Full on Confusion
*God this marketing voice is so fucking cheesy and gross what was I thinking when I wrote this*
What is even going on in the 3D print space anymore. How do I feel “Old School” after only getting into this with the release of the Ender3 in 2018.
I need to adapt my plans. Things have have changed.
The accessibility of 3D printing has made things explode. It has also saturated markets. Much bigger markets than ever before, but with so many more options.
How do I break through the noise?
Promoting my Mushroom 3D Stick-Stack-Toad-Stool game taught me a lot about how the landscape has changed. Social media has changed too. And search engines. This landscape is so different than it was even two years ago.
A new marketplace of ideas
Makerworld, Thangs, Printables, so many new powerhouses of websites just sprung up seemingly overnight. Thingiverse and Github seem like old news. I have my research cut out for me figuring out the best approach.
I tend to think my own websites are the best way to go, but are they really? Social media changes so fast, and so do these 3D printing oriented websites. It is both very hard to keep up, and unwise not to.
From Early Adapter to Behind the Times
What do I do now that I am no longer an early adapter?
Did that window close?
How do I catch up?
What is good positioning?
Why does it feel like making comics is the way to go forward?
Just being my authentic goofy self feels like the way to go.
There are so many people saying “Hey look at this trinket I designed.” But how many people are saying “HEY I MADE THE BEST TIC TAC TOE GAME EVER OMG AHHHHHHH MY HEAD IS GONNA TIC TAC EXPLOAD?” I’m not sure.
I appreciate this talk on the subject:
3D Printing Design Marketing Best Practices(?)
This is a topic I would like to explore a lot further and will in upcoming posts. What are best practices for marketing your 3D printable designs? What are the best ways to market free designs? What are the best ways to market paid designs?
Doing market research and I stumbled on this Reddit thread from the owner of Outofmarbles.com. They seemingly had their designs ripped off from an AI bot cranking out webstores with stolen digital product. In the comments they left this gem while interacting with another Redditor:
“But generally speaking if you are good in marketing (which I’m not,) then you don’t even need that good of a niche.”
This statement makes me go “Woah!”
My background is in campaign strategy. It has been a long rocky road that brought me to 3D printing. This all begs the question: “What does good marketing in the 3D printing space look like?”
I saw Bambu Lab partner with thousands of influencers for the launch of their products. That takes so much start up capital! What would a little guy do to get going? What are my best practices for my own stuff moving forward? I have very little capital, my 3D printer is great but not up to date with the current scene, and the market is heavily saturated with 3D designers who are often working for free or makerworld rewards. How will I ever break in? I will document this journey in the upcoming blog posts!
Posting stuff in 100+ Facebook groups and all relevant subReddits, sending it to partnered Youtube and TikTok channels, posting it on my own channels, posting designs to all these different 3D printing websites, creating text content and flash and how to guides, create a bunch of video media about it, cultivating user communities, building websites, on and on; it is all so much!
This was a nice update on how to hang with modern social media:
It feels like a lot of established businesses got in on this space before there was a lot of competition. Most talented designers seemed to have jobs with their skills that made 3D printers look like a waste of time. Poorly functioning rapid prototype machines – why would they focus on that for anything but prototyping? With the mass popularity and accessibility of 3D printing now, there are huge markets for them to break into and focus on!
If you were a moderately successful early adapter, your old methods of cornering a market might not be keeping up with the times. Competition is saturating the markets and you will need to defend your position. Anyone with a good enough product who follows the right steps can break in and further saturate everything. How will those early adapters defend their positions? How will I carve out my position that has faded away with the time I took off over the past 2 years?