Hey guys.
Welcome back today.
We're talking about how to start a 3d printing business.
Now I started my 3d printing business just a couple of years ago, and it's quickly
grown to a team of about 11 people.
And today I'm sharing with you exactly how I did it.
So that if, your interested in creating your own business.
You can follow the same step.
If you're new here.
Welcome my name's Austin.
I own crate 3d.com we're a Canadian-based company.
We do 3d printing and 3d design.
I literally started the business with an ender three, which is just a $200 3d
printer, and I've built it up to where it is now to start a 3d printing business.
You do not need a lot of money.
Just enough time and a lot of effort.
Now I've laid everything out in the PowerPoint here that I'll be using.
I will also put a link to this PowerPoint in the description.
So if you want, you can download it, print it out, et cetera.
It's all 100% free.
This is kind of my way of saying thank you to those who have
subscribed to the channel so far.
So first thing is first, and that is step one.
Like any business you need to put in the groundwork and you need to
learn the fundamentals of the actual business activity and how it works.
Basically, you need to learn everything about 3d printing.
This is the step where you get a 3d printer.
You learn how to use it, how to prepare files and all the different
materials and their use cases.
Now it does sound like a lot when I say it like that, but honestly, this
can be done in just a couple of days.
Okay.
You cannot run a proper business without understanding the
operation from the ground up.
So yeah.
You need to know the ins and outs of 3d printing and how to use a 3d printer.
Now, in addition to learning how to print learning basic design
work is a very, very good idea.
And again, it's totally free.
Okay.
There are infinite resources out there, and I will attach some below in the
description, but my learning basic design work, you've opened yourself up
to far more clients, and you will have a much bigger competitive advantage over
those who don't know basic design work.
Under design work on the slides.
I put, learn to design using basic shapes, how to edit existing designs.
An example of that would be something like if a customer wanted
to put their name on an existing print file, something like that.
And then lastly, I put, you need to know how to export files for 3d printing.
Additionally, there are links on there to the recommended printer, and
then I think you should get if you're just starting out and also to design
software plus tutorials, I highly highly recommend checking out those
two links, but let's keep moving on.
So step number two, this is where we get into service printing and service design.
Okay.
At this step, you should be able to pretty quickly make back every dollar
that you spent on your first 3d printer.
And that filament, this is where things start to get exciting.
Okay.
You can actually start making money, building clients, gaining
experience, um, building a portfolio, all of those really good things.
However, this is also where you learn to troubleshoot.
Okay.
You're going to have failed prints, uh, things like delays in getting material.
You're going to deal with annoying clients, shipping issues, et cetera.
This is where you learn the process of business.
So how do you get 3d printing service clients?
Okay.
Here are a few ways, and I have mentioned these before.
I also recommend that you do watch first video on the subject.
I'll put a link to it on the screen.
Now open that in a new tab and watch it after this basically
for 3d printing service jobs.
The best ways that I recommend are number one, Facebook marketplace
create a simple listing for 3d printing and design services.
Okay.
Number two, local classifieds create an ad on kijiji Craigslist, whatever your
local classifieds are, create the ad for 3d printing and 3d design services.
If you can do both number three, call local businesses, visit them, ask
them if they need printing services.
Literally any business that uses small plastic parts may be
interested, especially if you can do that design work as well.
And then finally, I just put, ask family and friends.
If you know someone who is in the business space, maybe they know
someone that they could connect you with and that you could begin doing
some work for let's keep moving on.
Okay. Step number three is to build a brand.
This one's really important.
Okay.
You need a company slash a brand it's 20, 21.
Like you can't just be some back alley, 3d printing and design guy.
You need to look official.
You need to grow a brand.
The reason for this.
is Well, there's tons of them.
A first off a it'll help you in finding clients.
I it'll help you maintaining clients, closing deals, networking.
And frankly, you can just charge a lot more for your services.
If you look professional, which brings us to Wix.
Okay. The sponsor of this video is Wix.
You guys know, I do not take a lot of sponsorships on this channel, but when
Wix reached out my like personally, my company website create 3d.com for you.
Long before I even started on YouTube was built by me and made using Wix.
So it just felt right.
And honestly, I can wholeheartedly recommend Wix.
I'm going to be showing you my initial website that I use
when I was just starting out.
And then also the website that we currently use@create3d.com today.
But before we jump into the web builder, let's bring out
my slides on step number three.
