alt Hacker News- design time earned about $25/hour
- $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.
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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.
It is PMF discovery. It is a survey cosplaying as a business :)
No, it's not a pity, OP should drop this.
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.
well, there's that, and there's this https://www.businessinsider.com/teenager-built-six-figure-ec...