Have you ever thought of starting a 3D printing business? There is no better time to do that than today. But how to start a 3D printing business?
Starting a 3D printing business is not easy because there are many things to note: get to know the market, what type of printer you should use, how you should build a brand, etc.
Don’t worry! We will help you solve these questions with the article below!
1. Learn Thoroughly About 3D Technology
A mandatory principle you must grasp in business is: “to trade certain products or services, you must understand them.”
If you want to open a 3D printing company, you should learn about 3D printing techniques, applications of 3D printing in everyday life, etc.
One more thing you cannot ignore when setting up a 3D printing business at home is the technical know-how.
Even if you are about to hire an expert to help you run your business, you still need to understand how 3D technology works.
Like most self-employed entrepreneurs, you must familiarize yourself with all the essentials needed to run a successful 3D printing business.
It involves knowing how to set up the machine, the materials used, how your print is designed, and any other information that will help you create high-quality 3D prints for your clients.
Learn, collect knowledge about the printing industry, learn 3D printing techniques, expand your lessons, and be creative to have knowledge and differences.
After you have mastered the 3D printing techniques and know-how to create a beautiful print, you need to learn and learn business knowledge.
To succeed in any field, you must constantly learn and improve knowledge related to your business field.
2. A Detailed Budget You Can Afford
As with any business, having a budget determines the type of business you will run. It is about the quality, size, and quantity of 3D printers you intend to buy.
Depending on your budget, you can start small with one printer or have multiple printers if your budget allows. Also, for starters, you can outsource printing services before at least you can get your printer.
You will only need the designs; then, when they are printed for you, you can sell them on your internet site.
You need to note that the beginning up excursion will require a specific measure of cash to fabricate offices and put resources into the labor force while not having the option to work for sure-fire income.
When you build samples, marketing needs to have good financial preparation and calculate the total capital to prepare.
Therefore, it is important to have a conservative and sensible consumption plan right from the outset as well as during the later improvement of the business.
3. Market Research
Before starting your 3D printing business, research the market in your area to determine the needs your business will meet.
If there are other businesses in your local area already, find out how and what they might not be doing. It will give you a unique selling point to attract customers.
Do you provide a cheap 3D printing service, or do they run a free 3D printing service from time to time? If not, consider doing so because you have the advantage of not having to pay for an office space.
More importantly, statistical surveying assists you with staying aware of the most recent improvements in your objective market and pursuing fast advertising choices.
In the quickly changing global business climate, you want such a proactive methodology, and that is your truly upper hand.
Through statistical surveying, you can decide the size of potential client gatherings and the distinctions between each gathering in various nations and foresee their inclinations to answer.
The “proactive” move will prompt accomplishment by rapidly answering and presenting appropriately planned items in size, style, and so forth to every client above.
4. Decide What 3D Printer You Use
What are you going to print? Remember that with 3D printing, the list of things you can tackle is endless: Toys, home decor materials, prosthetics, face shields, ear pain relievers, furniture, jewelry, and even homes.
While you may still be general, identifying who is specifically for you will give you the edge of being known to be an expert in a given industry.
For example, you can choose to serve hospitals and medical equipment dealers. There are different types of 3D printers on the market today.
They are classified according to the 3D printing technique, the 3D printed material, or the purpose of 3D printing. But whatever it is, the structure will include the following three main parts:
- Mechanical parts: in charge of guiding the drive for the printing parts. The precision of the mechanical part determines the precision of the 3D printer.
- Electronic parts: is the part that reads and analyzes G-Code commands from 3D software to convert to electrical signals that control the 3D printer engine.
- Printing parts: are the parts that directly participate in the process of creating layers of stacked material.
From the type of analysis point you focus on, you can choose the printer with the above component designs that is right for you.
5. Choose The Type Of 3D Printing You Target
3D printing technology is widely applied in manufacturing goods products worldwide because of its efficiency in terms of product processing.
Continual innovations to further meet market demand have created the variety of 3D printing technologies available today.
You need to choose the type of 3D printing you target to develop the right strategies. Here is information summarizing some of the 3D printing innovations for you to consider:
FDM 3D printing innovation: The FDM 3D printing innovation is widely used for 3D printers with filamentous materials.
The operating principle is based on heating the deposited plastic strip through a hot extruder to produce printing layers according to the data from the system.
Each layer hardens as it is deposited and overlaps the previous layer until the product is formed.
- SLM 3D printing technology
SLM metal 3D printing technology uses materials such as titanium powder, copper powder, aluminum powder, and steel powder to make 3D printed materials for products.
SLM technology uses UV rays and high-intensity lasers to embed each layer of materials to design products.
- DLP 3D printing technology
DLP technology was invented by Larry Hornbeck in 1987 and is used in film projectors, cell phones, and 3D printing.
DLP 3D printing technology is a digital light treatment that exposes the printed material to light to form solid thin sheets and is stacked on top of each other to create the finished product.
- SLA 3D printing technology
SLA 3D printing technology uses UV rays to solidify printed layers from liquid plastic materials with printing layers up to 0.06mm.
