Gabe Bentz brings 3D printing power to the people

By Karen Hanna 

Slant 3D President Gabe Bentz envisions a future in which his lights-out-capable print farm rivals corporate monoliths like Amazon and Foxconn. But he’s chasing a dream, not dollars — to revolutionize manufacturing in a way that allows anyone to turn an idea into a part, using platforms like Etsy to communicate orders for one-off print jobs. Other print farms have come and gone, but Slant 3D — which uses proprietary machines that can print most of their own replacement parts — is still standing. While Bentz admits running a company is misery, he’s insatiable for further growth. He spoke with Karen Hanna, Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing senior staff reporter, about giving injection molding a run for its money. 

Tell me about Slant 3D’s business model.  

Bentz: For 3D designers, their only option historically was to sell their file to other people with 3D printers, which means you only have a market of all the people with 3D printers, which is only a couple million or something. But now they can upload those files to our system, and they can delete them anytime they feel like. Their file isn't loose out into the internet where some other print farm or unscrupulous printer can go sell it. They never lose control of their IP, and they get access to more customers. You find out [for example], “Oh, it costs $3 to make it through Slant 3D, I’ll sell it for 10 [dollars].” When somebody buys it, we print and ship it. There’s never a cash outlay for the creator. There’s not the necessity for volume discounts, because there’s no amortization; the user doesn’t have to buy a machine. There’s no money exchanged until somebody actually wants to buy a product. [Creators] get the royalty or however big of a payback they want or think they can bill for it. They have no cost. They’re immediately profitable as soon as they sell their very first unit. 

Our largest farm is spec’d out for 3,000 machines. We’re working on, how do you make a single part for 50 cents [for example] out of the blue, out of thin air, so that it’s literally just a warehouse where the shelves make the product? If we’re able to do that, people no longer have to buy giant batches. They don’t have to buy 10,000 at a time. They can just upload the file and, if they need 100 a day or two a day or 2,000 in a day, they can just order those and have them delivered a few days later, as if it was just plucked from the shelf.  

We’re going to build about three to four more factories in the United States over the next couple of years. The main one is in Boise; we have another one starting to go in in Austin, Texas. We’re going to go a little further east — [the] final location hasn’t been decided. Then, we probably bounce back to the West, somewhere like Nevada or Arizona. The international ones would be likely Europe and Australia. 

Is it possible to be profitable making just a couple parts at a time?  

Bentz: If you have the scale, a couple parts at a time can certainly be done profitably. We’re able to absorb the margins of manufacturing, shipping and warehousing. We’re not just the manufacturer at that point; we’re the entire supply chain. You just need a lot of different customers. We’ve done that through our software offerings, which are things like integrating with Shopify or our main API, where any company can just plug into our print farm and order parts whenever. Those things allow us to have users who order a single part a day, or a part a month or something like that. 

How did Slant 3D come about?  

Bentz: Slant 3D started out as a division of another company called Slant Concepts. I trained as a mechanical engineer in robotics. We were a product design firm. I worked in consumer robotics and R&D projects for a little while. Through a series of projects, we ended up creating a small STEM robotics kit that was a little robot arm. It had to be 3D printed because we were lazy and didn’t want to design it for molds. It ended up being more successful than we thought. We had to figure out how to make 3D printing produce enough of them to put into retail stores. That kind of set us down the path of building out Slant 3D. Slant 3D was eventually spun out in 2019. 

What are some of the tricks for making 3D printing scalable? 

Bentz: The biggest one was automation. 3D printing was always quite expensive mainly because of the labor involved in it; a part would be finished, and then someone would have to pull that part and then start a new part. That’s just too slow. We designed machines that could be heavily automated, so that when a part is done, it is removed almost immediately, and then it can move on to the next part. We worked really hard improving the supply chains and ancillary processes around it. If you want low-cost parts, you have to have raw materials that are low-cost, so we started producing our own filament. We liked the print farm model, because, even though it might take an hour to print a single part, if you have 1,000 machines you’re now making 1,000 parts per hour, you can match the same scale as any other manufacturing process. And you have the benefit of never having a single point of failure, because, if a single machine goes down, we’ll run the other 999. 

What are the biggest and smallest orders you've seen so far?  

Bentz: The maximum goes all the way up to like a million. But, right now, 3D printing generally breaks even with molding around 100,000 units; if you’re making more than that, molding should be fairly reasonable, depending on your supply chain. If you’re making fewer, 3D printing should probably be the dominant solution. 

