Pricing and Color Rationale for Dice Designer
My name is Samuel Cohen and this is how I single-handedly designed, developed, and launched a website where you can customize a die and have it 3D printed in 30 days. Below is a business update post. If you wish to read more about the project, the landing page is here.
When I first came up with the idea of a dice color customizer, I figured that the options were almost infinite. In a lot of ways they are, but it takes a massive amount of work to get there.
Since I only had a month, I had to determine exactly how far I would go. I chose to allow the customization of 9 colors. This meant that there are 72 variations in total, excluding duplicate colors. I figured that for an MVP, the current amount would be sufficient.
Below is a video showcasing my rationale for determining colors and price. If you want a more in-depth look into the process, continue reading.
Color and Pricing Overview
Color Rationale
The biggest cost of producing the print is time. Standard 3D printing material cost is low and the die barely weighs a couple of ounces. Web hosting is also fairly cheap these days. However, it takes approximately 45 minutes to create a die with my current setup. I decided to set the price at $7.99, although it might need to be raised depending on the circumstances.
Let’s get into the specifics of why I made these choices and my plans for the future.
Determining Color Options
In my initial program, you could change the color of each of the faces. I could do this because each face is a separate 3D model.
In the following program, this feature is disabled because I only have a one-color printer and variation limits within WooCommerce.
Printing Limits
If the original color options were still enabled I would have to print each dot separately, making the time investment and failure rate ridiculous.
With all faces being the same color I only need to change the color once. Here you can see the dots printed in one color and the second color overlaid.
The failure rate for this process is still quite high and could be improved. The failure rate is high because the dots often come up from the bed and get stuck on the print head. This is because they are very small, about 3mm, and at that point, bed adhesion isn’t great. This can be improved with increased temperature and bigger dots.
However, there are a multitude of solutions I could use to solve this problem. I am currently working with a printer that can only print one color at a time, but there are upgrades that would allow me to print 5.
Tools like the Palette 2 allow you to print with more colors without significant modification to the printer. A purchase of a palette would greatly expand my potential options and improve consistency. If I choose to continue product development, this will be my first investment.
Software Limits
I am using Woocommerce for store functions. It provides a great basis to work from, but some options are limited.
I ran into two issues: product id and variations.
The product id is listed on the right side of each different variation. As you can see they are chronological. When you add something to the cart in a Woocommerce store you are using the product id. The problem is that when you are adding the die to the cart, the program has to know the product id. If the product id isn’t based on colors then there is no way to find it.
I had to solve this problem by creating a plugin that added items to the cart using a SKU instead. A SKU is customizable, meaning I could give it a value that made sense to the program. For example, the color green is equal to 5, and black is equal to 9.
This problem ties into the issue with variations. If each color in the die is a value, then the amount of variations is exponential. With 9 colors the potential variations are 72, with 10 there are 90 excluding duplicates.
Plus the price and settings have to be re-entered for each variation. Meaning that I had to spend several hours entering everything manually.
I’m still working on a solution to this problem, whether it be saving an image of the completed dice or simply saving a configuration in a different way. For now, 72 variations are enough for me.
Pricing
Finding a price comes down to how much people will pay for something. If that price doesn’t cover your costs then you have to make it cheaper. I have yet to find out exactly how much I can charge for my dice, but here is what I started with.
Material Cost
The materials for this product are physical plastic and the cost of web-hosting.
As mentioned previously the plastic doesn’t cost that much. A kilogram of good quality material is approximately $25, meaning that the actual dice costs $.50. This is a huge benefit of producing something using 3D printing. Even if you include the cost of electricity and maintenance the physical costs are low.
The cost of web-hosting and administrative work is not oppressive either. It will cost approximately $100 a year to keep the website running. These costs scale well with a larger customer base, so I shouldn’t have much difficulty increasing production.
Time Cost
By far the most expensive component of my product is the time cost. At the current moment, it takes approximately an hour to print and ship a completed die. For a majority of this time, the user has to pay attention to the printer to notice potential errors and change filament color.
When working with traditional manufacturing methods, the more you produce the cheaper the product. This doesn’t function nearly as well for 3D printed products because you cannot reduce print time significantly. 3D printing is bound to how fast a layer of plastic can cool properly, something that cannot be overcome easily.
However, I can improve my time investment by investing in some automation. For example, implementing a multi-color printing system would mean that the print wouldn’t have to be monitored and could be started automatically.
Open source tools like OctoPrint allow a printer to be connected to the internet and controlled remotely.
Alternatively, I could utilize belt printers to continue my production automatically.
Conclusion
Although the color options and cost to produce for my product is currently high, there are ways to drastically improve efficiency. Even an investment of $1000 could cut time and cost in half.
I chose the price of $7.99 as a starting point because it is what I believe someone would pay for a custom die. Once I get some orders and reduce manufacturing time I will likely adjust the price.
In the next post, I will give a quick overview of my fulfillment process.
Check Out the Website at www.dicedesigner.com.
