Founder Profile: Dan Downs Taking 3D Printing Back To The Basics

Paul and I met at Fordham where our first big project was putting a hot tub on the roof of the library. It sounds ridiculous, of course, but the logistics of doing so in midtown Manhattan were extremely complex. Filling it with water, getting power to heat the water, and checking if the roof was weight bearing were all difficult tasks and even more so under the nose of the university.

Solving all these logistical challenges solidified us as a team and we began to see what could be a kernel of a startup growing.

In the late summer of 2013, we bought a 3D printer as a passion project and discovered there was opportunity to make something happen in that space. I left my commercial real estate career in September 2016 and started a 3D print manufacturing business in NYC,  where we learned a ton about the challenges and opportunities in the space.

We quickly realized that our 3D printing business wasn’t scalable because the hardware was slow and ineffective. But it was pretty clear that the venture dollars for 3D printing went into software upgrades before the hype cycle happened. We knew the tech, the market pain point, and the megatrend, so we were confident that software was only half the problem.

We knew one of the big problems preventing widespread adoption of FMD 3D printers is speed, especially since they were incorrectly marketed as being fast. That is why we have developed the R3 printer to be 90% faster than contemporary mass-market 3D printers, which makes up 76% of the market.

We do so by offboarding key components and reducing the weight of the extruder assembly by over 80%, which prints by stacking the plastic. Our extruder assembly also has a 75% smaller profile, which results in a 200% increase in build area compared to current printers. This means bigger prints, faster.

The crucial safety benefit of our printer is that the active overheat prevention system reduces the occurrence of burns to users, which is the number one cause of injury with 3D printers. The system detects overheating and prevents users from having to manually monitor the machine, which are traditionally often susceptible to warping and melting from overheating.

We aim to provide 80-90% of the quality of commercial printers at twice the speed and at half the unit cost. This price point provides the opportunity for smaller 3D print manufacturers to print high-quality items quickly and at an affordable price. It can really legitimize a huge market that was alienated by either practicality or cost.

Our margins all-in including cost of manufacturing, freight shipping and storage are around 77-78%, which gives us plenty of breathing room.

Because we saw hardware as a problem in the printing market, we went deep into the niche of hardware optimization, while most companies have invested their capital and resources in developing software for this space.

We don’t want to move into the open software space, though; we know the tech and hardware well and can really transform the infrastructure of the industry with our hardware skillset.

We’re going with a try-before-you-buy scenario by leveraging cash we raise through venture funding to build out rigs and put them in-house with prospective clients. We’ll give it to them for a quarter to make sure it works and is making them some money.

We’ve been clever in how we’re approaching it—it’s often a situation where the customer doesn’t have access to business capital, so we see an opportunity to lever revenue. With businesses like SoFi, we can throw business their way by making intros for business loans and then we can finalize the relationships with the manufacturers when they purchase our rigs.