Your Business/Product born from RepRap?

Please share your links/pics/stories about the products that reprap allowed you to prototype and or market. I look at all the trinkets and widget posts too but I love to see those where someone had an idea, prototyped it, and took it to market regardless of the scale.

If this has been discussed before, please point me to the post(s).

Thanks!

I would love to share, but my products are not on the market yet.
I did get into 3D printing purely because I had alot of parts / products that I needed a prototype of.

Will post again when they are on the market.

J

There are a few products out there worth marketing that already exist on Thingiverse. Have you seen the Geared Heart? Thats probably the most widely used item to market, however, I've never actually heard of someone who made a product themselves and are running a business with it short of new RepRaps.

One guy who I had an email correspondance with was telling me all about his business. He said that himself and one other ran an Etsy account and also sold (bi-weekly) at a local craft fair. They sell a lot of Geared Hearts amongst other Things and run about a 50-60$ revenue (Not all profit) with two printers.

It'd be nice to see someone run a business with something they made though. Could you sell a ton of those awesome Kilowatt Axial Flux Generators? You'd need a printer and a CNC that can cut steel.

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-Tom

Revenue per what? Day/month/year... big differences.

More products might well be a good idea. Perhaps there should be contests designing/making those at some point. Also some sorts of products grab more attention than others, so probably want to take that into account considering when to pick which.(Stopping here not to digress off-topic)

Per day. Haha kind of forgot that part.

He was improving though, starting at (I think) 5$ revenue a day. The problem is "down time." The only way to compensate for a printer that can only run for 16 hours is to use two printers and printers break down eventually needing repairs that take hours to days to fix.

Brooke Drumm runs like 30 Printrbots to make his kits, but he has a whole team working with him.

For the lone wolf it'd be very difficult to run a business with printers. You'd need at least one more person with you to help and a lot more if you want to make enough money to quit your day job.

This is my dream.

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-Tom

Sniper4395 Wrote:
> For the lone wolf it'd be very difficult to run a
> business with printers. You'd need at least one
> more person with you to help

Or robot.

I love hearing about the products people are making with their 3d printers and CNC machines. I do think the machines need to be able to print in a higher resolution on a bigger scale to really become a true manufacturing machine. I would think that once we can print 24X24X24 on a resolution half way between extrusion and DLP/resin, people will really start kicking out great designs and products we could all use.

Sniper makes some good points but I think that durability is one of the few things that has greatly increased in designs lately. It is true that you need multiple machines (or a large print tray) to start making a decent profit from printing alone but you can always print your own machines . Personally I think that you get more profitability in a kit. By taking the stress out of sourcing the parts and providing support for your kits you are able to leverage your knowledge and skills much better.

If you are looking for a new location to sell your products, I am working on building a marketplace website right now. Please PM me if you would like some more details.

Yeah I agree that resolution is a big limiting factor and really I never thought so much about products that were made exclusively with a reprap, but more so, reprap prototyped parts. And don't misunderstand me, I'm not looking to pirate or anything. Heck, I haven't even got a machine yet. A good example that I saw recently was a smartphone holder for mounting to tripods and whatnot. I saw something on kickstarter where a guy had made this Bluetooth capable watch and his first design attempts came from a 3d printer. Stuff like that is really fascinating and really shows an entrepreneurial spirit.