Growing Lean

Exploring the Future of Manufacturing with 3D Printing: A Conversation with Gabe Bentz

• Ethan Halfhide

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Brace yourself for a journey into the future of manufacturing with 3D printing, as we host Gabe Bentz, a mechanical engineer and the CEO of Slant 3D. Gabe shares his thrilling journey from robotics to consumer product design and how it led him to pioneer an innovative production 3D printing company. Discover how 3D printing has transformed from a costly and intricate process to an affordable and scalable manufacturing option due to automation and on-demand production. Gabe explains how 3D printing can revolutionize the manufacturing sector, offering limitless possibilities for businesses.

The excitement doesn't stop there! We continue to unravel the magic of 3D printing and its ground-breaking influence on e-commerce and dropshipping. With the guidance of a guest who operates one of the world's largest print farms, we break down how this technology is overhauling the production process, making it simpler and more cost-effective. Curious about the role of AI in 3D printing? Our guest lays out the potential of AI in creating personalized products and how it is set to make 3D printing even more compelling in the future. 

But every technology has its share of challenges and 3D printing is no exception. In our final segment, we delve into the highs and lows in the 3D printing industry from finding a dedicated customer base to the rigors of building hardware. We offer valuable advice to entrepreneurs keen on making a splash in the 3D printing industry, highlighting the potential for innovation given the low entry cost. As we wind up, Gabe talks about his commitment to nurturing community and collaboration in the 3D printing industry. To stay in the loop with Gabe’s journey and Slant 3D, check out their YouTube channel and connect with Gabe on LinkedIn. We bet you won't regret tuning in for this enriching conversation.

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Speaker 1:

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning software and app development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, Dylan Burke, also known as Deige. I'm happy to be here with Gabe Bentz, CEO of Slant 3D. Welcome, Gabe. Hey, Dylan, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for being here. I'm excited to hear about your journey. Can you get us started and give us a little bit of your history and background and how you ended up where you are today?

Speaker 2:

So I'm originally a mechanical engineer. I was trained in robotics and that kind of thing, and that was kind of the start of my career was working in space robotics and then moving into consumer robotics. But up until about 2015, I was working at a product design firm where we did consumer products and that kind of stuff. But while we were there we started. We created a small project that had to be 3D printed, mainly because we were lazy and we didn't want to go for molds to make the thing, because at that point the molds would have just been super expensive because you'd have to spend $100,000 for the molds and then you start getting your parts. So we decided to print them because it was viable at that point. But that product was way more successful than we had originally anticipated, which is a well shuck-starn. But we ended up producing it with printing and we saw how terrible that process was.

Speaker 2:

But as engineers we kind of identified that there was a roadmap to where 3D printing could be made reliable and scalable, to where it could replace injection molding, so that you no longer have the molds, no longer all the warehousing and process around traditional manufacturing, and instead could just print stuff on demand. So we started working on that and in 2019, slant 3D was spun out as a production 3D printing company and any more. We work on kind of that main North Star goal of building a warehouse where the shelves make the product so that nothing ever actually exists until somebody actually buys it. And right now our main mega farm here in Boise is specced out for 3,000 machines and we work with everybody from Amazon to individual Etsy stores who want print on demand products, but at scale. So whether they are making a cookie cutter for a single bakery somewhere in the background or are going to be the next fidget spinners that just go viral and blow up and make millions of them, we're able to support them through both stages of that kind of growth and scale.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's amazing and it's super cool that you've taken the print on demand concept and put it into the 3D printing world. That's, I've never heard of that. That's epic. And just one question from my side is when 3D printing became a thing I don't know mainstream, like 10 years ago or so, it was like super expensive and it took like really long to print something is what has changed since then? That's made it a viable business option like yours.

Speaker 2:

A lot of the problems with printing that people had from the early old days and that kind of thing was sort of the perception that was slow, crappy and expensive.

Speaker 2:

None of those were really part of the process itself, because if you look at printing, you put an electricity and you put in plastic and a finished part comes out.

Speaker 2:

The problem the reason it was always expensive is because you had a human touching it too much, like a human pulling it off the machine or a human looking at it and inspecting it, which would make a 50 cent part suddenly cost 25 or 50 bucks because there's so many people touching it.

