No Intellectual Property No Business 

I was speaking with a guy the other day who was having trouble scaling his business. 

He was selling a decent volume of his 3D prints some months, but he didn't have the consistency he wanted and wasn't sure the best route forward to reach more comfortable levels with more stability. 

It's tricky to plan your move away from your full time job to your business when one month it's doing $6000 and the next $1500. 

After asking a few questions about his situation, there were a few key changes he could make that would lead to big results towards his goals, but I was curious why he hadn't also started selling on Amazon - because this was a huge untapped market for him. 

That's because his Etsy sales were already doing well for him, and Amazon's ecommerce business is about 260 times larger than Etsy. 

Plenty of room to grow. 

He said he couldn't - and when I dived a little deeper, he shared with me that about 90% of his designs he was selling weren't his products. 

They were other people's designs. 

Now don't get me wrong, he wasn't ripping anyone off - he had purchased permission from the designers. But they weren't his Intellectual Property (and a lot of it was “fan art”) and they were all designs. There were others like him, selling too. 

Think Marvel, DC Comics and Disney trademarks…

Now his printing quality was top notch, but beyond that he was essentially only competing on price. 

Because customers could either buy from him, or a dozen or so similar sellers offering pretty much identical products. 

That means his competition was only going to grow, with more and more people coming in selling the same designs - over time this is only ever going to be a race to the bottom. 

Lower and lower prices, strangling his profit margins.

Ughhh, talk about a constant uphill struggle…

Now I'm not sure about you, but if I'm gonna build a business, I want to create a bit of distance between us and the competition. One of the ways we do that is by choosing a niche with some slightly higher barriers to entry. 

It's a little bit more work for us, but far more importantly, it means it's physically harder for people to copy you. Because of the way we understand the exact nuances of what the customer wants, and how we present that to them. 

And they certainly can't just join some designer's Patreon and download the very file you're selling and start selling the same thing tomorrow…

So even if your products are selling well, and even if they're running with a decent margin - you're restricted and you're on borrowed time. 

The solution? Is only sell your own products. Products that you've either designed yourself, or commissioned a designer to design for you (and thus you own the designs) - stuff you fully own and control. 

Then people can't easily pop up and start stealing your market share, eroding your sales and forcing you to cut prices just to maintain sales. 

You also have more control about how you sell them, and where. So you can have higher profit margins, and sell in more places. 

In business, it's important to have control over how you want to do something, how you want (or need) to run your business. How you can improve the product, or better serve the customer. 

It's why I've always stayed clear of franchises - and damn near hated dealing with controlling suppliers when I used to sell ‘regular’ ecommerce products. 

Unless you're one of the big guys who own a significant output of their production capacity (as in, your business purchasing power might make up say 5% or more of their output), then they tend to have no problems playing games with you. 

If, like me, you start your business for freedom, why tie yourself down to assets and systems that are in others's ultimate control? 

I mean, if you have a business where someone else is your boss, that's basically just getting yourself a job. 

Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently wrong with a job - but if you've started your business so that you can enjoy freedom and want to scale, we likely want to stay away from things that make our business rather job-like. 

So if you take the easier route today, make sure that's not going to screw you over tomorrow. It might seem like the fast way to get started, and you might well experience some sales to begin with, but the foundations are weak and you're essentially creating a fragile business. 

That's why we build businesses from thinking about the end goal first. What do you want, what you don't want - what are your non negotiables?

Then we know we're building a business that aligns with us, and that's how we manage to build a business that both serves us well (good money & low time) and that we enjoy running.

What's more, we can implement systems into the business to actually make ourselves antifragile (a concept borrowed from a book of the same name). 

So, instead of a challenge coming along that weakens our business, like a competitor or new, better product - we can set things up so we get stronger when tested like this, because of how our business reacts to these challenges and proactively seeks to navigate them. 

That's how we achieve the dream situation. That's how we don't get our feet under the table, get comfortable and then get the rug pulled out from underneath us when we were least expecting it. 

But it doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by doing one thing, then doing another thing and another, reactively building a business. 

It happens by starting from the end point, working backwards and being proactive in your business decisions. Being intentional about exactly what you're looking to build.

Have a great weekend! Remember if you feel something I've mentioned is, or isn't relevant to your situation building your 3D printing business, I'd love to hear your feedback or questions. 

It helps me craft future content so that I can create content you find useful and thought provoking. 

Best,

Ed