Launch HN: Voodoo Manufacturing (YC W17) – AWS for Manufacturing

Hi Hacker News! I'm one of the co-founders of Voodoo Manufacturing (https://voodoomfg.com/) in the current YC W17 batch. Voodoo Manufacturing is an automated 3D printing factory capable of producing anywhere from 1-10,000 plastic parts in 2 weeks or less, at injection molding prices. The difference between us and other 3D printing services is that we use lower-end commoditized 3D printers rather than commercial or industrial machines. Today we have 160 MakerBot Replicator 2s. We started Voodoo because we believed these machines were capable of making high-enough quality parts and products for various use cases. Obviously we're not (yet) producing any high-performance parts for airplanes, etc., but we can make cost-competitive hardware components, and surprisingly we make a lot of promotional products (event swag, trophies, memorabilia, etc.)

Since launching Voodoo we've come to realize that traditional manufacturing is still really hard for most people and companies, and definitely falls short when you're producing parts in runs of less than 10,000 units. More than 3D printing, we're excited about the future of fully digital manufacturing -- going from a digital design to physical parts with virtually no upfront costs or overhead. Today we're cost-competitive with injection molding for runs of 1-10k units (the exact cross-over point depends on the part), but our goal is to reduce costs by 90% over the next 5 years, and thus become competitive for runs of up to 100k units. We also believe that 3D printing and other digital manufacturing technologies will continue to improve, from materials to machines, and so over time we'll become capable of producing high-quality and high-performance parts that can be used for more applications.

A couple of projects we've worked on include this current marketing campaign with Dixie (http://www.crushtomizer.com/) where they're using our API to submit orders to be manufactured and drop-shipped on-demand, and a pet-project where we printed a life-size body model in less than 24 hours (http://blog.voodoomfg.com/2016/06/10/a-life-size-human-model...). Today, we've worked with over 1,200 customers, from large brands to small startups, to help people make things that wouldn't be possible or economical with other manufacturing methods. We're excited about all the things currently happening within manufacturing, and are proud to be one of the companies trying to push forward and build a new type of factory, right here in the US.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on what we're doing, what you might want that we don't currently offer, or help you out if you have a project in mind. Thanks so much!

How many hours do you have on your Makerbots? I've worn two into the ground, and at around 500 hours things start to "go wrong". Air prints, printer head misalignment, more frequent clogged nozzles, a variety of things. At 1000 hours, belts start to show wear, build plates have noticeable warpage, extruder gears need replaced.

If you can, could you speak to your long term maintenance plan? I was swamped keeping two Rep 2s running consistently, I can't imagine managing a fleet of 160.

In a similar vein, it would be really cool if in a year or so a blog post showed up showing statistically significant numbers about wear on the MBs, percentages of successful prints, why prints failed, etc.

Are you just doing FDM printing or can you also do milling?

I'm very very interested in multiple possible $300-$1000 budget things for both. Edit: Looking at the other comments (I haven't priced anything out using the site yet, scared to do so b/c i don't like drip campaigns), some of my projects might be below this budget using you! Wow!

Is the goal that I use this service to make beautiful enclosures for my projects, or to do all the hardware needs for my project from design to complete?

I've mostly used Oshpark/Shapeways. I was looking into getting a desktop milling machine like an Othermill or Shapeoko, but from my testing they're still way too loud to have in my home office.

Do you cater to one-off things from people like me, or is the hope to be doing mostly B2B?

Good to see a manufacturing startup in YC! I'm currently a grad student in industrial engineering and have been working with geometric analysis for manufacturability for around 2 years now.

What types of analysis are you doing on the parts to determine cost? Slicing, orientation optimization, volume analysis, full toolpaths with estimated time?

Does your analysis automatically look at the tradeoff between injection molding and 3d printing for a particular design which was uploaded?

I noticed the current interface requires all parts to be in the same unit. Any chance of a per-part unit selection (while keeping the batch)?

What made you choose to go through YC a second time after your startup Layer By Layer? Isn't the network there for you after the program?

I did a price comparison vs Shapeways of the direct print which was 20 units.

Total cost was $158 for Voodoo and Total cost was $332 for Shapeways.

Is it true that you guys are cheaper and any reason why?

"we make a lot of promotional products (event swag, trophies, memorabilia, etc.)"

Is there a gallery of products you've made? Also, do you do your own drop-shipping?

Looks cool!

We use 3D printing extensively, for large sized parts, and there are very few options out there.

Consider buying a few machines that can do very large parts. We would use you literally today if you could do that. It's a very underserved part of the market.

I'm talking apx 700mm x 400mm x 300mm

I just got one of the Voodoo manufactured "coffee stoppers" from http://www.crushtomizer.com/ in the mail!

I noticed you guys don't ship to Canada - any specific reason why? Also your user edit page appears to be broken - https://voodoomfg.com/users/edit, click update, drops to a blank white page

This looks great! I myself just bought a chinese 3d printer to prototype some parts. One thing I noticed was QA was difficult. If I did a run of 10k parts, how would you QA them?

This is a really cool approach to make 3d printing affordable! I'm one of the cofounders of Rolling Cube (rollingcube.in), an Indian startup in the digital manufacturing space. We're trying to make traditional manufacturing convenient and accessible to everyone, starting with laser cutting, and would love your feedback on the concept.

I bought $50 in prints from you last spring! Everything went very smoothly. Good luck!

I own a Taz2, but it's nice to have somebody else handle the printing every once in a while.

What's the pricing like? Or is it quoted per order?

Really cool! I signed up for your mailing list, eagerly awaiting when you can offer materials other than plastic.

Did anyone else think of 'OMFG' in the URL? I.e. I read it as 'Voodoo OMFG'

How do you compare to protomold?

Please consider adding support for international shipping.

Why no .SLDPRT support?

Please develop a different, self-degrading material - we already have too many plastic material in the ocean and it is a major problem - you certainly did read about it, this is commonly known nowadays. I wonder how anybody would build a new business on the idea of flooding the world with even more poison.