This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/3dprinting by /u/Fickle-Echo-2227 on 2025-08-17 10:51:17+00:00.
The first lesson, revenue /= net profit. With 10.000 USD of revenue, I got 2000 USD net profit.
TLDR: Made 4400 USD with a Kickstarter, and 5500 USD with a Shopify store selling Hardware kits for 3D printed designs. In the end, I earned less than 5 USD/hour for the time spend.
I learned a lot from this sub and maybe someone can now learn from my last 12 months.
The Start:
I lived in Germany my whole life and came to Hong Kong around 3 years ago. I started 3D printing back in university and wasn't 100% happy with my job at that time. So I started to look for opportunities to make some money with my hobby. First thing I realized how cheap stuff in China really is, even compared to Aliexpress. There are a few kits out there that give you a list of hardware that you need to buy from Aliexpress, and if you buy that in China directly, it is around 30-50% of Aliexpress. So a few weeks pass by and I figured it would be a good idea to design kits and sell the hardware as custom kits with the exact quantity. I started to explore what kind of designs would suit me and what kind of category would have interest.
The First Kit
The first design I decided to do a Marble Run. Since I am a mechanical engineer, I also wanted to give it a touch of engineering to it. The elevator for the marbles was designed to be a planetary gearbox with two inverse rotating elevators in one. A few weeks later, I finished the design sourced the all the parts that were needed for assembling. The kit contains screws, bearings, a 3V motor, a battery box for 2x AAA batteries and the marbles. The hardware per kit cost around 6 USD at the time. The next question came up - how and where do I sell it?
Marble Run
Crowdfunding
I knew that a website without traffic wouldn't do it. I also didnt want to invest to much money and order a bunch of kits and never sell them. Thats when I discovered Kickstarter. The platform is supposed to be for innovative new prodcuts and creators to share their projects and collect funds before going into production/shipping. This would give me a few benefits, free traffic and I don't have to prepare the kits before selling them. I could run the campaign, and after the campaign is over I order everything and ship the kits. So far so good. A few days into the campaign, and the Campaign didn't get a lot of attention. A few kits were pre ordered but under my expectations.
Marketing
Even with a Kickstarter, you need to attract people to your Campaign. I have tried social media, posting pictures and videos everywhere but it didn't really get any conversation.
The next thing I tried is Advertising. I set myself a budget of 50-100USD/day and see what will come back. I tried to advertise on google, youtube, reddit, instagram and facebook. The only really success I had was on Facebook. Once dialed in, I got a ROAS (return on ad spent) of around 2. That means, I spent 100 USD on advertising and got around 200 USD in sales. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Results of the Kickstarter Campaign:
So how much money did I make with Kickstarter? The Campaign raised around 4368 USD.
But how much did I spend? The Kickstarter Fee is 5%, payment fees and dropped backers are another 5%, so that brings me down to 3931 USD. I spent a total of around 1900 USD on advertising, 560 USD on shipping, 450 USD on goods to come to a net profit of 1021 USD. It is interesting to see that I spent more money on shipping than on the goods itself. That was another lesson I learned. Since I decided to use 12mm steel balls as the marbles, 14 of those in one kit already account for 100g, which shipped by air makes it quite expensive. The whole kit with packaging weights 245g in total.
My own store
After the Campaign ended, I tried to use the knowledge of advertising to generate traffic for my own online store. I learned to set up a shopify store, Google Analytics for tracking and connected the Facebook Ads account to it. It is very important to set up everything properly so Facebook can use the Data to track the customers. I was preparing the kits at night and going to the post office in my lunch hours. It takes a lot of visits to convert someone to buy your product. I believe online it is common to have somewhere between 2-3% as a standard (My overall conversion rate is 1.34% with 2 months of no sales due to tariffs).
Here are my first two months:
First two months of Shopify Store
The first month wasn't great, I was expecting that before Christmas, people would spend more money, but at the same time that also means that more companies spend more money on advertising, and it becomes more expensive for everyone. I adjusted a few settings, improved the store and January was already profitable. I also added some features to increase the order value. I added spare parts, and offering discount on buying 2 kits, which increased revenue and profit.
The second kit
In the meantime, an Interview of Donald Trump caught my attention: "Drill Baby, drill" got me into looking at those Oil derricks and their mechanism. I thought it would be a nice second kit and maybe gets public attention because of the current politics. It was designed quite fast, and I decided to do a Pre-Order on my own website without a Kickstarter.
Oil Pumpjack
The release week resulted in sales worth of over 1200 USD:
https://preview.redd.it/hemwuse6xjjf1.png?width=1040&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f9641ee660cc1c9bff9dbdf707cb8f37d3213b3
New Strategy for Oil Pumpjack
I had an idea for a longer period in my mind that I would like to give a try. Instead of selling the Design files together with the Hardware, I wanted to share them for free and give the customers the options to buy from my website. I shared them on Printables, makerworld, cults, and Thingiverse.
The biggest impact had Thingiverse. Sharing it gave me a lot of traffic, and it was increasing day by day.
Unfortunately, it only lasted 30 days, since the main website shows whats trending in the last 30 days. I made it even to the front page of the website for the last couple of days.
Thingiverse Analytics Oil Pumpjack (Purple: Views, Green: Downloads)
I didn't spend anything on advertising in April, sold half the amount and made more profit compared to March:
March vs. April sales
Tariffs
Unfortunately, tariffs were announced and 90% of my customers were from the USA. I paused my store from April to July.
New strategy for Marble Run
Tariffs cooled down and I also found a third-party company in China to do international shipping. They can ship with pre-paid Tax for European countries and also for USA. Outsourcing the shipping was the long on my To Do list. It saves me a lot of time and was one of the best decisions. I prepared 50 kits, sent it to the warehouse and they take care of tax and delivery. I had similar success to the Oil Pump:
Thingiverse Analytics Marble Run
Shopify sessions over the same period of time
July and August Net Profit
You can see that the sessions grew proportionally to the views on Thingiverse. For example, in the last 5 days of the "Hype" I had between 1800-2400 views per day on Thingiverse, that translated to 90-100 Views on my website.
Was it worth it?
It was amazing to see people build your stuff and share it online, but I definitely underestimated that not everyone is using the latest printers and know what they are doing. If you sell to customers, some will text you with all their problems. Of course, I am trying to answer everything and everyone, but it is also tired and sometimes annoying.
Moneywise, definitely not. I spent hundreds of hours designing, learning, trying, staring at my phone and waiting for sales, and especially when you are running ads, you can burn money very easy and fast.
If you compare the time I spend and the money I got, I think it is way below 5 USD/hour for the profit.
But I learned a lot. From social media marketing, to setting up a website, increasing sales, designing kits, video editing, customer behavior and logistics. It also helped me with the job interview of my current job, not that I got the job because of the store I was running, but we talked about it.
Whats next?
My motivation to start this business was to learn and earn some money, because my job did not fulfill me. I recently changed my job and have no time to run the store anymore.
I don't know what to do with it now, I don't have time (for now) to design new kits, but it cost around 50 USD for the store, email, etc..
