Fair enough, and thanks for the advice here + glad you like the idea! SEO does make sense as a more scalable marketing strategy, but I'm doing some soul searching at the moment after reading your comment and I think, in my half delirious state (have been up all night babysitting 3d print jobs for a customer and doing the delivery myself) I've come to the conclusion that PrintSwarm isn't even the type of business I want to run as a solopreneur:
- Very customer support / legal heavy which means lots of $$$$$ down the drain at scale. I've realized this product is a minefield for issues with:
1. printers not working/having maintenance issues causing delays or poor quality prints that disappoint customers
2. customers sending crazy complex 3d models to printers leading to 10+ hour turnaround times even for a physically small model
3. delivery drivers screwing up the address and going to the wrong place
4. the wrong print being handed over to the wrong driver
5. customers/printers demanding (rightfully so, I would do the same) refunds or payments for all of the above issues, essentially forcing me to incur Stripe processing fees for $0 in revenue
6. customers requesting to print illegal stuff like gun parts and printer owners not realizing what they're printing, then inadvertently enabling a murder when the customer puts the parts together and kills someone (ok, extreme scenario but still, I could something like that happening => lawsuit city)
- High engineering workload: not initially, but if I ever want this to scale to a lot of users that I might gain through SEO or other means, need to build a matching algorithm not unlike what DoorDash, Uber does to match orders from customers with printers (instead of drivers with riders/food) based on operating hours, location, estimated print speed, cost, materials/filament available for a given printer vs. what the user requested for materials, etc. Also need to take into account geo features/road serviceability like bridges when offering delivery as there are laws against delivering locally across a bridge especially in NYC. I like hard engineering problems, but I also just spent 5 years of my life working these exact kind of logistics/matching problems and realized I really don't want to do it again haha.
- Touched on this with the support point but low margin as physical goods are being delivered and delivery fees hurt bad (will have to eat or charge the customer $7+ per order with DoorDash/Uber/Relay)
So given all of this I may just let this one die and shut it down entirely to move onto the next thing that has better margins and be happy that I generated some revenue. Why am I posting this as a WIP comment? Dunno, just felt like I needed somewhere to dump my thoughts now that I've gotten into the weeds of the business and talked to customers, used the product myself => got some conclusions I didn't have before.
Anyway, I'm not making any decisions on keeping the biz or not until I get some sleep, so going to do that now and thanks again for your comment which spurred some thoughts on my end 👋
Fair enough, and thanks for the advice here + glad you like the idea! SEO does make sense as a more scalable marketing strategy, but I'm doing some soul searching at the moment after reading your comment and I think, in my half delirious state (have been up all night babysitting 3d print jobs for a customer and doing the delivery myself) I've come to the conclusion that PrintSwarm isn't even the type of business I want to run as a solopreneur:
- Very customer support / legal heavy which means lots of $$$$$ down the drain at scale. I've realized this product is a minefield for issues with:
1. printers not working/having maintenance issues causing delays or poor quality prints that disappoint customers
2. customers sending crazy complex 3d models to printers leading to 10+ hour turnaround times even for a physically small model
3. delivery drivers screwing up the address and going to the wrong place
4. the wrong print being handed over to the wrong driver
5. customers/printers demanding (rightfully so, I would do the same) refunds or payments for all of the above issues, essentially forcing me to incur Stripe processing fees for $0 in revenue
6. customers requesting to print illegal stuff like gun parts and printer owners not realizing what they're printing, then inadvertently enabling a murder when the customer puts the parts together and kills someone (ok, extreme scenario but still, I could something like that happening => lawsuit city)
- High engineering workload: not initially, but if I ever want this to scale to a lot of users that I might gain through SEO or other means, need to build a matching algorithm not unlike what DoorDash, Uber does to match orders from customers with printers (instead of drivers with riders/food) based on operating hours, location, estimated print speed, cost, materials/filament available for a given printer vs. what the user requested for materials, etc. Also need to take into account geo features/road serviceability like bridges when offering delivery as there are laws against delivering locally across a bridge especially in NYC. I like hard engineering problems, but I also just spent 5 years of my life working these exact kind of logistics/matching problems and realized I really don't want to do it again haha.
- Touched on this with the support point but low margin as physical goods are being delivered and delivery fees hurt bad (will have to eat or charge the customer $7+ per order with DoorDash/Uber/Relay)
So given all of this I may just let this one die and shut it down entirely to move onto the next thing that has better margins and be happy that I generated some revenue. Why am I posting this as a WIP comment? Dunno, just felt like I needed somewhere to dump my thoughts now that I've gotten into the weeds of the business and talked to customers, used the product myself => got some conclusions I didn't have before.
Anyway, I'm not making any decisions on keeping the biz or not until I get some sleep, so going to do that now and thanks again for your comment which spurred some thoughts on my end 👋
I'm glad I could be your sounding board. 😁
Those are all excellent reasons to kill this idea and move on.