We’ve covered about 95 or so percent of all job sizes ever made because the 1-million-unit quantities are just not very common and becoming less common. 

What kind of customers are you serving? 

Bentz: We do a lot of industrial hardware — wheels, brackets, gears. ... That’s largely production clients. And, on the opposite side, consumer-type products — cookie cutters, lamps, tools, widgets, gadgets, that kind of stuff.  

Tell me about the printers you use. 

Bentz: We design and manufacture our own machines. It allows us to maintain control and consistency. It's about automation, the ability to auto eject and be controlled and compatible with our software and do the particular dance that we want them to do with our software. For industrial use, if we were to go buy desktop-size machines, printer manufacturers are designing them to be consumer-focused and consumer-friendly, which is an entirely different set of goals from industrial use. If we bought a bunch of machines from  
“insert manufacturer name,” we don’t know that they will be making [or supporting] that machine five years from now, and now, all our workflows and everything else are messed up. 

FDM is, to us, the only one that can do mass production. Any other 3D printing process requires so much post-processing, whether it be removal of toxic dust, or messing with the toxic resin, baking and cooking it and dyeing and blah, blah, blah. Long term, FDM is the only one where we can build a warehouse where the shelves make the product because an FDM part could be printed and then pulled straight from the machine and thrown straight into a box, if it’s designed appropriately. Short term, within the context of just straight-up mass production where you’re making a bajillion parts, FDM is able to leverage the injection molding supply chain, so the raw inputs are way more affordable than other manufacturing processes.  

What sort of materials can you use? 

Bentz: Anything that’s a thermoplastic. We make our own commodity filaments. But we like using suppliers whenever we can because they should be better at their job than we are.  

What size parts can you make?  

Bentz: They have to fit inside of an 8-inch cube. 

We’re in a sweet spot of what is needed. You never want to engineer a solution around what a technology can do because that’s a solution in search of a problem. The problem our customers have is they’re trying to make a plastic part. So, how do we make that plastic part as efficiently and reliably as possible? The vast majority of plastic parts ever manufactured are about the size of your fist. We’re quite a bit larger than the size of a fist, but able to go up, down and sideways in different ways. I think there’s plenty of room in the industry for different formats, like large format and maybe microscale. But those are for solving different problems. We’re trying to get a generic Amazon item shipped to a customer without having to store warehouses full of inventory. 

How long can these printers run without human interaction? 

Bentz: If they’re running a production job with auto ejection, indefinitely. Our production machines were meant to be really robust and reliable. People come by and collect the bins. We’re working on adding more robots.  

Can your printers print themselves? 

Bentz: I think 50 to 60 percent of the part count is fully 3D printed on our machine. 

In addition to your printers, is all your software proprietary? 

Bentz: All of our software, the APIs and the rest of it has all been created by our team. 

How fast is Slant 3D’s turn-around? 

Bentz: On our print-on-demand services, the turnaround is somewhere between two and four or five days. We’re going to get that down to less than two soon. 

Should injection molders be afraid of 3D printing?  

Bentz: It depends on [the] time scale. 3D printing is fundamentally a better process than molding. 3D printing, you have electricity and plastic and no other inputs; molding, obviously, you have the mold, and then you get your first part ... [a] huge upfront investment. It just requires such large scale that you lose flexibility. 3D printing still has plenty of engineering hurdles to get over, but if you want to game-theory this out into the way future, 3D printing would become the dominant way of making stuff. If you don’t have to buy minimum quantities and you don’t have to buy a mold upfront and you don’t have to store stuff for months or years, if all of that just goes away, that looks like a really, really good option compared to molding.  

How long is all that going to take? 

Bentz: It’s almost impossible to predict the future. You’re generally looking at not necessarily how fast can people adopt the technology, but how fast do people change? The old engineer who’s been in their career for 30 years knows everything about molding and nothing about printing. I don’t think there’d be a major transition until supply chain managers and engineers have a generational turnover, to where the college students who are growing their careers and getting promoted, who consider 3D printing an option, are decision-makers.  

If people design for 3D printing, they get a vastly better output and can match or exceed the specifications of the molded part. But if you attempt to 3D print an injection molded part, you’ll probably be disappointed.  

It’s not necessarily people are against redesigning parts, it’s just they don’t know how. There’s not a textbook or a tutorial or anything else out there. We’ve considered it incumbent upon ourselves to show people how to fully leverage the process. 