Speaker 2:

What we really focused on was the automation aspect, so that when a part comes off the machine it can go straight into a box and out the door and can be done at scale. So when a machine finishes a part, it ejects the part and moves on to the next one. A robot comes by, grabs the pieces and carries them off to where they're going to be packed up, so that the human touches a lot less, which makes it much more of a manufacturing process than a boutique prototyping, artisan process, which is really what it was in the early days where the single wizards who knew 3D printing were able to get their printer and make your part for you, but it was really expensive. But since we were able to deploy these tons of machines if you have thousands of machines, you're not making thousands of parts per hour pretty easily, even though the individual machine might be slow, but they're also reliable and there's enough automation to where you don't have people looking at it, which kind of solve all those problems of speed and capacity and cost pretty easily.

Speaker 1:

Okay, 100%. And how long would it take to print like, let's say, a fidget spinner, for example?

Speaker 2:

A fidget spinner might take as long as like an hour to print. So it takes an hour to grow a single part, which is really slow for a part. But if you parallelize that across like a thousand machines, you're making a thousand of those fidget spinners an hour. So you still have the scale, so long as those individual machines are affordable enough to deploy at that level. So just like server farms are able to support thousands of people watching a high-def movie at once, we're able to produce thousands of parts produced at the same rate per project rather than rate per part.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's awesome. And I saw that one of your or in your LinkedIn bio it says taking the molds out of the printing world, and that's really awesome. So you don't really need to have one machine to one product. You can have one machine to thousands of products, which I just don't mind. That's awesome.

Speaker 2:

It's really sick because, yeah, you're no longer setting your product in stone, which is literally what you're doing when you're doing a mold. You're carving it into a rock and that rock is gonna produce every single part of your parts. From now on, 3d printing is totally digital, so that, yes, all you have to do is upload a file and your part is now in production. If somebody orders that file, that digital information is sent to the machines. They grow the part and then the part is sent to the one person who ordered it. So you never have inventory, you never have that upfront cost of the molds set in stone and you can change your part over time, which is an advantage people don't really realize, because as soon as you have uploaded that model, if you get customer feedback and they say, oh well, you need a hole there, or we want a different color, or whatever else it was, you can just update that digital information and every part going forward will be changed, as if you had just updated an app, but you're able to do it with physical stuff.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. Yeah, that's huge. And would you say your? I think that your main customers would be like dropshippers and e-commerce guys. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

A lot of those guys who are doing e-commerce and, yeah, trying to find an alternative to T-shirts and mugs, because they're able to create truly original products now rather than just a different logo stapled across the chest. So a lot of those guys do it. But then on the other side we have a big kind of B2B component where companies will connect with us for, like, spare parts and that kind of thing, so that rather than storing spare parts for 10 years through the life of whatever they might need, they just upload the file and if somebody needs to buy that piece within the organization, they just go up and say, oh well, we need that washer, that bracket or that box, and they get that hardware, those kind of spare pieces or infrastructure kind of pieces for a corporate client.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's awesome, I love that. And what is your? Can you run me through your overall business strategy?

Speaker 2:

Which part of it, that's the whole business plan, would take an hour or two or something on those.

Speaker 2:

But our main goal is to be an alternative to injection molding, because molding is such a monolithic, slow and expensive process.

Speaker 2:

Basically, we're taking a startup process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and taking it down to like hundreds of dollars, so it's a 10 to 100x improvement over waste. The way stuff is made. So the way we go about like getting clients on board into that, is really showing them how 3D printed parts can be equivalent or better to traditionally manufactured, not only through the cost because you no longer have this big startup cost with traditional manufacturing but also through the engineering and how can you get a high quality part and how can it be reliable? And how does your supply chain change now that you no longer need molds, no longer need warehousing, no longer need ships full of containers, movement stuff. You just have to kind of plan and project around the parts that you need. So when we're talking to customers and bringing on customers, it's that conversation of like how can you kind of readjust what you do as minimally as possible, but readjust it so that you can really take advantage of what this technology does for you?

Speaker 1:

Okay, I love that. And so you said it brings down the costs if you were to buy in bulk, right? So what? How does your cost compare, let's say one for one, if you buy in from China or something like that?

