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XMachine’s Genesis 3D Printer Launch Seems to be Having Challenges « Fabbaloo

By Kerry Stevenson on November 1st, 2016 in printer

Tags: financial, fundraising

The XMachine Genesis Duo desktop 3D printer

We have been contacted by a backer of the Genesis desktop 3D printer by XMachine, who has some complaints, which appear to be legitimate. 

The Genesis Uno and Duo desktop 3D printers are one of many low-cost desktop 3D printer options. This one involved a single or dual extruder, automated calibration, WiFi connectivity, remote operation and apparently high print speeds. All provided at very low cost, around the USD$300 mark. 

The project was launched on Kickstarter in 2015 and raised an amazing USD$500K, from 1,525 backers. Roughly, that corresponds to approximately 300 units. 

The problem is that today, November of 2016, it’s one year past the original estimated delivery dates for the machine. As you might imagine, the backers are not happy and this is quite evident from even a brief dive into the 4,600+ comments on the campaign page. Some selected comments:

This campaign is just another examples out of hundreds that show the cowardice of the creators. It will be a hard road of some years for the creators to understand that they have to include the backers into their strife for success AND not treat them a stupid retail buyers that can be lied to again and again and again. 

I am interested in visiting your facility on Friday November 4th. What is the address and what time will the facility be open for a tour?

XMachines, this is how you lose people’s trust – before you go any further, I suggest you read all that you have written.

It appears that the company has run out of sufficient cash to complete building and shipping machines to the original backers and has instituted some rather unusual steps to recover, including asking backers to promote their product – even though they have not seen the machines as yet. 

Also, they’ve indicated they will ship a machine to backers each time a retail machine is sold. This doesn’t seem like a good business practice to me, but companies can make unusual moves when they have having challenges. 

XMachines has posted a series of updates on the situation, but one portion of a recent update is a bit disturbing: 

XMachines is now at an extremely pivotal point in its development. Without decisive action the Company may not survive much longer. Fortunately, at the suggestion of family friends I was put in contact with experienced business and legal professionals to assist with our current situation. Chester Business & Innovation Law has been retained and is advising on our critical business contracts, strategy, protection and commercialization of our intellectual property, and both venture funding. They believe in the market opportunity for XMachines product technology and are working at NO charge to the Company over the next 90 days.

This suggests the company did not have the benefit of professionals prior to this announcement, which is never a good idea when starting a serious company.  

Nevertheless, the company has listed a series of steps they feel will right the ship, including:

  • Start Selling Printers NOW
  • Raise Additional Capital
  • Contract Manufacturing
  • Deliver more than expected to Kickstarter backers

I have no idea how the XMachines saga will turn out, but it does appear bleak at this point. 

But there is something to be gained here: experience. We’ve always recommended caution when considering the purchase of very inexpensive desktop 3D printing gear for a variety of reasons, as the prospect is risky and you may in fact lose your investment. 

Via Kickstarter

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Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!

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Tiko 3D - Headquarters Locations, Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees

What Went Wrong: Creator of Micro 3D Printer Provides Perspective on Tiko 3D Failure

