MakerBot Math

by Joseph Flaherty on January 18, 2010

Zach Hoeken, one of the founders of MakerBot Industries recently tweeted that they currently ship ~150 MakerBot kits per month or roughly 1,800/year.

To look at it another way that equates to $1,350,000-1,710,000 in revenue (1,800*$750-950). Not bad for a three person team that is about a year old. This number is especially encouraging when viewed in light of the industry leaders in 3D printing.

The industry leader Stratasys uses a FDM technology similar to MakerBot. The first part I ever printed was on a Stratasys and the quality was approximately what you would get with a MakerBot today. Total revenue in 2008: $124,500,000

The other public 3D printer company 3D Systems reported revenue of $138,940,000 in 2008.

Both companies had a brutal 2009 with 30%+ drops in revenue. After 9 months of data it looks like both companies would finish the year at ~$100MM each. So with almost no R&D budget 3 guys in a basement in Brooklyn were able to generate 2% of what the major 3D printing companies could with 8 figures worth of R&D and a fleet of sales reps.

The most exciting number I could find re: the MakerBot was – 130,329, the number of schools in the US. MakerBot will have a tough time making inroads with businesses, but they are in a unique position to own the educational segment of the market. Hopefully they take advantage before someone else realizes that their plans are open source.

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Tagged as: 3D Systems, Fused deposition modeling, MakerBot Industries, Stratasys

  • http://home.att.net/~castleisland/ Ed Grenda

    The most interesting number to me is their unit volume. After less than a year, Makerbot is pretty close to parity with the market leader Stratasys. And they're not the only ones attacking with a machine based on RepRap. There are a number of suppliers, including Bits From Bytes (UK) and its distributors, as well as discrete parts and sub-systems suppliers. There are also a substantial number of kits being sold based on the Fab@Home work. See this page on our site:

    http://home.att.net/~castleisland/comp_lks.htm

    If you added all those unit sales together it might be an even more interesting number. Some of these hobbyist machines will certainly cannibalize the bigger players' sales, but it could also work in their favor by offering a platform for experimentation and apatite-whetting.

    The extruder-based open-source guys are roughly where Stratasys was in 1997 with respect to performance. It will be interesting to see if open-source can progress technically beyond the point where patents have run out, especially in the US which is more restrictive – or whether they'll march in place while they wait.

    Stay tuned…

  • http://id.erikdebruijn.nl/ Erik de Bruijn

    Thanks for this post! I was hesitant to publish these numbers because I was afraid it would get Makerbot into trouble (and I'm very happy with their success). But since Zach is publicly showing us the figures now, I guess it's fine. Funny thing is, when you were writing this, I was giving a guest lecture with the main question “What would Scott Crump do?”. This was among business students, and although they were not fully aware of open source and patenting specifics, they generally agreed that Scott could encourage RepRap for R&D input (who are experimenting more radically, they focus more on reliability and incremental, dimension of merit improvements). They could hire from this community (free-lance or contract). Also, they suggested they could try to sell an even cheaper unit similar to the Makerbot. Personally, I think they should at least partly open up their existing product lines so that they encourage and facilitate experimentation by their customers. Their users are an important source for more radical innovation (see the “Lead user” literature).

    I think unit sales are the most interesting, perhaps even more the unit sales rate (4.2/day and rising for Makerbot vs. 5.5/day steady for Stratasys). If you include BitsFromBytes, Stratasys was beaten by open source 3D printers in unit sales last year. Not to mention that the Makerbot batches always sell out, suggesting that there's a bigger demand than what they can currently produce. This is an indication that for this unpenetrated segment they are not close to a market saturation point. So you can safely expect it to speed up.

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