Monday
10Aug2009
MakerBot Distributes Itself!
Monday, August 10, 2009 | Share Article 
The buzz over MakerBot, the budget 3D Printer is clearly intense. Sufficiently intense that demand for their amazing device has almost outstripped their manufacturing capacity.
However, being an inventive crew, they've come up with a pioneering solution that we don't think has been attempted before. They are crowdsourcing a portion of their manufacturing. Even better, they are crowdsourcing to existing MakerBot printers. In other words, they are asking the clients themselves to help make more printers. And those printers will make more parts for even more printers, and so on...
It's not the entire printer, but it is one specific part (the "608 Idler Pulley"), and MakerBot will pay you USD$30 for a batch of 30 operational pulleys. Why this part? Simply because it's on their critical path and the barrier to larger scale production. But where else might this lead?
In a mind-bending twist, they've invented the embryo of a self-replicating client base; something the marketeers have dreamed of for millenia!
What will they do next week?
Via MakerBot
Reader Comments (1)
That's brilliant, basically taking an idea from the Reprap project and using it as a marketting/supplier distribution solution