How My Desktop CNC Made Over $500,000 in 2 Years

hey guys I'm Ryan drapela and this desktop CNC made me over a half a million dollars in a two-year span while I was in college so in today's video I wanted to kind of show you what got me to buy the CNC in the first place what I made where I sold it at and the questions that I asked myself that really shifted my thinking and shifted my mindset and allowed me to go from zero dollars really pretty much zero dollars to that half a million dollars in that two-year span and I really think those questions in that mind shift mindset shift are very applicable to you and wherever stage you're at in business and I really hope this video helps and brings you value and if it does bring you value don't forget to like subscribe once again thanks for watching and stay tuned so how did I end up with this CNC in the first place right and and my story is probably really similar to a lot of y'all's is that you know I was in high school I needed some money for new car right I loved woodworking so I was making the making the cutting boards and tables and stuff like that in high school I graduated high school and I know I needed to pay for college because I wanted to go to college and so I was making a lot of cutting boards at the time and selling them to friends family and fools and anybody else that would please buy a cutting board from me and I thought that I could inlay cutting boards and I was doing it with a scroll saw and a plunge router and it was really hard and so I decided to get a CNC and this CNC right here this is the original one that made me all the money all that good stuff this was six thousand dollars I bought this whenever I was 19 years old I actually took a loan for my girlfriend's parents so shout out um Alan and Susan thank you all um and so they actually gave me a loan to buy my first CNC because I was dead broke like most I I guess most high school Woodworkers right not making that much money and so I got it so I can inlay cutting boards and I did the math right if I sold 60 cutting boards at 100 I can pay off the CNC well it did help me in like cutting boards and here's actually some photos of those awesome amazing cutting boards um but it just wasn't doing it right because currently we're actually standing in my parents horse barn and this is kind of where my shop was built right so I'd go to college I'd come home on the weekends work in my parents horse barn we concreted some horse stalls you know and I'd literally have the CNC in here with a little window unit to keep me air conditioned you know I'm doing my thing and uh yeah and so it was it's very similar right to I hope some of y'all stories you love it you're doing it you're trying to make a product you're trying to sell something that people will enjoy you love your craft you love what you do and then it came to a point where I realized like hey I'm not gonna make enough money to pay myself through college making this stuff like I'm I have to work 100 hours a week um to be able to afford all this you know I had rent I had tuition all that stuff and so I was crying One Night in the middle of the night it's like 4 30 in the morning because I'd work until 3 4 30 in the morning wake up at six do that three days a week I drive two hours back to college all that crazy stuff and I'm bawling my eyes out crying looking at the computer and knowing like what can I make with this machine like what can I possibly do because I'm tired of it like I lost my passion for woodworking I'm burnt out nobody else is making money that I know in Woodworking and so I'm just I'm just I'm just finished right and um you know I was super sleep deprived and all of a sudden this idea hit me like hey why don't I make this one thing and I'll tell you about that in a minute right why don't I make this one thing and why that idea hit me is because I started asking myself some some some questions that that really helped me um kind of shift to my mind and this was like the one of the first questions was if I wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars to help me pay for college I started dividing out how many hours I'd have to work and it was like oh I can't make a hundred dollars an hour doing what I'm doing right so I need help um and I need somebody else to come in I pay them and I make a little bit of profit off of them right and so it's like what can I make that I can hire one person for to come in and help me make and so that was a little mental shift right and so I designed this product and I got it out there and uh it didn't really take off at first and I'm like why why isn't it taking off right and so the the second big question that I asked myself is you know I was whenever you're when you have when you whenever you have a CNC and you don't know like what the charge everybody says like how much do you charge or how much to charge an hour and all that stuff one of the big things is like yeah you can do all the math and figure out that you need to charge 40 an hour for a CNC or 20 or 100 whatever it is but what if you reverse engineer that so this was like a big Epiphany I had like what if you reverse engineered that and go what can I make where I can charge 200 an hour for my time on the CNC and so it gets you thinking where it's not like I'm gonna make this product charge so much an hour for this and so I'm gonna make a tray or a trinket or whatever and charge twenty dollars because it takes my CNC half an hour to make right the mindset shift was like what can I do with this machine that I can charge to up to 200 an hour or you know 150 an hour whatever that whatever that um that number is to you right because that's what I needed to make in order to pay for college and so I realized and I did a lot of research in the industry and all that stuff and I realized that if I were to engrave something with this CNC like I'd cut out a product and then engrave it and charge for that Engraving bigger companies didn't want to do that China can't do these Engravings because they have to personalize everything they don't want to ship all this stuff and so I decided to start engraving people's names and initials on there now you may say like oh duh Ryan that's like you know that's pretty simple but think about in this context it you know my engraving is small enough where it only takes three minutes for my CNC to do it takes me about two minutes to program it right on you know on my