Speaker 2:

So if you were buying parts from China in a traditional method, you would call up the factory over there and you'd say, okay, I need a mold made and they charge you $10 to $100,000 for the molds to be made. That's the first start and then you get your first part. Then, in order to make that mold pay for itself, you need to make about 10,000 to 100,000 parts, which will cost anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar, let's say, if it's like a fidget spinner size item. So now you have another 10 to $50,000 for just the parts themselves. So now you're $150,000 in and you've got your batch of parts and now you ship them over in a container and you have to store them for the next three years and hope everybody buys them. So there's a huge amount of risk for all of that upfront investment and you hope that your product is successful enough to sell through so that you paid off all of that upfront investment. Calling us up or a 3D printing company up, you're able to call them up and say here is the design for my file and you might spend like $100 to get a prototype of the file and that's your first production part.

Speaker 2:

So your first part cost $100 rather than $100,000.

Speaker 2:

Then you say, okay, I want 10,000 of these.

Speaker 2:

Then it would be per cost per part maybe 10 to 25% more expensive than injection molding, but you don't have the mold. So very often if you're doing mass production scales where you're making tens of thousands of parts, it is cheaper to use printing up to about 100,000 units rather than to go with traditional manufacturing. But that's only if you're going 10,000 parts and 10,000 parts Printing. You can make stuff on demand which is more expensive per part because now you're in a couple of dollars per part to print one single item at a time as each customer orders. But your risk is so much lower because you spent $100 to get started and verify it and then your margins are a little bit smaller per part for the first thousand, as you're doing this print on demand kind of component, but you're always profitable and you had basically zero upfront investment. So there's kind of like two tiers of matching injection molding and scale and then actually take an advantage of printing where you can do on demand stuff for kind of thinner margins but way less risk.

Speaker 1:

That's wow. That's insane. It blows my mind. I really love this concept. And how long so? You started about four years ago, correct? So how have there been any notable accomplishments like hitting the mainstream or getting like huge clients? What have been your notable achievements since you launched?

Speaker 2:

We don't hang our hat on too many of like the big wins because they're very, they're intermittent and they don't always keep the boat afloat for the big wins and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:

So we always focus within the company of like the little 1% improvement. How can we get just a little bit of an edge every single day and basically have that improvement compound over time? Because you can improve just a tiny amount every single day, at the end of the year you're like two or three times ahead of where you were, because 1% every day is 360% at the end of the year. But with that, the big wins that we've kind of had, probably one of the largest ones was the deployment of the mega farm here in Boise, which is one of the largest print farms on the planet, to where we have these thousands of machines that are able to produce parts at a scale that's never been possible before with any kind of printing. And the fact that that is interfaced to where someone can basically plug it into a Shopify or their business purchasing system or whatever else it was and just upload files and then get an order on demand and do it affordably, that's been a really, really big milestone.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome, okay, yeah, yeah, I understand, with the 1%, each day, it makes a big difference, and so you've obviously noticed, over the last four years, I guess, there's been a boom in dropshipping and e-commerce, as well as like this AI revolution. How have both of those affected or influenced your business? I assume the dropshipping was part of the reason you started this, because it was such a huge sector, so how have those influence, those changes in the industry, influenced your business?

Speaker 2:

Two very different influences. Ai and dropshipping have a decent amount of correlation, but they had very different industries. Dropshipping absolutely was great in the beginning, but ever since the iOS 13 update a year or two ago, to where online advertising has just fundamentally changed, the dropshipping industry has changed a lot, mainly for the better for us because, again, 3d printing gives people a differentiation that doesn't compare to anybody else, because dropshipping you're either doing print on demand with t-shirts and mugs, which are super boring and all of our sock drawers are full of that garbage, or you're in dropshipping straight from China, which is a really bad customer experience because it takes so long to ship over here. So you're either storing, warehousing and that kind of stuff, so we're in a really good position to help that industry because you're able to do truly original products but quickly delivered with low risk. The way AI has impacted all of this stuff is it hasn't quite reached us, because right now AI is still restricted to 2D art and writing and that kind of stuff, which certainly helps with the marketing content and all that kind of thing and even with the design of products, if you like, compared to the t-shirt or artwork kind of component of dropshipping.

