Brian Krassenstein, Founder of 3DPrint.com (USA)

Brian is the founder of 3DPrint.com – a site I visit on a regular basis to get some news about the industry. He’s also helping companies with their online advertising and marketing needs including mobile application management and development. Some key takeaways from this interview include:

• 3D printing has had a growth spur and is about to explode.
• Don’t focus on monetizing a new property right away, let it build in terms of influence and traffic first.
• Online advertising, immediate ROI feedback should be the focus.

Your background is advertising, marketing and brand promotion – what are some of the biggest mistakes companies make when trying to get their product or project known? What are the solutions?

The biggest mistake I see is companies overestimating what their budget can do. 95% of all advertisers expect to get more from their advertising budget than they actually get. Advertising on the web is a lot more competitive and thus expensive than just 3-4 years ago. The solution is to cut back your spending by fine tuning your audience. Only pay for ads which are catered towards the exact niche your company is in.

How did you eventually become interested in 3D printing and then took a further step to build an online website, 3DPrint.com, dedicated towards additive technology?

I invest a lot into companies involved in up and coming technologies. Because of this I try to read as much material on future technology as I can get my hands onto. I feel this gives me an advantage while investing, but giving me a blueprint of sort on where technology is headed. That’s how I stumbled upon 3D printing. For the last few years I was very interested in the technology until finally decided to launch both 3Dprint.com and 3DPrintBoard.com last year.

How has the reception to 3DPrint.com been thus far, how do you promote it and how do you plan on monetizing it in the future? Do you see this site as a stepping stone or a lifestyle?

It’s been amazing. I find that if you have content people want, traffic will find it’s way there. We promote the site via social networks, as well as partnering with some of the trade shows and conferences around 3D Printing. Having 3DPrintBoard.com as a launching pad, which we started 4 months prior than 3Dprint really helped too. Both sites are currently more of a hobby for us. We eventually plan on selling ads and perhaps creating a membership feature , but for now we are happy to just make the amazing connections we have been within the industry.

I’ve designed hundreds of CNC projects for my site CNCKing.com and people are astonished when I tell them that out of all the technologies I can design for, 3D printing is by far the most difficult. Not because of the design process but the tecnology itsels has a lot of limitations that you need to build into a design for optimal results. This is especially true with extrusion 3D printers though they are getting better… in your view, is the 3D Printer space overhyped in the way they promote how “easy” this stuff is to the general consumer who doesn’t have a modeling background much less a technological one?

I do think that the technology of 3D Printing may be over hyped in terms of how easy it is for anyone to buy a printer, plug it in and print out a pair of shoes or something like that. Having said this I believe this will not be the case much longer. Within 2-3 years user interfaces should improve dramatically. As for the industry as I whole, I think it is under hyped for long term potential. In 10 years 3D printing will be bigger than anyone can imagine, and spanning across practically every industry out there. .

Crowdfunding, like 3D printing, looks great on paper but both are getting increasingly difficult to break into, a few years back it was relatively “easy” to get something crowdfunding but with the avalanche of users dreaming of quick riches, the bar has steadily gone up to the point now that you have to market and promote full-time in the hopes of gaining any type of traction. I’ve intereviewed a number of people here on CNCKingdom.com and the results have been mixed. Where do you see this innovation progressing over the next few years? I’d see the next opportunity in becoming a discovery engine, not crowdfunding per se.

Crowdfunding is a difficult industry to predict. Much of its future will rely on what regulators decide to do. It could either be the biggest change we have seen within the financial system in over 80 years, or not grow much more from here on out. It will depends on how regulators handle things, and if they smother the markets or let them grow.

I have over 50 domains myself, when ever I get an idea, I look for the domain in order to secure a place on the internet should I develop a business for it. What are some general trends you see developing in the domain industry and how does one go about finding an accurate value for their domains then somebody to buy it from them?

The major domaining trend now are gLTD (Generic Top Level Domains). ICANN has begun to release dozens of new tld’s like .Guru, .wed, .money, etc. I think this will only drive more value towards com domains though. As for finding value, that’s a tough question. When I sell a domain I have already don’t comparison analysis on similar domain sales so I can get an idea of what price is fair. in the end it’s up to the seller and buyer to work out a value they feel is fair.

There are several business models at present using 3D printing, from the “open sourced” Makerbot selling machines while promoting free design distribution using Thingiverse to purely bureaux 3D printing services such as ShapeWays.com. You then have 3D Systems that’s just eating-up all the small fish around it and developing apps to ease the design burden of 3D printing. I think each has contributed in their own way to the 3D printing ecosystem but I was wondering where you saw things heading, from your vantage point, over the next 10-20 years as the market begins to mature?

It’s tough to predict the next 10-20 years, as so much can happen now-a-days within 10-20 months. I think that within the next 4-5 years the landscape of 3D printing will look foreign to today’s eyes. I predict that several major players will enter the industry. Whether it’s Hewlett Packard, Epson, Apple, Google, IBM or Microsoft, there will also be consolidation within the consumer based side of things. The growth we have seen in the last year alone is staggering. I think in 5 years the market will be much bigger than even some of the optimists had predicted. In 10-20 years we will likely see things that are unimaginable.