Startup Idea Every Day #4: 3D Printing and Copy Shop

This is the fourth post in my series, "Startup Idea Every Day", where I offer a new idea for a startup every day, for 31 days (January 2014).

Kinko's was founded in 1970 by a guy named Paul Orfalea. Orfalea started the business in a small office he rented for $100/month in Isla Vista, near UCSB. In 2004, Kinko's was bought by FedEx for $2.4 Billion. At the time, copying was relatively new, and most consumers did not have the money to create quality copies at home. Today, 3D printing remains very much in the same space. Startup idea number 4 is essentially Kinko's for 3D printing.

The first thing your probably asking is, how much of a need is there for 3D printing, and how could a company like this be useful enough to the average consumer to turn a profit? I've thought of a number of different ways this idea could potentially be monetized.

The first idea I thought of was to create a place where you could get 3D printed souvenirs, kind of like a hyper-modern flattened penny. If you really wanted to take this a step further, you could even offer customizable souvenirs, such as names, faces, or even add a third dimension to a photo.

The second option for monetizing would be to make 3D modeling easy enough for almost anyone to accomplish. A lot of people have really good ideas about simple devices that could make their lives easier. If those people could be given the tools to prototype their product, we might get a lot of really innovative new products to help us rethink simple tasks.

Monetizing option number three would be to add a design-firm element to the store, where aspiring engineers and inventors could bring in an idea and you would build a prototype for them in exchange for royalties on the patent.

The last option I came up with was to have user friendly 3D scanners, and different blocks to use with the scanners, so that you could make your own completely customizable model using different shapes, letters, numbers, and pre-fabricated models. All you would have to do is arrange the blocks in the shape that you want, scan, and print.

I really like this idea because it brings technology to life, in the sense that, currently, 3D printing is hardly more than a weekend hobby for engineering students, and a rapid prototyping method for large corporations and wealthy design firms, but it has the potential to be so much more. Bringing 3D printing to a process that has the user experience necessary for mass consumption is not going to be easy, but it will undoubtedly be lucrative.

On a side note, there is also a really cool company doing something very similar in my hometown (Santa Barbara), called the SB Hacker Space