Speaker 2:

But it's probably about two more years before AI gets good enough to really help with like 3D modeling, because right now, 3d modeling itself is a pretty technical process that requires technical skill of either being a game designer or an engineer or something else along those lines.

Speaker 2:

There's a learning curve to that. But generative AI makes the creation of 3D models basically free and unlimited. But I think that the implementation of that will not necessarily be dropshippers. I think it'll probably go more of a direction of an everything store unlike anything Amazon could ever do where basically a customer goes to your website and searches for the thing. The AI runs in the background, designs 10 separate product variations of the things that you're looking for. You click on and buy the thing that you looked for that didn't exist a second ago, and then the AI creates the model and sends it to the print farm, which prints that one perfectly original product to what you asked for on the website. It becomes a web store with infinite inventory and exactly what a person is looking for, rather than a large selection. It is whatever a person wants. It's flipping magic.

Speaker 1:

That's wild. Is that what you guys are leaning towards?

Speaker 2:

Yes, we're getting pretty well positioned to take advantage of that as it comes down and it matures. There's a lot of weirdness on the technical side of the AI component of it, but yes, we have the scale to be able to support that and support the startups that will be working on that kind of stuff here. So they build an appart farm is a really expensive thing because it's a factory and most startups who will be working with this don't have the capacity to build a large factory. So hopefully we have those all in place to where we're kind of the server farm for all of these guys to build on top of as they're messing with the generative AI solutions like that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, amazing. And because your factories are very low on human interaction, does that mean they can run 24, seven, three, sixty five? Yes, that's okay, that's wild. So what is your, what's your production capacity? I'm not sure what unit to use, but, yeah, you understand what I'm saying.

Speaker 2:

No, that's a really tough question to ask, because if you're making tiny little part, well, we make millions a week, yeah, but if you're making bread box, then it suddenly becomes slower. So there's not really a good direct relationship to that, other than, like, the number of machines. So, yeah, the main mega farm is specced out for 3000 machines. We're working on another mega farm in Texas that will be similarly sized and we hope to have about three to four of them more in the states in about the next two years distributed around, so they basically act as fulfillment centers, so that there's really a really good fulfillment rate.

Speaker 2:

But, math wise, if we were comparing to like an Amazon Amazon delivers 1.5 million packages a day. If we were to like replace them so that rather than warehouses, you have these print farms that are warehouses where the shelves make the product, we would need about 1.5 million 3D printers, which is about 500 of our current mega farm factories around the world. But that's a very doable kind of creation. That's not like oh, we need 2 million of these buildings around it's, it's hundreds, it's not millions or thousands, which is a very tenable kind of a goal. It's not absurd, it's just kind of large.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%, I'm sure it'll get there one day. Yeah, I'm super exciting. I see so much potential here. I'm excited to see where this goes. I'm definitely going to be following, following your journey. I wanted to also ask you I'm sure there've been some challenges in getting to where you are today, in opening that first farm. Can you talk about any of those challenges and how you overcame them?

Speaker 2:

Oh, many, many of them. What? The one of the largest things that we struggled with as a company and many companies struggle with is just focus. But it was especially bad for us because when you start a new company, you want to have a very detailed idea of who your customer is and a very, very small market segment so that you can really focus on and delight those core customers. Start this niche in a small as you possibly can and then you expand from there.

Speaker 2:

The problem that we had is that 3D printing can print anything. So what do you print? Where do you start? What is the industry that is ripe enough and strong enough and really loves it enough to where you can really focus in on them? And that's been a challenge for a long, long time, because it's like people wander through the door of, like, I want a gamer joystick, oh, I want a medical device. So I want a narrow space part, and for a long time we kind of, in order to pay the bills, you do whatever people ask you to do, but for long term growth and that kind of stuff, it has to be super, super focused, and that's something that we have struggled with and continue to struggle with, but it dilutes you so much that it's really tough to try everything, so you just have to iterate super fast to get to that core product market fit.

