CNCKingdom.com: Why I Keep Trying!
I keep getting asked by visitors to CNCKing.com questions like “I’m in X country, can you recommend a manufacturer for Y machine?” or “I’d like to get one of your models laser cut along with a few other projects, can you do this for me?” Firstly, I’m honored and can usually help these people out but more importantly, I see an opportunity… a massive one that I just can’t pass-up!
I’ve been down this road several times… three times! Each time… I failed. This will be my 4th attempt at trying to establish an industrial lead generation system for manufacturers and their reps but learn from my failures, I think I finally got it!
My first attempt was ShopMarvels.com that was just a simple business directory, I had some people join but the ROI just wasn’t there nor were people interested in maintaining yet another online system. I let the site die.
I learned from that and rebuilt the whole site, this time making it “prettier” and more functional. It solved some problems but not the ROI one and it was just too limiting. I let the site die.
My third attempt was about a year ago, I thought – if people are tired of writing, I’ll give them an easy way to just upload videos instead… it was a “visual CNC machine directory” and like the other two attempts. IT FAILED. I realized that although I had made things easier – businesses had trouble seeing the ROI. The ROI I had concentrated on in this case was TIME and not the most important, $$$.
How CNCKingdom.com came into being
I rebranded WoodMarvels.com and 3DMarvels.com into CNCKing.com but originally, the site was going to be CNCKingdom.com – thanks to a conversation with a friend, he suggested that maybe I should drop the “dom” and go with the shorter url which happened to be available.
The moment I finished all that rebranding effort, copied everything over, I realized that “CNCKingdom.com” was a great domain for lead generation. I was the King and my land was full of CNC toys is what I thought.
My passion for CNC
Almost 15 years ago, I started an industrial 3D animation studio, selling 3d animation services to industrial companies around the world… that’s when I was first introduced to CNC machines and I really enjoyed the challenges that these companies face from marketing to mass production. They have the coolest overbuilt machines on the planet and their job is to somehow generate a ROI out of it before it breaks down.
My 3D animation services (i3DS.com) fit nicely as instead of spending 10-30K on a single tradeshow shipping their massive machines around the country and world, they could give me 10-40% of that and just show-up with a plasma TV (all the rage back then) and some samples. It was an easy sell all around and incredibly profitable while it lasted. The .com crash along with Chinese and Indian manufacturers flooding the industrial marketplace followed by 3 successive recessions killed my industrial animation business.
CNC Opportunity
Long story short, I never lost my passion for the industry, whatever I could do was an outgrowth of that which lead me to CNCKing.com but to me, selling files is only a third of the equation. You still have machine lead generation and another that I’ll explore in a few months (still under wraps).
The more CNC machines get sold, the stronger the CNC marketplace becomes, the more files I can sell… it’s the perfect loop and I want to be more heavily involved at both ends. There are only a handful of “consumer CNC” machines out there but a ton of “industrial CNC” which is a market that’s just as cool but severely under served in the public sphere – if you aren’t in it in some fashion, odds are you don’t even know it exists! There is so much misinformation out there, unfair product comparisons and massive amounts of machismo… it’s no wonder that the machine world is as foreign to most people as living on Mars.
So with this post, I’m opening CNCKingdom.com to the world… I know it’s rather empty right now but fear not, I have an idea, the passion and drive to give it another go, hopefully dodging the mistakes from my earlier failures in this space. It will start to fill-up in the coming weeks… the deals are signed and the specs sorted.
CNCKing.com started one day with ONLY one product and as such, CNCKingdom.com already has one client, Trotec Laser Australia but more on that later. The site will be evolving heavily in the coming weeks as content gets added, bugs fixed and I begin getting things to where they aught to be.
I want to bring the industrial world closer to the consumers who benefit from their efforts. It’s a wonderfully imaginative world that has lived in the shadows for far too long!
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