Feb 26, 2017

By JD Alois “Tiko 3D: Another crowdfunding fail, as backers money goes down the drain.” Tiko 3D is the second most-funded 3D printer on Kickstarter ever —the first being M3D  who launched the Micro consumer 3D printer back in 2014. M3D raised $3.4 million on Kickstarter from over 11,800 backers. M3D is operating today and appears to be doing well in the highly competitive 3D printing market. Tiko 3D unfortunately “ overpromised and undelivered ” by shipping very few 3D printers. Last week, Tiko 3D put itself on “standby ” as the company had run out of money. Michael Armani, the CEO and co-founder of M3D, believes the trend of failed tech companies on Kickstarter is a “troubling” trend for the rewards crowdfunding sector. Crowdfund Insider recently reached out to Armani for his unique perspective on the failed Tiko 3D campaign and what could have been done better. Crowdfund Insider: M3D successfully raised $3.4M on Kickstarter for a 3D Printer. Did you deliver all of your printers? Were there any hurdles or issues along the way? Michael Armani: Yes, we delivered the bulks of these rewards a long time ago (amazingly, there is a very long tail of few backers still following up, but we are actively closing them). Like any new business, there were huge issues that we faced at first, namely customer support and product quality. We realized how important these are to creating strong customer relationships, so we made them an immediate priority for the company—our quality has been much improved and customer service is headed towards becoming, in my view, legendary and a key differentiating value. We are all under one roof in Maryland and able to work closely across teams. We focused on solving the biggest problems first by either reducing or outright eliminating them. One-by-one all the links fell into place for a working, sustainable business that we could improve gradually. In a sense, it was like triage. One of these challenges was to not over-perfect the design. It was the right decision to release the product when it was at about 90 percent ready for market, and to keep improving iteratively along the way with customer feedback—we included the thoughts from the community in our product’s ongoing development. Crowdfund Insider: Did you outsource any or all of the campaign? Did you get help from a company like Dragon? Michael Armani: No, we did pretty much everything ourselves, with some external support when it comes to marketing and public relations. We did talk to Dragon briefly but they wanted an exorbitant amount of money for us to receive some basic engineering advice—and if we couldn’t afford that with a $3.4M Kickstarter campaign, no one can. Crowdfund Insider: How is M3D doing today? Michael Armani: We’re a leader in consumer 3D printing market with our 100+ filament choices and dedicated US-based support, and M3D’s mojo is doing extremely well today. Our management team has expanded to include many like-minds and is inspired to serve our company vision: M3D is an innovation company, and we innovate affordable, cool technologies and business processes. You can expect to see a pretty dramatic expansion of M3D’s product lines in 2017—not all of them will relate to 3D printing. Crowdfund Insider: Have you raised additional capital from Angels/ VCs? If not are going to? Or perhaps use an investment crowdfunding platform? Michael Armani: M3D is fundamentally driven by organic, 100 percent bootstrapped growth. We never took an investment, and right now we have no debt or loans. We’re not eager to attract the attention of investors. It’s a huge time burden to “court” them, and it can take up to a year to secure an investment, time that we can better spend boosting our organic sales growth. We’re in it for the long haul—the 5-10 year vision where 3D printers routinely print human organs, and make assembled products so good that it disrupts trade, manufacturing, and engineering as we know it today. That said, we are open to strategic investors who want to help us develop these next-level technologies, like high-resolution color and bio print heads to advance the field of 3D printing—should they read this article you can let them know to reach us here . Crowdfund Insider: Tiko 3D, the 2nd most funded 3D printer in Kickstarter history, experienced a dramatic collapse. Were there signs of problems at the beginning? Michael Armani: Yes, we knew on day one that Tiko, Peachy, Xmachines, and a few others were destined for failure. For a business in North America, it’s not feasible to have a cost of goods that’s 65 percent of the sales price—that’s the rate a reseller like Newegg gets and that was a dead giveaway for us. A manufacturer needs to have margins well over four times to survive, maybe five times to thrive if they are doing production, marketing, sales and support. Crowdfund Insider: Tiko 3D made multiple operational errors. What should they have done differently? Michael Armani: Tiko needed to do a better job with formal, consistent and professional communication with their backers. We think trust is first and foremost—it’s critical—and they lost that somewhere along the way. Their cost of goods were unfeasible from the start, and it didn’t account for rejects, failures, rebuilds, warranty parts, etc. They also took pre-orders way too late into the campaign. It also seems clear they should have developed a more production ready prototype before launching their Kickstarter. Crowdfund Insider: Can rewards-based platforms do a better job of helping hardware campaigns? Are backers partially to blame for viewing them as online stores? Michael Armani: Because of this single key mistake of trying to offer too much value in order to capture market awareness, Kickstarter has become a sort of wild-west Ponzi scheme tech bubble, especially toxic for 3D printers, an industry that is in some ways still finding its footing among mainstream consumers. It is without a doubt, in my opinion, that a crowdfunding platform should be evaluating the technical feasibility, cost analysis and credibility of the creator before issuing a greenlight. A lot of the people that bring an innovative project to a platform like Kickstarter just get way too far in over their heads. Crowdfund Insider: Any suggestions to backers of Tiko 3D? Michael Armani: Tiko supporters, like all backers, are a curated fan base that supported a very specific product—they wanted an affordable and easy-to-use 3D printer with third-party compatibility, not just another 3D printer that may require some tinkering here and there. They saw something they believed in so strongly that they would risk their hard-earned money for a product that may never come, but would certainly take a year to develop. And these are mostly bargain hunters, they don’t have that much money to waste; “I got this for my son, now my wife and son are mad at me” is on its way to memedom. Unfortunately, we believe there is no practical solution to their problem at this stage, other than a strategic partnership. However, many still want a printer, and because our printer has similar characteristics and is in stock, we are offering Tiko backers (or backers of any crowdfunded campaign that went belly-up) a deep-discount price of when we launched the Micro 3D printer at $199 to support the industry. Learn more at www.printm3d.com/backer-rescue Have a crowdfunding offering you'd like to share? Submit an offering for consideration using our Submit a Tip form and we may share it on our site! You may also like...