Speaker 2:

What we ended up finding was really for us one of the core places that works really well is like Etsy, because there were a lot of people who had like small print farms were producing product on Etsy but then don't have the scale to really expand for like Christmas season or if one of the products pops off. So we found product market fit with those folks to where we could really add value by giving them a lot more scale and allow them to focus on creating products rather than focus on the logistics of printing a part and putting it in a box and shipping it out. So that was kind of one of the first kind of core audiences. And then on the industrial side, the sales team found a few core markets there that we could really focus on and take care of that we can then expand from. But yeah, the finding that core group of customers whose eyes just light up when they get your product and see your product and use your products, that was a challenge for a long time because there was just so many options that we could go and there's plenty of people who like a lukewarm response but then you're not really adding anything to the industry. They're just like you or the other guy, whatever. So that was a big challenge.

Speaker 2:

And then just hardware is hard. Building a factory is flipping hard. My background I had done a lot in software and that kind of stuff for a long time, but I was always in robotics so I knew hardware was hard. But the challenge that a lot of people come to especially if you were like in a software background or the traditional startup background you're used to kind of this idealized world of the internet where you have full godlike control of your website or your app or whatever it happens to be, and that disappears as soon as you go into the real world. You are now dealing with just physics and the rotation of the earth and whatever else happens to go wrong. The humidity that day can jack up all your perfect plans. So building hardware that's reliable and durable and scalable is really tough and also just really expensive, because a bit costs nothing but a bolt costs a ton. So those were kind of some of the big challenges there.

Speaker 1:

Like building physical stuff is really really hard and having a good focused customer base when you can do anything is really really hard 100% and have you have there been any partnerships or collaborations that have helped you achieve what you have IE funding or anything like that or have you bootstrapped the business?

Speaker 2:

The business has been able to be bootstrapped for the large portion of it there because the model itself helps that. I mean we don't have to outlay capital except for building the factory on any given job, so we're able to be paid as we go as well as the customer gets paid as they go. So it's an easier model to bootstrap because there's not this big old two year R&D process where we're going to like build it all out. We're able to get to a dollar pretty quickly and we have a really big focus on getting to the customer, because if you're just thinking big thoughts in a room it's really not useful and you don't really have a company, so go get somebody to pay you somewhere somehow. But as far as the partnerships go more broadly, our industry is really really odd because it's focused on a completely different thing than what we do.

Speaker 2:

3d printing is focused on selling machines to machines, to individual consumers, which is completely backwards from what we need in order to do like mass production, because everything is all backwards of how, what the product goals are. We want the printer to be invisible. Everybody else wants the printer to be in the house, so it's a tough mismatch there to be able to partner with other folks in the industry. But we have great folks in like supply who like give us materials, and a number of software partners who have been good in helping to expand kind of the reach of it through like software design and modification and like the long term sort of AI partnerships and that kind of stuff where cool stuff will be coming out over the next couple of years.

Speaker 1:

OK, that's. That's amazing. I can't wait for the day where I can just type what I want and it's created and printed and sent to me. That's going to be wild. Yeah, so we are running out of time. I just checked. I completely lost track there, but I've really enjoyed learning more and I'm definitely going to continue learning more after this. But if you have to give one piece of advice for, let's say, business owners looking to succeed in your industry in terms of printing side and business owners looking to sell products that they can print with your machines, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 2:

start the cranking stuff out. Just give it a shot, because the cost of entry is so low that you can start experimenting really quickly. It's like, yeah, it's like the cost of building a website back in the early days was basically zero if you could kind of find some high school kid who could do it for you, and the upside is just so huge. So, find, like, a designer on Fiverr or go find some models, and if you have a marketing channel, just give it a shot. Start throwing stuff out, because you can actually experiment with it and it basically costs nothing to get started compared to so many other places. Yeah, it expands experimentation and the success rate from that just goes way up, because you're able to try so much stuff until you find the thing that actually works, which has never been possible except in software until now.

Speaker 1:

Okay, amazing. Well, I appreciate that so much and thank you for your time today. What is the? What's the best way for people to reach out to Gabe Bents or Slant 3D if they wanna make use of your printing or wanna follow your journey?

Speaker 2:

Oh, I really recommend watching the YouTube channel if you're interested in the Slant 3D stuff. If you wanna reach out to me, linkedin is kind of my main social profile, so yeah, hit me up over there. It's Gabe Bents, there's nothing special about it, and Slant 3D is the channel on YouTube.

Speaker 1:

Amazing thanks. So much, Thank you.