can engrave you know wood leather 3d prints i did uh some 3d prints painted them and then lasered off the paint and that looks really cool um so there's quite a few couple things we're starting to explore that a little bit more i've only actually had the engravers for a couple weeks now had i had them like three or four days before i moved into this shop so i haven't had a lot of opportunity to play with them yet but they seem pretty neat um doing some reindeer here but um yeah i mean this is this is essentially what i had to do the another key aspect of this would have been the software i use um the software doesn't make the difference by any means you getting software isn't going to make you successful but it's a nice tool that makes the daily life of things a little bit easier so i'm specifically using this thrive it gives me this type of inbox here so people email me they do my website so they have really good website designers the company that is thrived is dexyp yellow pages so dex yp is an internet web page company and they merge with yellow pages which is the yellow book the phone books and um they do they do websites um so i've got just kind of showing me the three different websites i've got this nice website here if you haven't been to it i encourage you to check it out i do get a lot of compliments on it so i'm proud of this website although i didn't build it myself i just kind of helped direct to say hey i know what looks good um i want it to look fancy i you know i i didn't say like here's where i want everything i was just like make it look good be professional with it and then i'll tell you if i want something to change we end up getting a gift to run in the background so that's really cool i really love the gif in the background i think that really alone that's probably the one feature alone that impresses a lot of people and the other thing would be this and my story so the history right here a lot of people actually read this at least one in five or something that come to my website are reading this and then commenting on it so i literally get calls just on this saying hey this is awesome we love where you're at it's actually time that i update it so i haven't updated this since the beginning of the year it'll be a really good update to do now but uh but the website is important so you want to make sure you have a good website um otherwise i do my invoicing through here so i can you know just straight up bring up an invoice i can email it over put their name their information in you know go to the sasha lizard guy and you know you can see i can put in pre-made stuff or i can add a custom item so all this is you know i can add my taxes and processing fees this made billing people a lot easier instead of just saying i'm only cash or can you do venmo or paypal or whatever i can just accept credit cards right through here so so that type of stuff is pretty cool uh they also do a bunch of other stuff they can manage your social media if you want to pay a little bit more i pay a monthly fee for this service but whenever i want to change to my website i just say here here's what i want on my website they'll make the changes um they have this like constant contact type stuff or you know birthdays i can turn all this on as you can see none of this is turned on online because i'm getting so much business that i haven't needed to turn those on but um it's pretty neat seeing using this software and i i also liked it because they were headquartered near where i am now unfortunately kovit has shut down their headquarters but um they are still um live and working from around the world so so thrive is really cool and they're constantly updating that software and there's there's plenty of other software the type of software that it is would be a crm a customer relations management software i had never heard that term until i was already a year and a half into this business so if you've never heard it don't feel bad but a crm can do any number of things from just managing your contacts to managing projects another thing that might help is some type of workboard and i was hoping that thrive would have this they do have this type of project thing but it doesn't work exactly the way i'd love it to i also use trello if you haven't seen trello before trello is really useful so i'm giving away a lot of tips and tricks here i'm only withheld a little bit at the punt here but you can go on to trello and make a board this is a basic board i'm not going to show you my my phone but you can fill out cards you can edit [Music] you can edit these cards and add files to it you can add other people to it you know this looks like it could be done for like a school thing um so there's a lot of application with trello i found it pretty interesting i haven't fully utilized it yet i keep like using it and not using it using it not using it i'm kind of really good at doing that but i need to get a little more scared just doing that but yeah there's a lot of it's a lot to the way i'm doing it here this is how i did it i'm not saying this is how you need to necessarily do it what i would not recommend if i was going to say there's a couple things to to try to avoid is printing a lot of inventory of stuff from thingiverse and then trying to just go sell it at a booth for you know double what you paid that's honestly a part of what i thought would come of this in the beginning but that's how you wind up getting boxes of prints that you don't know what to do with and they start getting in your way and you know you don't want that you don't want trash around your house that you know you can't do anything with but there could be some really hot ticket items on thingiverse or anywhere else that you're able to to you know buy and sell the squid game mass you know for halloween a couple people would have made some good money on that i sold a couple squid game masks but i didn't i didn't retail sell them i had people literally request them so if you want to do retail that's one option i'm a strictly service based where people literally just request orders from me i'm also a reseller for some printers so as you