Okay.
So why do you need a brand slash a website.
Number one, this is all specific just to 3d printing and that is portfolio.
Okay.
This may be the most important of them all, but you need to be taking
photos of the work that you do because this will help attract other clients.
Okay?
Every project you do, no matter how big, no matter how small,
just take some photos of it.
If it's design work, take some screenshots or some videos.
It is fantastic marketing material that we can put on our website.
I promise that is something that you will not regret number two is
to show what services you offer.
Okay.
If you offer 3d printing services, maybe you offer 3d
printing plus design services.
Maybe you offer 3d printing plus design plus painting services, whatever it is
that your potential clients need to know exactly what you offer so that they know
their options when picking your services.
Okay.
Number three is to separate yourself from the competition.
Okay.
If you get an inquiries through.
Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, et cetera, being able to
say, Hey, I own company X.
This is our website.
This is where you can see the work that we've done.
And this is what we offer.
Like that is just a huge advantage against just being some random guy.
Ok, number four is to attract professional clients.
Okay.
Professional clients being, uh, companies, corporations, other businesses, et cetera.
They all typically have way higher budgets than do individuals.
And they may require repeat business that one's pretty straightforward
and it is really important.
Number five is organic traffic.
Let's say that you live in, uh, like Houston and someone needs
something designed or printed or are they going to do, they're probably
going to open up their computer.
They're going to go to google.com and they're going to type in
3d printing service Houston.
Well, if you have a website, now your website might pop up for that search and
they may inquire it through your website.
That one's also pretty straightforward.
Number six is credibility.
This kind of ties in with being more professional, but you can actually use
your website to build credibility through things like reviews, testimonies, a list
of companies, a list of company names and logos that you've done work with
people that you've done work work with.
Et cetera, all of those things.
Okay.
And the best part about this is that you can do this right now to go ahead
and click the link in the description or the link in the slideshow.
If you did download that, but let me just quickly show you exactly
how easy it is to set this up.
So I'm on my Wix dashboard right here.
I'm going to go ahead and click on select and edit site.
Now this is indeed my company website.
You may have already seen this before, but from there, I'm
going to go ahead, edit site.
And what we're going to do is we're just going to add in a portfolio
page, the reason that this is so powerful and the best features of Wix
is it, you can make changes on the fly with absolutely no web development
experience and what this means for us as new, uh, new company owners or
new brand owners to 3d printing is that we can make those changes such as
something like adding new items to your portfolio or adding the companies that
you've worked with, things like that.
So right off the bat, I can go click the pages at the top there,
manage pages let's add a page.
Let's just do a blank page.
We'll keep it super simple for right now, unless there's I call this portfolio.
So there we go.
We have portfolio and you could see that it automatically added
it up here in the top bar as well.
And what we're going to do, let's say that we took a picture of something that
we had just 3d printed add button, and then you'll see all of the different
elements that you can add that you can make it fancy or make a themes.
But for now, let's just go ahead and let's just add image.
Uh, I'm going to click on my images and then site files.
I've already uploaded this here, and this is just a simple
plastic stand that we print.
So from here, you can see, I could just go ahead and resize this image
and let's just put it right here.
And then what we're going to want to do is add some sort of description.
So add, and let's add a text, add a heading.
And this is the thing is you can just drag and drop the.
So let's go ahead and say that this is a plastics stand for, um, electric.
And then, and what we could do is go ahead, add one more text and let's add
a paragraph and we could add something describing, uh, what this item is.
Maybe the material that it's printed from what it's used for how much
weight it holds, something like that enough with the slide summary.
Let me walk you through my websites and explain, oh right.
Once we get into wakes, I can see from my dashboard here, that I.
Uh, on the left here is the first website that I made.
This was literally back in, I think it was 2018.
I made this website.
I was a one man team doing all of the 3d printing and the design work.
And this is the website that I use to basically just kickstart or boost
my company to where it is today.
And then on the right here, you can see that this is crate 3d.
This is the website that we currently use today.
Uh, as a, as our entire business, our whole team, this is our website.
Let's jump into the first one that I had there so that I can show you guys around.
So let's go ahead right here.
I'm just going to go into view, live site and let me walk you through
what our site looks like from there.
We can see the three options, home portfolio and contact that is all that
you need when you're just starting out.
Again, the purpose of this website is for basically a few things, but the most
important are legitimacy and a place that people can see your portfolio.