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Genesis 3D printers looking for Kickstarter sponsors willing to pay 19$9 for quality and reliability

News

On April 1, X3D Machines launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for its line of Genesis 3D printers.

You may not think this news is unusual, but if you find out that the first 50 backers were able to purchase a Genesis Uno for just $199, your opinion will change, right?

Naturally, the first 50 Genesis Uno 3D printers sold out in a matter of minutes, but you still have the opportunity to buy such a printer for 249dollars. As for the Genesis Duo with dual extruder and increased displacement, it started at $299. Unfortunately, this offer is history, but now X3D Machines is ready to offer the Genesis Duo for $349. Agree, the price is still small for a 3D printer with such high technical characteristics.

So by now you're probably wondering how X3D Machines managed to push the price of their Genesis 3D printer line to such a low price?

“When developing our patented design, we paid special attention to the choice of materials (primarily they had to be strong and rigid), which allowed us to reduce the number of parts by almost half. As a result, we have 3D printers with a large working volume at the most attractive price, - explains the representative of the company. – Each component of the structure performs several functions at once, which allowed us to abandon unnecessary details. In addition, all electronics are located in one place, so we have eliminated the need for time-consuming cabling.”

X3D Machines has been able to reduce outsourcing costs by assembling all of its printers in-house. In addition, this approach saves her time, which means she can start shipping 3D printers as little as four months after her Kickstarter campaign ends.

In the past, we have seen many examples of companies giving up quality for price and having to make compromises. But X3D Machines is a completely different case. Genesis Uno and Duo 3D printers have so many useful features and functions that they will interest the most demanding user. They even have the function of additional cooling of heat-resistant materials such as polycarbonate and HIPS. In the future, X3D plans to release updates for its printers to keep them up to date. Judging by the video and the specs below, the Genesis Uno and Duo 3D printers can compete with the expensive desktop FFF 3D printers on the market today.

Here is the full list of specifications for the Genesis Uno and Duo 3D printers:

  • Working volume: Uno - 23 cm x 23 cm x 28 cm; Duo - 30 cm x 30 cm x 28 cm
  • Dimensions: Uno - 41 cm x 34 cm x 38 cm; Duo - 43 cm x 43 cm x 38 cm
  • Print resolution: 50-300 microns
  • Print media: PLA/ABS
  • Print bed: Aluminium/polycarbonate removable
  • Filament thickness: 1.75 mm

    Nozzle diameter: 0.3 mm

  • Print platform leveling: automatic, with special software
  • Printer construction: aluminum and steel
  • Connection interface: USB, SD card and wireless
  • Operating system: Linux, Mac, Windows
  • Weight: Uno – 4, 6 kg; Duo - 5 kg
“We offer the most affordable and functional 3D printers at an unbeatable price point,” says a company spokesperson.

Learn more