computer program and I charge ten dollars for that so in five minutes time three minutes of CNC time and five minutes of my own time I'm charging ten dollars for this thing okay and so when you do that math over the course of an hour it's like a hundred and eighty dollars an hour is what your CNC is making you by doing that small Engraving and that was it and I was like oh my gosh like that's how I'm gonna do it I'm gonna sell somebody their name and that's the key that's a huge key point I'm gonna make somebody feel so special and so important because their name is on my product so now let's say you make a tray and it's worth 20. you put somebody's name on it and it's worth really 30 with their you know with their name on it and it only took you a little bit more work to put their name on it and it makes them feel so special because the number one most important thing to somebody is their name right that's the number one most important thing and so long story short I put it on Etsy because I did this is I guess another question I asked myself right before I put on Etsy I asked myself this question was hey Ryan do you think you can sell one of these yeah I can sell one do you think you sell two yeah I can sell two do you think you sell ten I can sell ten no problem do you think you can sell a hundred yeah I know 100 friends family I got a big family you know I know Joe down the street you know I'd walk down over there and you know maybe bargain it up with them or do some bartering you know I know a store a little boutique store I can sell my stuff in but I did the math and I was like I got to sell a thousand of these I got to sell 10 000 of these do I know ten thousand people how do I sell to ten thousand people and at the time this is 2015 and uh you know I'm 19 20 years old at the time and I go the only way to do this is get on Etsy or Amazon I was terrified of Amazon didn't understand it didn't think it's so good because at the time you couldn't personalize on there and so I got on Etsy and within six weeks of getting on Etsy we did 43 000 in sales with these um and these things what I'm talking about are these docking stations right here um and so this is what I used to make um now I'm not going to show you my exact one because I don't want y'all to steal it but these docking stations always like the original maker of these back in 2015 and now there's a thousand different designs some of you may actually be making them but I designed these docking stations and then I was the first one also to customize it with people's names offer different colors all of that stuff and so my first year on Etsy with them I did 43 000 in sales or the first six weeks right so I I did them in October so I did like forty three thousand dollars in sales in a six week period the next year I did 150 000 in sales with them right I'm still going to college still taking classes did 150 000 in sales I have a couple helpers now and then the very next year I did 450 000 in sales with them all with this CNC cutting really slow because I knew nothing about CNC cutting out six at a time or eight at a time it took over an hour to cut out eight uh which was not efficient not good like that but then I'd personalize them and that personalization is what allowed me to charge that extra ten dollars and all that stuff so by the time I graduated college in you know a three year span so in two years I did over half a million dollars to Dish this machine over four or four year span by the time I graduated college we did over a million dollars in sales with just that docking station and so this CNC right here has engraved over 50 000 of those docking stations and engraved over 50 000 different names onto them um and it's it's absolutely bunkers to think that but that's that's kind of how it happened and how it built my shop and all the other videos that you're going to see that I make about my cool shop and my all my bigger scenes cnc's in this I got a 300 000 CNC now um which is absolutely crazy um I got five other ones as well so those little tiny shifts from asking myself like how can I have somebody else do this instead of me because I can't possibly make enough money or I'm you know I'm a contractor then right I can't possibly make enough money myself to be able to produce enough to make a living wage right or to make to make a living salary okay the other question was what can I what can I make that what can I charge the maximum amount I can possibly think of for my CNC per hour so that reverse engineering of like how do I make something that I can charge 200 an hour for right or how do I make something I can charge 500 an hour for and start high right and then just kind of try to work your way through it and eventually you hit a point in a product where you can charge that really high rate for your CNC time and then you blow everything else out of the water because you you reverse engineered it right and the third thing is how do I make somebody feel really really important and allow and not allowing foreign competition or other giant companies to come in and mess with my competition so like what's my competitive advantage and a lot of times that's adding somebody's name because this C and C is just as fast as my three hundred thousand dollar CNC at engraving think about that right this CNC is only six thousand dollars another one costs was that 50 times that much if I'm not mistaken I think it's 50 times that much and it can grave at the same exact speed okay so I hope this helped I hope you got a lot of value from this if you did please give us a like subscribe to the channel and uh I'm gonna come out with a lot more content that's going to help you help you grow your CNC business and uh once again I know it's a little story a little convoluted but I hope it helped thanks guys

Channel: Cutting It Close

Views: 1,598,441

Keywords: woodworking, cnc router, cnc machining, wood cnc, cnc beginner, desktop cnc, hobby cnc, laguna cnc, laguna IQ, Laguna IQ CNC, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, woodwork, business, woodworking business, cnc business, how to make money, how to make money with a cnc, can a cnc make money, can a cnc machine cut wood, wood cnc router, ryan drapela, making money with a cnc, hobby cnc router, shapeoko, shapeoko pro, avid cnc, avid pro, beginner cnc, hobby, hobbiest, starting a business

Id: 9C17TFXwAYc

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022