And then finally, somewhere that they can contact you.
Okay.
So they're right at the top home portfolio and contact.
Off the bat.
You can see it says engineering design and 3d printing.
Basically all of these services here are.
Fancy ways of saying 3d design and 3d printing.
Moving on, we can see here.
There's just two pictures.
This is just part of my portfolio works out, scrolling on.
We can see 3d printing over traditional manufacturing.
Again, just a few reasons why someone might be interested in 3d printing.
Uh, finally I have some architectural models that I did.
Uh, funny enough, these two buildings are literally like right there.
Like I can see them from my spot here.
So those are two buildings in Calgary at the bottom here.
These are just stock photos.
Then you can see we go into a video right away.
I remember back when I said, what you could do is you could actually
take a video of your design process.
Let me show you an example of that right here.
Again, this is the Saddledome.
This is right outside my house over there.
And this is one of the projects that I did.
So all I did was I quickly recorded the design process.
Then right here, I recorded the actual printing process.
And I'll skip through this a little bit.
You can see it as just a nice time lapse.
And then you can see the final result, right?
There was the 3d printed model of the Saddledome.
Now continuing on at the bottom here, you can see clients, right.
Go ahead.
And I stayed three clients that we have worked with in the past.
Now, again, what we're doing with this is just increasing our legitimacy.
It looks good.
It looks professional.
Okay.
Let's continue on.
If I go in here and you can see portfolio again, our work right away, the first
thing that pops up is one of those videos.
That's the Saddledome one.
We did see that.
Uh, if we go down and we can see this here as a business sign that we 3d printed.
So there is another business idea for you.
3d printing business signs.
Uh, it's a really great thing.
You can literally walk into any business and say, Hey, are you
interested in having your logo or any signs printed for your business?
There's another one that we did.
This was for an ice cream shop here.
Uh, they're actually in Okotoks, I believe it is, which is close
to Calgary, but there is some that we did for that ice cream shop.
Moving on.
We can see here's a model truck that I did.
Okay. This is a truck from a car show.
We then took that, designed it in fusion 360, and then we went and we actually
resin printed a smaller version.
Uh, a conform to confirm before printing a large one moving on here is another video.
I believe this one is a bridge.
Yeah. So this is the Stony Creek bridge.
This is in Canada here, but you can see what we did is we took the blueprints.
Uh, these are the actual, like original blueprints from the archives.
And then we basically went and just replicated the design.
And then we went ahead and we printed it out.
Again, all of this is just portfolio work.
Like I said, when you have a client that contacts you on something like a Facebook
marketplace, a Kijiji Craigslist, any local classifieds, maybe even YouTube,
TikTok Instagram, all of those things.
It's always really good to just say my name is so-and-so.
I own my website.
Here's a link to my website.
You can check it out.
If you're interested in seeing more of my work, trust me, trust me.
It goes a far ways to separate you from the competition.
Let's go down, let's go down a little bit more.
You could see more architectural work.
Here's some COVID related work.
We did a run of face masks and the list goes on and on again, just having
that portfolio is really important.
So then lastly, on the far right hand side, you can see the contact us.
Okay, then you need to have one of these now, in addition to just having the
contact us form, that's built into the Wix website, you can see that I do leave
an email out there that says, if you have any files, you can just right away
email these files to this email address.
And we'll get back to you with a quote.
But the other good thing about this is that if someone doesn't want to
email files, Whatever it may be.
They can actually just go on Wix and they can fill out this form right
here with them name and their email.
And then you will get a message in your inbox when someone does that.
So that right there, again, we're just taking all these leads, sending
them to our website, then using our website to pretty much convert those
leads into clients and into sales and build up our company and our business.
So that is exactly where I started out.
This is a nostalgic looking at this.
It's not a bad website.
Uh, it could definitely be better and it could be improved, but
like I said, using WIX, I had absolutely no web design experience.
I just drag and drop all the elements and WIX kind of did most of the work on that.
So let's go check out the website that I currently use
this is our company website here.
Okay. Here we are on crate 3d.com.
You can see right off the bat, it says, send files to print@crate3d.com
for a free and fast quote.
That right there is kind of just the easiest thing.
If someone, uh, Google searches get things, 3d, printed, whatever it may
be, maybe they already have files.
They can just email them off right away.
And we usually reply within an hour or two.
Yeah.
Scrolling down industrial solutions.
