I’ll piggyback on what some others have said. I think the conventional wisdom, in business, is that, if units are selling, and the company is losing money, the company isn’t charging enough per unit. I know that you want to keep it affordable, but I like the idea of keeping the kit cheap, and selling an assembled unit that just works out of the box. And you’ll need to charge like h@ll for the assembled unit. It’s like offering a Volkswagon and a Rolls Royce in your product line.
The Dynaco ST70 was the greatest selling audio amplifier of all time, I believe, and it was available fully assembled (Dynaco), or as an inexpensive kit (Dynakit). It had the reputation of being “the poor man’s McIntosh”, which is to say that it had a stellar reputation.
The Rolls Royce will need to ride like a Rolls, but the Volkswagon can stay a Volkswagon, and continue to serve your core customers. Good luck!
I don’t think it’s really a long term money earner, but have you thought of some sort of enhanced support offering?
”Get Bar on a video call to help you build your Maslow”, etc…
It’s something that could bring some money in, and also it might even help iron out pitfalls, and give you insights & help move towards some of other points people raised of it more a product and less a very DIY project.
I really think the key is marketing to sell more units.
I think Bar is running a 1 man operation at this point so his time needs to be applied to efforts that have the most value. Prebuilts, seminars, video support for troubleshooting or assembly are just too time consuming (and costly) at this point in the game. We really need software improvements to make this thing more viable and marketable. Working out the bugs has to be taking up most of his time and is vital to ensure longevity of the product.
As mentioned by quite a few members, I think the best route is to get interviews with YouTubers and bloggers that are big in the woodworking world. He can showcase his vision for the machine and where we currently are in development with follow up interviews. This will help get the word out to a larger customer base. Reach out to makerspaces and provide them with informational flyers to hang in their areas and that contain links to videos and the website. Selling on Amazon and search engine priority are other options. We do need to ensure that the buyer understands what he is buying.
Selling other stuff such as router bits may be cumbersome, I’m not sure if he could compete with Amazon on prices.
We need to support him by posting more of our projects so he can showcase what the machine does. I love the projects Bar is doing, but his time may be better spent on bugs, software improvements, and marketing. Plus big projects eat alot of plywood $$$.
At least one China manufacturer making long-enough cordless brushless router bodies.
At least one China manufacturer making a PSU-in-a-box that appears to work with it (subject to testing).
Together they are in the $100 ballpark.
I feel like there is a market for ~$100 dewalt/makita clone router brushless replacements, with the PSU changed to have a 2-3m lead. So sitting somewhere above a brushed makita clone, but below a full spindle and vfd, but still coming in at about 8/900watt.
I wonder if Maslow / @bar is well placed to lead that as it potentially solves a few problems around which router to use and the longevity issues of brushed routers?
Oh and a quick one - I’m not sure it would make vast amounts of money per se, but accessories with a decent mark-up are often quite good modest money earners (as others have noted).
Specifically though, I was thinking some that also support tinkering (because that’s part of what interests me) - a set of 10/15cm lead extenders for the motors / encoders / steppers for people that want to relocate the board for example.
Bit of a pain to DIY, but not that expensive to order a small batch from China I’d suspect. Similarly a PSU extender wire.
@bar I was going to buy a 1/4 in to 1/8 collet adapter for myself for christmas, also was going have a dust collector and button pusher printed. Would it be possible for you to add affiliate links for those?
@bar My spouse was trying to figure out the not shop for christmas, and suggested that you make the titles of the objects links not just the pictures to make it more obvious and clickable.
I am a lover of the flatpack concept (for furniture and other things), which was largely invented by IKEA. But they have profoundly corrupted their own idea by focussing too much on minimising shipping empty space at the expense of everything else, such as something that’s reasonably easy to assemble. Not a single thing is put together into a sub-assembly.
A partially assembled Maslow (major components) I think would be a game changer, especially the arms. Going along with that, making subtle changes to the design so that a Maslow is as easy as possible to service, would take it from a strictly enthusiast “Let’s make our own CNC” focus, to a “with just a few steps you can get making” view.
and:
The dewalt router being a structural component of the design is a major design fault, and a significant limiting factor. The concentricity of the arms (and the tool bit) should not be dependent on whatever spindle/router is used.
