What 3D printers will actually be used for, in the short term
Sent to Luke Nosek and Derik Pridmore at Founders Fund in February 2011, as a follow-up to a fall 2010 pitch meeting and to Alyssa’s Thiel Fellowship application. The point of the note was a fix to the pitch — that “3D printers can build anything” is true but useless to investors, who need to know which goods first get printed and why people will pay for them. What follows is the four-category answer she developed.
In the longer term, 3D printers will be able to replace large segments of the manufactured-goods market, as the future technology that Humanity+’s Gada Prize encourages the development of will be able to print things like metallic machinery and electronic circuit boards. However, in the shorter term, using current printing technology, we anticipate that the primary market for these devices will be producing the following four categories of goods.
Goods which are highly customizable, user-specific or artistic in nature.
3D printing provides a new artistic medium, in the form of printed 3D sculptures and 2D paintings, and the medium is one that does not require large monetary or time expenditures for works to be replicated. For example, if one hand-makes an oil painting, then in order for the painting to be duplicated, one must paint the entire thing again, an extremely tedious process which 3D printing is not constrained by. 3D printing also allows for easy replication and use of custom designs and logos, either as components of another printed product, or components of a product made using traditional manufacturing.
Goods which need to be available rapidly to the consumer.
There are, essentially, two major modern forms of good distribution: retail, where the customer walks into a physical store and buys the product, and online ordering, where the consumer goes to a website and orders, and the website then ships the good in the mail. Both of these suffer from major flaws: retail stores are frequently closed, difficult to travel to or may not exist in the consumer’s location, while mail-order can be expensive and often takes a week or longer for the good to arrive. Personalized 3D printing has neither of these problems, since the consumer may manufacture the good on demand.
Goods which are parts of other goods, needed for repair, or otherwise unavailable to the consumer.
A large percentage of the things that people own are defective or broken in some way: phones with cracked cases, laptops with missing keyboard keys, shirts with missing buttons and everything with forgotten pieces. Often, repairing these goods is impossible for lack of the necessary piece, even if the repair would be trivial. 3D printers can allow people to repair, enhance or upgrade goods, without needing to buy an entirely new product.
Goods which are generally small and cheap.
As it stands, our infrastructure is such that there is a certain minimum, fixed cost to making any good available for ordering. For instance, there are a large number of books on Amazon which have zero value; the supply and demand are such that people are willing to sell them for a penny. However, one cannot actually obtain one of these books for less than $5, because there is a fixed cost of around $5 (in materials and labor) to physically getting an envelope, sticking the book in and mailing it off. A 3D-printed product can be profitable for both the designer and the consumer, even at a very low cost per unit.