Like I said, this website is just targeted at more industrial clients because that is
the business model that we have moved to.
So you can see 3d printing, additive manufacturing services.
We do design, FDM printing and SLA printing.
As we scroll down, it just kind of looks nice.
It's clean, it's professional.
Let's keep going on the right.
You can see materials.
This is just some information that people can go and they can read.
Uh, industries.
These are just examples of some projects that we've worked on and
then get a quote, careers and shop a shop right now is closed because
we're not actually selling products.
At one point in time, we were selling, uh, Prusa printers and Prusa accessories, but
that part is closed down for right now.
And then careers in case we're ever hiring, you can check that out.
Uh, that is what it is.
And then get a quote is the same thing as it was on our previous website,
where there is just the contact us form.
And again, people all the time go to Google, they search 3d
printing, uh, Calgary or Canada.
They find us, they make an inquiry here and then we take the
files would give them a quote.
They want it printed.
We print it and we ship it to them.
So all of this is possible because we have a website.
Okay.
All of these leads that come in, all of the business that comes
in, comes in through this website.
Let's keep moving on.
So now that we know steps one to three, we can move on to step number four, which
is determining our goals and our strategy.
For example, how much money do you want to make?
How much time do you have to spend on building the business?
Um, maybe you have a full-time job and you just want to make an extra $50 a day.
Now that scenario of making an extra $50 a day.
The goals and the strategies that you will set up to make an extra
$50 a day are very different than those that you would set up.
If you're trying to make $300 a day, okay.
Step four is determining those things and understanding what is required.
So what I recommend is to take a minute and answer the
questions listed in the slide.
Now, lastly, You need to understand what your role is.
Okay.
You need to understand what you are absolutely best at and
what you should be prepared to potentially hire someone to do.
For example, maybe you're okay at design work, but when a project comes in that
requires both design and printing.
Maybe you want to contract out someone else to do the design work so that all you
have to do is the printing or vice versa.
Step number four is determining those things.
Let's keep the ball rolling.
Step number five is to plan and scale.
Basically here, we're determining how are we going to achieve what
we decided upon in step four?
And I'm going to give you my list of recommendations for generating
revenue, with 3d printing and design.
Then basically the input effort that you put into those will help determine
the financial output of those.
Okay. Number one is Etsy.
Find a product or a niche that you are passionate about and that there's
market interest in design, something for and create and sell that product.
Number two is repeat clients.
If you're calling around.
And you're getting clients you want to find repeat clients, okay.
People who need parts printed often or design work done frequently.
Number three, use marketing to get clients.
This can be done with Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube videos,
Instagram TicTok, et cetera.
I'm not going to dive too deep into that one, because that
would be a whole nother video.
But basically what you're trying to do is set up a campaign where
you spend X dollars on advertising.
And that campaign brings in X dollars, plus a 30 or 60% or whatever you
need to make your profit margins.
Number four, build a brand around a product.
Okay?
Maybe you design something like 3d printed camera accessories.
You can then create an Etsy store or a wig store, and you can drive traffic
to that store and sell your products.
There there'll be a completely different brand or company from
your 3d printing service web.
But now what you're doing is you're 3d printing the same items over and
over again, and you're selling it in a store, which is easy to scale.
Number five, you can sell your digital files that you design.
Okay.
The best part about this one is that once the files are done, they can
literally live on the internet forever.
Just making you money in the slides.
I've attached a bunch of websites that you can actually go upload
your designs to set a price.
And so your digital files.
Let's keep going.
Last one.
Number six is education slash consulting.
Okay.
Once you know how to design or to 3d print, you can actually go and teach
others and charge for those services.
Okay.
You can offer to educate or consult with businesses, schools,
students you do online teachings.
Like the opportunities for that are also endless.
That number six is to build a team.
Eventually you're going to need help keeping up with capacity.
We all want to do everything ourselves, but having an extra
couple of people help with either the design or the printing is going to
be a huge advantage down the road.
Okay. And that pretty much concludes this video.
I really hope it help.
That's pretty much all the main things that I've learned and the things that I
wish I knew in the form of a blueprint.
Literally, everything is free except for obviously the initial machine cost.
If you do need to buy a 3d printer, but if this information and the examples
helped do consider subscribing, if you have any questions or comments or you're
interested in other videos, Please let me know in the comment section of this video.
And until then, I'll see you guys in the next one.