This technology is used to create products that require high precision, surface smoothness, and high aesthetics, such as in the fields of dental medicine, jewelry, and fine arts.
6. Price Your Product
Building a business takes time, effort, and money. Any content you create, unique product combinations you find, or additional customer support you provide can add value to your product.
The resources you invest and the additional value you provide to customers should be reflected in product pricing. You should determine how you value your design from scratch to avoid confusing your client.
Your price will depend on the design’s size, material, and complexity. The more niches you have, the more you can charge because the customer doesn’t have as many choices.
You can encourage customers to use our free 3D printing service for large orders for their small and simple designs. As long as your service is top-notch, even the smallest free bonuses can keep your customers coming in for more.
Product pricing plays an important role in many different aspects of the business, such as:
- It is one of the four tools under the 4P Marketing strategy.
- It has a significant impact on the profit value of the business.
- The agent has a great influence on the competitiveness of products.
- It has the ability to show how businesses position their products relative to competitors in the market.
- Price variation will have significant effects on all aspects of a business.
7. Branding
Branding makes your business special. The most typical example of building quality for your business is when consumers face many products to choose from, they will decide to buy your product instead of other products.
It proves that the brand factor has created a competitive advantage for your products; it can affect the customers’ buying decisions.
Regardless of the branding strategy, focusing on your target audience is important because the ultimate purpose of branding is to find customers and increase the number of products/services sold in the long run.
Target groups of customers are groups with demographic characteristics (age, gender, geographic location, income, education level) that are relevant to the company’s products/services; they are people in need and willing to pay to address their needs.
Selecting the correct audience will help brand strategy planners to analyze and partly predict target customers’ consumption habits. Then offer product introduction programs and promotions that suit their needs.
Besides, consulting and learning from previous competitors in your branding process is necessary.
However, you should avoid copying the competitor’s identity strategy, but be selective and create your brand through special features, outstanding product quality, service attitude, philosophy, etc.
8. A Marketing Campaign
It is not only your question but also the questions of many people, whether in the industry or amateurs. You should know that only advertising campaigns can have a well-thought-out investment in goals and achieve the goals.
You need time to influence the perception and emotion of your guests and target products, leading to changing behavior, increasing brand awareness, making customers interested, and choosing your products or services.
You might consider using the internet and social media platforms to market your design. Take professional photos of your prints and share them on your Instagram for everyone to know about your service.
You can also run ads and write guest posts about your services on popular internet sites where potential customers tend to hang out.
The message is one of the factors determining the success of an advertising campaign; good messages are often suitable for in-depth deployment.
Letโs tell many different stories and create intimacy with users, helping them feel like they are “the main character” in the story.
Your brand creates a pervasive, emotional impact and changes customer behavior. Therefore, you should have a consistent advertising campaign around your goals.
Some Tips for You to Start a 3D Printing Business
Here are the most important tips to keep in mind when starting a 3D business:
Offer An Idea That Adds Value
If there are no differences in the products on the market, price is the main factor determining the product’s competitive advantage. So either your product has to be different, or it has to be cheaper than the competition.
What makes your product more valuable than your competition, and why should consumers spend money on your product when it’s more expensive than similar products?
The key to selling effectively in this situation is the “unique selling point.” You cannot target your sales unless you identify what makes your store unique.
Identifying unique selling points requires creativity and scrutiny. One way to start is by analyzing how other stores use their USP for convenience.
It requires you to carefully analyze the advertising and marketing messages of the stores doing the same business.
If you carefully analyze what they say about what they sell and not just their products, you can learn a lot about how those stores differentiate from their competitors.
Keep Costs Low
Cost is one of the factors that customers care about. To keep costs low, you should apply modern technology in your operation.
With telephone utilities, online installment deals, the executive’s programming, and far-off administration PC applications, you don’t have to sit around and labor force to work the above errands in the picture above.
This conventional business information is also how science and innovation assist you with lessening business costs and becoming more expert.
You additionally failed to remember one thing that old clients don’t have to lose cash on PR or to publicize. However, they can, in any case, carry on with work.
Hence, organizations should spend the expense of growing new client frameworks from former connections.
Learn From Successful 3D Printing Startups
There is a lot of important knowledge and skills if you are a business owner, the head of a company, or an organization. And to achieve that, self-learning skills are also essential for any business owner to know and implement.
There is a lot of knowledge that not all books provide enough nor a single teacher to teach you. Besides that, between knowledge and reality is also not completely 100% accurate.
Each person needs to learn by themselves and others through their experiences to have more useful knowledge. For business owners who lead hundreds of thousands of employees, self-learning becomes even more important.
Self-learning will help to have more ideas and experiences that are important to managing the operating apparatus of the company or enterprise.
Conclusion
In the manufacturing industry, 3D printers are used more widely, thanks to their ability to produce models with complex shapes, quickly create products, etc.
Starting a 3D printing business is not difficult, but to be effective in business is hard. We hope that the steps to take and the important tips we’ve given above can help you. Thank you for following us!