Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Partnering to Get it Made: Zach Kaplan, Inventables”.
All right, so my name is zach kaplan, i’m the founder and ceo of inventables and the slides went too fast there all right. So this my story starts in 2002. I went to the rapid prototyping show in chicago before it was called 3d printing. It was called rapid prototyping and these were the kinds of machines that they had there there i emailed terry rollers runs the rollers report, which does this industry study on rapid prototyping, and i asked him in in 2002. What was the average price of a 3d printer? Does anybody know yes, anybody anybody, guess average price two we got 200k.
What did i hear 240 anybody else 50k. It was 450 thousand dollars, so over the next decade you could say it dropped from 450 thousand dollars to the the cheapest printer you can get is about three 299 350 in the course of almost a decade, pretty exciting. Give yourself a round of applause, so in in august of 2012, the economist wrote this article about the third industrial revolution, the digitization of manufacturing – and i was like this is awesome, so the digital, the the subtitle of the article, was the digitization of manufacturing – will transform The way goods are made and then i was like we’ll transform the way. I think they got it wrong. It’S is transforming the way if we’ve been listening to all these talks here. It’S already transforming so props to the economists were writing the article, but i think they got the subtitle around.
So what we do at inventables is we’re an online hardware store for this digital fabrication revolution and there’s really about 12 000 products that we sell in eight categories: materials, machines, components, fasteners – and i was approached uh basically in january of last year by uh, the inventor Of this machine, it’s the shapoco cnc milling machine. His guy’s name is edward ford and he had run a kickstarter there’s edward. His goal with this machine was that him and like nine buddies, would do some cnc, have some beers and have some fun, and so, as you see, his goal for the kickstarter was 1500 bucks. So that’s funny today, but at the time it just seemed like it was what he was doing, and so he raised 11 000, which was 10x his goal and he actually didn’t want more than 1500 because he just wanted to make like 10 machines to mess around.
With friends, so he ended up shipping it successfully and his garage turned into this mini factory um. But his wife really didn’t want him doing this in the house anymore, and so he put up a forum and generated this massive community of very passionate, diy cnc, guys who were basically rolling their own. These things didn’t come assembled their kits and over the course of the next year, built huge competency, online kind of like diy drones, where these guys are just mostly in their house, doing cnc, improving the machines, and so we ended up launching. He didn’t really want to do a second kickstarter, so we launched on our site a pre-order campaign, because we had no idea how many of these things wanted to get bought. So the question people ask is: why would edward want to work with you? Well, one was, i think, his wife wanted him to work with us more than he wanted to work with us. But two is he had a full-time job and he didn’t want this to take over his life.
You see his goal was 1500 bucks. He enjoyed the engineering, the design, the main, the basically the creative part of the making the machine he did not enjoy picking packing shipping all of these kits to all of his customers, and so the other thing that we learned you could we didn’t know this at The time, but in retrospect all of the customers that were buying from him on kickstarter were way over here in this. In the innovators, the people who are willing to roll their own, the people are willing to roll up their sleeves and when an m5 screw is in there, they just go over to the hardware store pick it up. They’Re like no problem.
This gets awesome, and so his view of the world was everybody was like this, and so once it got, he started getting customers who probably shouldn’t have been buying the machine which were over here and he’s like yeah. I don’t know why they’re doing this so um. The second reason was because all the customers – inventables were probably somewhere between here and here, and he wanted to sort of get it out of his garage, and so we joke about this in the office. Where edward is it like? 99, like it’s done, we’re like okay? Well, that’s like 25 of the project, so the last 1 is 75 of the project and it really depends on.
When you mean project. Do you mean product that people are buying from you or project in your house, because 99 of his project was done, so we? The first thing we did? Is we we put up the the pre-order campaign. We got about 400 units that were bought in the first 22 days, which was about three times the number that we were hoping for and we set up an assembly line in chicago in what’s called a sheltered workshop. So this is a it’s a social service where folks, who have some sort of disability but they’re physically able to do things can do work, but they also get medical treatment, and so we had all of them, basically in a line. But it was a six person assembly line and on the we promised them within 60 days of the campaign ending and on the 60th day. This is what the kit looks like assembled. We had pallets and pallets of these things, shipping out and we sent out an email with a blog post with the picture from the ups truck and the ups guy going like what the hell are. These things, so it turned out in october of 2012 edward ended up coming to work for inventables, because we had done four more campaigns with this each where we had sold about 100 or 200 machines, and so at this point we had sold about 1500 machines.
Since april, so he had come and he’s now a full-time employee, so he quit his real job and now he’s working full-time with us on the next version of the machine, and so it is a true open source project. All of the components are open source. The plans are online, you can hack it, you can mod it.
People have made everything from pick and place machines to plotters how many people in the in the room have a shipoko that they. So you got a handful of folks here: um, the guys who do the electronics are speaking next, but in true open source fashion. Someone in the community actually uh had some open source, cad and cam software that he wanted nothing to do with.
So we adopted it. It’S called maker cam, so it’s free, it’s open source and it’s online and it lets you go from design to uh g-code in about five minutes. So this is a it’s two and a half d, so you can’t do complex curves, but this is an iphone dock. That you’ll see at the end, where you basically go um make a rounded rectangle and then you can do the tool pass and you’re done. So the shane pickle also ended up changing inventables, so, prior to edward, we didn’t have any wood, and now this is a picture of all the wood that we have. So if you need purple heart in 8 by 12, we’re your guys we’ve also because of the volume now there’s almost 2000 shape logos out there we upgraded to a proper manufacturing facility, and this is a picture of the cell where they do the assembly and we Now inventory them, so you don’t have to do a pre-order anymore and they ship same day, so that was kind of exciting.
And now that edward doesn’t so edward was working, two jobs, one where he was going to his real job and then at night, where he was working on the machine. And so now he has 40 hours a week to just focus on the machine. We’Re about to launch uh the next version, actually, the next two versions so uh to be fair to all the folks who supported us and got this we’re going to keep an open source open machine. That’S fully hackable and extensible! You can get it up to for about 200 more dollars.
You can make them eight sorry, six by six um people are doing it in their garage for about 800 bucks total, so 600 bucks for this kind of thing, but then also a fully assembled one for folks who have no interest in in assembling the machine themselves And so what starts getting interesting is when i started with the economist in the way that digitization is changing manufacturing. So these are examples of a bamboo wooden clocks that we have made in our in our lab and inventables, and you see, basically, you drew the shape. The exterior shape and then the the machine cuts out the the profile and the pockets, and so then, when you start so this is a picture of the iphone dock.
You start seeing. People are buying the machines and they’re starting their own businesses on etsy selling things like iphone, docs or jewelry or clocks things that maybe you would buy a crate and barrel. But what really started getting interesting was when this company approached us and they make the body of this watch uh with the mill, and they had historically done it with uh conventional milling just like by hand and when they like blew their mind when they learned about Cnc milling, so this watch really sort of changed, even my perspective, of like what was possible with these tools. These guys sell these watches for about 250 bucks they’ve got a store in the galleria and in dallas, there’s five guys in the company, and it’s just fundamentally changing if they make them in dallas on their machine. It’S just changing the way that we’re thinking about products.
What’S possible and how quickly they can iterate. Thank you very much. .