Year after year towards madness
AM Survivor #4
I don’t know how it looks in other countries, but in Poland I’ve observed the following phenomenon: every founder and business owner in the AM industry, after crossing the ten-year mark in the field, started to behave differently… Irrationally. Irresponsibly. Foolishly.
And sometimes they literally fell into the arms of ultimate business madness.
For rather obvious reasons, I’m not going to mention any names—especially since some of them are still quite active and well-known in the global AM industry. So forgive me, but I will write in generalities.
The story you will read is quite universal and share many common traits. And in the end, it boils down to one thing—the 3D printing market is so specific and demanding that people who get deeply immersed in their work eventually lose their common sense and start doing things they wouldn’t have even considered just a few years earlier.
I’m not claiming that the AM industry is the toughest. It’s difficult—but every industry, every market, is more or less demanding.
However, I do claim that AM is undoubtedly one of the most thankless industries out there.
To succeed in it, you need high-level skills in many different areas. Mechatronics (because you need to know how a 3D printer works). Materials science (because you need to understand the properties of different consumables). Software (because you need to properly prepare both the printer and the model for 3D printing). Design (because you need to know whether a part is even printable—and if not, how to fix it). And finally, you need pure business skills—organization, marketing, sales, basic accounting, etc.
So you have to know a lot and keep constantly expanding your knowledge (because the technology is continuously evolving at a rapid pace).
Meanwhile… there has never really been much money in 3D printing…
I’ve written about this many times in previous articles:
A millionaire in the 3D printing industry could be a billionaire in any other industry.
And well, in the long run, not everyone can handle that. People either leave after a few years, deciding to work in other, more “normal” industries, or they keep pushing on in AM, gradually losing touch with reality.
Attention! This doesn’t apply to everyone. I know a few people who have been in this thing for 12-14 years and still see things clearly. But they’re just exceptions that prove the rule.
Jimmy’s story
Our protagonist is a middle-aged man born in Central Europe. Let’s call him Jimmy.
A true AM genius. He knows everything about practically every 3D printing technology. Like EVERYTHING. He started his career in the mid-2000s, when the industry barely existed. Back then, he worked as a designer in an industrial company that was one of the few using 3D printing for rapid prototyping at the time.
Later—still in the 2000s—he founded his own company specializing exclusively in AM and all related areas (design, reverse engineering, metrology with 3D scanners etc.) He began traveling the world—first Europe (Euromold fairs), then the USA, and finally China.
Jimmy met people, built connections. He became one of the first distributors of industrial machines in his country. But he sold very little because awareness of the technology was almost non-existent.
Basically, during the first five years of his business, despite his immense talent and ever-growing, incredible knowledge, the company remained very small and barely made ends meet.
In the mid-2010s, things began to change with the rapid development of amateur and desktop 3D printing. Awareness started to rise, and more and more people came into contact with 3D printers. Although still a novelty, AM no longer inspired amazement, but rather intrigue and curiosity.
Many new people appeared on the scene, quickly becoming good experts in the field of 3D printing. Of course, no one could overtake Jimmy in knowledge and experience, but often it turned out there was no need.
It turned out that very few people needed such specialized knowledge. And hardly anyone cared...
Year after year, Jimmy felt more undervalued and unappreciated. Suddenly, in the second half of the 2010s, he realized that he, with his 10 years of experience, was treated the same as people who had only been in the market for 3-4 years.
Moreover, although the overall number of customers (and money) in the market had grown, so had the number of companies offering the same things as Jimmy’s firm. His revenues didn’t actually improve that much—they stayed practically the same.
Fuck!
It really hurt his feelings. It made him wonder why he was even doing this…?
That was the moment when Jimmy started scheming…:
sometimes he sold a machine with “improved” specifications—but only on paper
sometimes he sold a machine that was incapable of producing what he promised it would
sometimes he sold a machine that didn’t work at all
he began taking grants for projects he never intended to complete or used the funds to build machines that never worked
finally, he offered services he never delivered.
Each new scam was a bit bigger than the previous one. And then a bit bigger. And bigger still. Until suddenly it turned out that Jimmy was no longer a 3D printing specialist—he was a professional con artist specializing in 3D printing.
He lost himself in intrigues and lies. His family fell apart. His mistress left him. His colleagues began to distance themselves. People in the industry first started hearing about, and then suffering from, his scams. He lost all authority.
He went insane.
Alright, not literally insane in a medical sense. He wasn’t admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
But comparing him today to the man he was 20 years ago, we see two completely different people. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. And the current one is a twisted, caricatured version of his former self.
The 3D printing industry drove him to this.
This story is based on several real people, but there are many more variations:
divorce, alcoholism, living day by day (from one 3D printer offer to the next)
falling out with a business partner, splitting up, years-long fights over IP, raw, animal-like hatred for each other, neurosis, and emotional disorders
a spree of acquisitions after waiting too long for financial success, ultimately driving the company into bankruptcy in a very short time.
And even I had my own moment of madness, when in 2023—exactly 10 years after my debut—I got fed up with the AM industry, dropped everything, and started selling stretch ceilings and exclusive furniture.
Luckily, I recovered from it quickly—losing practically all the money I had sunk into the interior finishing business helped a lot.
And so, the AM industry keeps devouring its own children—grinding them down, testing their limits, and either forging them into wiser, more humble people, or spitting them out as bitter, broken shadows of their former selves.
Take care.
Another excellent article, we seldom consider or discuss the human toll of this industry as we race towards the next "new development". Selfishly, I think I inspired about 50% of your article....and have landed somewhere in the middle of "wiser" and "insane"!