start to grow and people start relying on you and want to get into 3d printing it would be good if you can resell printers even if let's say you don't have a contract or enough money to buy 10 20 printers and have a good profit margin on them buy one on amazon assemble it make sure it's a good printer and then offer it to people with a class say hey i'll teach you how to use this i'll do all that make a little money on the class and then you can educate someone on how to use their 3d printer and and still make you know say 40 50 bucks on top of whatever the printer cost even if the printer you're making either 0 or 10 or 20 bucks um there's you just have to be creative so if you know if you're looking all this and you watch this video and you're still running out of ideas um you know there's a lot of people that need employees i'm not saying this for everyone i encourage anyone that that if you have a ton of ideas if you're feeling creative if you want to be creative you know push those bounds and and see what you can come up with i i you know it's this isn't going to work if everyone becomes a 3d printing business yeah you know but there's plenty of room you know i don't see anybody any of you as competition yeah you know i get two or three if i if i had mark forge move in next door they're still not going to be in my competition you know they do something different there's so many avenues when it comes to 3d printing you know the metal 3d printing the house 3d printing those are things that are still beyond my current capabilities but i'd like to get to and there's tons of companies in those spaces yeah you know we're still very small business i'm still very you know it's it's literally me and and kristen here and you know she hasn't even been here this long as far as working with me um and i'm not you know i don't have tesla money like i'm still making ends meet this is not like rich status so don't look at this and and and be super impressed just look at this as progression um you know i want to show you where i've been in five years i want to show you that i'm not stopping here i'm not giving up could i make more money and have more money in the bank if i had found an hourly a job above 20 an hour probably i'd probably be looking at a a little bit more money in my bank overall but what i see with this is the investment of gaining the customers the clients because a lot of my my happy clients a lot of my clients that are you know maintenance people or people that do innovation in their company of you know a thousand two thousand they call me to then get stuff done and then they call me again and again again i just had a call yesterday from someone who was a client from a year and a half ago and he read my website and was super impressed at where we've been in the year and a half since he's had something printed with us so that is what will propel this to a further level and if i get an opportunity to where you know a job is just thrown in my lap to print something in metal and you know all the money is thrown in my lap to go buy the machines then hands down you know we'll get into that and and that'll be great but you know if i'm just going to be doing daily jobs where everything is under a few thousand dollars everything's under a few hundred bucks most things are under a hundred dollars um you know it's it's just gonna take one period of time to to get there but i'm paying my bills uh i i am able to have some spending money so i'm not struggling by any means um but but it can be a struggle you know a week or two sometimes some of these customers don't pay for 30 to 40 days that's something you'll have to to think about when you start dealing with larger companies there's stuff called net 30 and net 40. i'd never heard of that until three years into this business i didn't know that people wouldn't pay for something until after it was delivered and then 30 days after that so that can really tie up some money when you're talking about spending four or five hundred dollars on an order and then you expect to get paid on that order a month and a half later um so yeah you know you got a budget you got a plan there's a lot to think about a lot to do with the way that i've done this um am i doing it the perfect way no have i had any mentors no have i watched anyone else on youtube not really honestly speaking and this is probably a fault in an air of mine for some reason i don't watch a ton of 3d printing videos on youtube um i like doing this i want to share my progress i'd love to do more entertaining videos but um yeah you know i watch a little bit of joel the 3d printing nerd i watch a little bit of some other people i've got my own opinions on different 3d printing stuff so i kind of just keep my opinions to myself maybe and in 3d print here but um i know we're doing some good work and i do always want to see other people doing good work and share that if you don't know i've got a 3d print everything for profit facebook page group that's meant to help anybody that wants to make money with the 3d printer so if you haven't been there definitely go there and check it out the community is really nice i'll remove anybody that posts ads and junk in there so so we try to keep it real clean but i think this video has gone on long enough i just wanted to kind of give a good spiel on how i've got where i am because i think it's pretty cool other people talk about it being cool and have requested this video so you know this is for y'all this is for me five years from now to look back at um you know and i'll probably laugh at myself for for a handful of the things i've said for whatever reason but um i do just like to to kind of rant and spiel and and go on like this i had no idea where this video was going to go when i started it i just knew that i wanted to kind of share how i got here and i'm sure if i did it three or four or five times it would come out through four or five times different but thanks guys and we'll see you later

Channel: Michael Lynn

Views: 26,558

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Id: jmiP4WYzXvA

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021