- This is the Toybox prototype.
Would I have started my business if I knew
that we would not have paid ourselves
for the first two years,
almost shut down the company twice,
be profitable and then not be profitable the year after?
Yeah, I think I would've.
- Ever since childhood, Ben Baltes wanted
to be an entrepreneur, but he didn't know how,
or even what he would start.
- You know, I remember having a conversation
with my dad when I was pretty young:
I asked why Bill Gates was the richest man in the world,
and he told me, "He made computers easy to use."
- That insight, making technology easy
for the world to use, inspired him to develop one
of the most user-friendly 3D printers on the market—
even a kid could operate it.
But getting there was anything but easy.
- The fact that we get to define the future of 3D printing,
I wouldn't give that up for the world.
That being said, uh it's f**king hard.
- You just started your dream business.
How much profit will you need
to pay your basic living expenses,
like rent and ramen?
This is a show about
the economics of entrepreneurship,
and founders making their dreams a reality.
This is "Ramen Profitable."
This is Ben Baltes.
Before he started Toybox, he worked at Microsoft,
and considered himself a 3D printer hobbyist.
- What really inspired this was
what happened outside of work.
I had just enough money to buy a 3D printer.
Zach, Jenn and I, we were building all types of stuff.
- Here's a little face planter that I designed.
- Shoes.
But the learning curve was very steep.
- It was just so hard to use,
like, this could really be so much easier.
Like, this could be so much better.
- Having backgrounds in tech, Ben, Zach, and Jenn
decided to try and build their own 3D printer;
one that removed the complex barrier of entry
so you could print stuff with the click of a button.
- When we wanted to start this,
we wanted to find a market that made a lot of sense,
and we looked at a ton of markets.
There's like, plastic bins;
that's like a $90 billion industry, right?
Hand tools is like a $9 billion industry.
There's tons of things around the house that you can print,
but we wanted to start with something
that people would find use out of right away.
And for us, that was toys.
So these are our first three prototypes.
This is the one we took to Maker Faire.
We built them all consecutively,
one after the other,
and this was really just like a proof of concept.
It's all super glued together and painted.
Definitely not something we wanted to go to market with,
but definitely got the job done.
- Ben and his friends decided
to debut their passion project at Maker Faire,
a convention for DIY enthusiasts
to showcase what they've made.
- You know, I remember when we were
planning for Maker Faire,
I was thinking of it as like a competition,
like, we're gonna win this trade show.
In reality, our prototype was spray-painted;
it had paint marks all over it.
- We show up, everybody has these really expensive,
like, setups and actual backdrops.
- And I remember looking around
and just being like, "Oh my God, this is embarrassing."
But, you know, once we set that thing up,
kids were lining up
for hours just to print, you know, a small toy.
I think we printed 600 toys just that weekend.
- The kids, they were the ones that really proved
that we're onto something here.
- After Maker Faire, Ben, Jenn, and Zach
had all quit their jobs to work full-time on developing
the Toybox printer.
- We didn't pay ourselves for like the first two years.
After I started using all of my money,
I started dipping into my retirement account,
and that's when things got really low.
- But, as money burned, they kept innovating.
- So this is what we ended up going with,
much better for production.
- What's unique about the Toybox printer
is the software.
It allows users to browse toys on a computer or phone,
select what they want, and simply press 'print.'
It demonstrates a future
where you could easily be printing things like shoes,
kitchenware, and tools at home.
- We have something called 'The Creator Space' here,
where everything is customizable,
and that's like a really key component of it.
- Finding the right price point is tricky.
People would come up to us, just completely intrigued,
like, "This is so cool, I want this in my home."
And they'd all be like, "$500 to $1,000, right?"
I'd be like, "No, it's only $400, do you want it?"
And we got said "no" to by everyone
for two months straight.
It was a brutal experience
'cause like people thought
it was more expensive than it was,
but nobody was buying it.
So, we went down to like $200
and the first person we talked to bought it.
Second person we talked to bought it.
$200 was a little too cheap;
we wouldn't be able to produce it for that cost.
$300 was where we could reasonably price it at the time,
and that's when people would kind of think about it
and purchase it.
- With that insight, Ben was able
to negotiate a factory deal that would allow them
to hit their profit margins
so they could begin their path towards profitability.
Toybox had officially set the price of their
printer at $300.
- Okay, I can close this up by, like, the end of the day.
- The next steps they took proved that timing
and persistence would be everything
if they were going to make a name for themselves
in the toy industry.
Ben and his co-founders raised $80,000
from a small group of investors,
and they decided to use it on an Indiegogo campaign.
- That Indiegogo campaign
returned around $160K in sales.
After that Indiegogo, Shark Tank contacted us
to have us on the show.
After we filmed, business was not doing too well.
We were growing not as fast as we wanted to,
and our runway was running out.
The founders actually all got together
and we had to have a conversation
of how we were gonna shut down the company.
That's a brutal experience.
- But, as luck would have it,
their Shark Tank episode aired,
and something incredible happened.
- We have these notifications on our phone
that, you know, pretty much ring
every time there was a sale.
Every two or three seconds, we were selling a printer.
That generated something like half a million in sales.
We sold out almost immediately.
That made a huge difference for us.
The ramp-up has just been pretty extreme since then.
- Over the next five years, Toybox went
from $160,000 in annual revenue to $10.6 million.
They recently launched a subscription service bringing
in an extra $1.2 million.
And Toybox even landed a large licensing deal
with Warner Bros., where users can print their content.
- Most success arcs have periods
where the founders think they're gonna fail
and push through it.
You know, if you look at almost every success story,
there are those moments,
and I think what differentiates, you know,
the successful people are just the people that don't give up.
And a little bit of luck.
- We actually 3D-printed our first 3D printer prototype.
I remember putting it together in my mom's garage,
and I accidentally spray-painted my mom's car,
and I feel so bad about it.