Yeah - I did that because I wanted to allow myself, and whomever else, to reuse as much of the rest of their Maslow componentry as possible, and to keep the design as similar as possible to the router-based form. But my own experience with my own machine has taught me that should not have been an objective. Guess what I’m also planning on changing…
Very similar to what I’m thinking of. What I want to achieve is an option to very easily swap out the router/spindle to change bits, or insert any other tool, eg. drag knife, pen, whatever - and there’s a market for add-ons right there.
It has been an absolute game changer for me using a spindle. Having a kit that comes with a spindle (with a proper ER-something Collett chuck) as the ‘default’ kit I think should be the way to go. Having a ‘cut-down’ version that will take any trim router, could be the ‘enthusiast’ kit - but of course “it’s easily upgradeable to the spindle version whenever you’re ready to step-up”. The third kit option, isn’t a kit, it’s the fully assembled version (but spindle based) for a premium, including things like ready to go anchor mounts for floor or frame mounting
Which then reminded me that there is a very common pricing model that could be used here.
Never sell just one version of something, or just two, because people will choose the cheapest version even if it’s not the right one for them. Always have three, and no more than three.
Cheapest version, the least, it’s really only here for anyone who is truly price-sensitive.
Optimum version, the one you make a reasonable margin on, and also the ‘in-practice’ best value for money for your customer
Everything version, significantly more expensive than ‘optimum’, also the one you far and away make the most margin on. This version exists to drive people to choose the optimum version, that’s its purpose, and occasionally for the show-offs who like to brag about how much money they’ve spent.
Translating that to the Maslow.
’Box of bits’ (enthusiasts) version - you assemble everything yourself, and you have to buy and build a lot of other extras just to get something working.
’Quick start’ version - key sub-assemblies already assembled and tested, comes with a spindle, comes complete (except for an upright frame) to get up and running fast.
’Professional’ version - fully assembled and tested, comes with absolutely everything, including the correct size masonry bit to drill holes into concrete for the anchors, all optional extras (e.g. drag knife), except for an upright frame.
For the assembly of parts, explore options related to getting piece work done locally, rather than doing it yourself. Yeah, that’s extra administration, and an extra cost, but it’s also a way of helping out your local community without obligating yourself too much.
Sell consumables. or at least have affiliate links to them so that people that already purchased a maslow from you continue to bring in income over the long haul.
Widen your reach - perhaps offer a fully kitted package with a smaller footprint (2x4, 4x4 ?) with a collapsible frame. Make it ready to use out of box, just fasten the frame together and start cutting. Of course it would need to cost more, but it would appeal to those that don’t want to “build and troubleshoot a robot”
Reach out to the more popular maker youtube channels/ other social media, and see if anyone is willing to trade a Maslow for publicity.
As far as shipping cost goes, USPS flat rate is really not the way to go unless you have a compact heavy item to ship, or you are paying retail rates. Cubic rate USPS ground advantage is often the lowest priced option, even with a 70% UPS discount, and it usually is only 1 day slower than USPS Priority.
I bought one of the original Shapeoko kits when it was a community driven hobby thing. Not hobby prices any more. Anyway on their website today and this is how they are making money: Not really the community model but might give you some ideas for premium stuff to charge for. Training, software and complete machines.
I just bought my Maslow 2 weeks back, got it assembled this weekend in a couple hours, ran calibration, and working on a first cut today. Very excited about the machine and want to see the project succeed!
For me, the biggest value props for this are size and cost - for anyone who wants to cut 4x8 sheets and doesn’t have an 8x12 space (or $7k+) to dedicate to just a CNC table, this machine is perfect and nothing else comes remotely close. I have 3 friends who are all looking at buying one of these - the thing that has so far scared them off is the maturity for less tech-y folks. They don’t need a ton of features, but they do need a greased path from buying the machine to cutting someone else’s design out of a 4x8 sheet of ply. Overall I think the product is quite close to being ready for this. A couple spots I think would be tricky for my less DIY-minded friends:
Not Shop and 3d printed parts - I love this model, but I think some folks would pay significantly more for a kit which included the button pusher, dust collector, 4x mounting brackets with pins, a cheap set of recommended router bits and an emergency stop button.
CAD/CAM recommendation - I appreciate the many options given for CAM software. I think having one option be “recommended” and including a basic tutorial article would be very useful. Say downloading the Maslow logo, adjusting the size and x/y home in CAM, selecting cut depth/speed options, uploading to the machine, and cutting. Maybe this already exists, I just couldn’t find it easily from the CAM options page.
Software “unknown state” - I know this is a very hard problem to solve, but I think it’s critical to the project that the software almost never goes into “unknown state” or can print good errors and automatically reset itself when it does. Retracting/extending belts each time this happens is a huge frustration, despite being simple. I think this might be the kind of thing where coming up with a better fail state is easier than solving every crash. I’m imagining fixing the machine at the x/y home manually, pulling tension and trusting the calibration to calculate belt lengths or something to avoid removing all 4 pins, fully retracting and fully extending every time.
Around marketing, I would love to see some influencers from various target fields using this successfully. One field that could really use this is speaker design - there are tons of open source designs available, and lots of folks who build them but rely on someone else to CNC cut the panels. If these folks could see someone successfully cutting speaker designs with a Maslow I think that would open up that whole market. My guess is there are a lot of niche markets which would be similar.
I also think paid support/training could be an interesting model, I know a lot of open source software devs have had some success doing that.
I’m willing to pay ( now / today ) for some coaching/assistance to get my project going and successful quickly. Maybe some coaches could be delegated and Maslow would take a cut of that?
This could also help with sales because people with less time to tinker could proceed with purchase.
I 1000% percent agree with this. I think that the important question is how to be best use our limited resources to get there as quickly as possible.
That is a great point and something that I hadn’t thought about in a while. I’ll revisit that and see what we can do to make that easier. Good suggestion!
This is something that is in the works. There doesn’t currently exist a really good free option, but I am working on building one right now. It’s available at abundance.maslowcnc.com, it should be ready for more use in the next few weeks.
Again, I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been putting a lot of working into exactly that (generally making the “find anchor point locations” as fool proof as possible.
That is an excellent suggestion! Do you have any folks in mind?
This is a good idea, but the issue there is that it takes a LOT of time. I’ve gone down that road a couple times, but I think there is a reason that most intro to CNC classes cost quite a bit more than Malsow. I think that the real key here is that a cheap CNC actually needs to be easier to use than an expensive CNC. Someone who spends $20,000 on a machine is going to be OK with spending another $200/year on software and $1,000 on an intro class, but someone who buys a Maslow probably isn’t interested in doing that
Again, I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been putting a lot of working into exactly
that (generally making the “find anchor point locations” as fool proof as
possible.
What he’s suggesting isn’t a better “find anchor point locations” calculation,
what he’s looking for is a way to recover the belt lenths without a
detach/retract/extendd cycle.
something along the lines of:
When you have a good set of anchor locations, drill a hole at a known location
(any location) and record what the belt lengths are for that location.
when you get into unknown state, instead of having to detach/retract/extend, you extend belts enough to give you slack, manualy move the
router to the known location (pin in router, pin in hole for horizontal, bolt
through hole then pull tight in z for vertical, something like that), then
tension belts and restore the known lengths for that location.
this is not the current extend belts a known distance, this is putting belts
into comply and letting the user run them out any amount (as belt lengths are
not known until they are tight)
TBH, I buy extra spare parts for fear you might go out of business and I will be stuck…
Reliability is an issue. I built some amazing things, but it took an amazing amount of time to troubleshoot to get there.
If the basic design as-is could run for 500 hours without breaking down, it might be worthwhile to start getting into the university space. There are 765 engineering schools in the US. If you could sell a dozen or more Maslows to every school, you could reach thousands of students who then might buy a machine or get their company to buy a machine after graduation.
You probably need an outside investor who know how to bring products like this to market, a small staff, and plan to sell out at some point.