The way we’ve worked to address this is through our YouTube channel. There’s a whole catalog indexed by search term. Having a free resource is a big deal.  

What’s holding 3D printing back? 

Bentz: Printing has been capable of replacing and becoming a primary form of manufacturing for about five years, especially FDM. The problem with 3D printing is much more about marketing. The industry is focused on selling machines to people who don’t want machines. No one in the industry is focused on making parts, and how do you make a good part that an end customer can be happy with? They’ve been really focused on how do we make an injection molded part with 3D printing, which is a fool’s errand. 

Did you ever see yourself running a business? 

Bentz: I don’t know if it was destined for me. I do know that if we weren’t doing it, I don’t know who would do it. I don’t really recommend it to very many people. We’re kind of the last print farm service bureau standing, at least in the United States. We’re the last ones dumb enough to try to build this model out. But we also think we’re the ones who know how to do it.  

So what makes you different? 

Bentz: I would say we were a lot more rounded. We didn’t necessarily consider it a technology play. We look at the distribution, business and economics of it in a very first-principle kind of way. Most service bureaus that failed diversified too greatly. They offer all this horizontal optionality, but then you don’t get good at any one thing. We focus very explicitly on FDM. We also focus very explicitly on scale. Anybody else trying to print on demand would buy 10 machines and then try to build a plugin. And then if they ever got a big customer, they’d immediately fail because a big customer would say, “Here’s 100 orders in a day,” and they’d be like, “I got 10 machines, I can't do it.” We started out with scale as a focus, trying to explicitly compete with injection molding, which required us to build giant platforms. Now, when we release something like an API, where someone can send us 100 orders in a day, we’re like, “Cool, whatever.” We’re able to scale with our customers. So, it can be a useful resource to them, rather than an experiment or a fun little project or something they have to keep an eye on; we can actually be a piece of infrastructure for them. 

Is there anything you’ve learned as you've been steering this business? 

Bentz: The necessity for focus. Getting really, really good at a single thing is so critically important.  

Can you tell me about a mistake you’ve made? 

Bentz: We have a huge graveyard of canceled projects. We tried selling one of our machines four years ago.  

Selling a machine was a mistake because it wasn’t our core competency. Our intention was people would use the machine for prototypes. [The user] would have a prototype that was verified on one of our machines, so they could just send us the final file. Having our machine with our material and everything else in there, the client would be able to get all the work done on their side and know that they have a good clean file coming through to our side. But people didn’t really use it that way very reliably. 

We thought it was a value-add to our clients, but then, we’re like, “This isn’t as big of a value-add as we thought.”  

We try lots of stuff because in order for a company to survive, you have to experiment and learn very, very quickly. But those experiments cannot become tumors. If the experiment doesn’t work, you’ve got to kill it as quickly as possible.  

What do you like to do outside of work? 

Bentz: That’d be a joy. I certainly do not recommend this to anybody. It’s wildly painful. It’s a mental illness to start a company. I have a great benefit of enjoying what I do. Since I’m able to engage with many different themes, from software, to hardware, to marketing, to video production, most of the itches that might have been hobbies, if I had a different type of job, most of those itches are scratched throughout the day. I have very little external availability. If I do, it’s mainly to just fully unplug from work and, I don’t know, stare at a blank wall or read a book. As a startup, it’s very rare that I have a week that’s under 90 hours. 

Do you regret starting the company? 

Bentz: You never have any regrets about it. It’s like saying, “Oh, I had to go to the gym every day and I’ve been sore. Do I regret that?” And then you look in the mirror and you’re like, “I did pretty good for going to the gym for two years.” A company is really similar to that, where it’s very much about showing up every day, putting in the work. There is an end result in the products or the technology that is now available that was never available before. If you hadn’t done it, it might not have ever been available. Sure, it’s miserable, but the results justify the methodology. Quite frankly, if you’re going into a company to have fun, you just increase your probability of failure. Especially if you want to do it for the long term. Many people try to start a company ... for two years and get out. Some of them can make a little money, but it’ll never be substantial, and it’ll never have any lasting impact. If you’re going to start a company, you have to commit for 10 years before you see the ultimate result. And most of those 10 years, you’re going to be miserable wandering around in the wilderness, as you figure out what to do and make all your mistakes. 

What are you most proud of so far? 

Bentz: The fact that it is now possible for, like, a kid in Zimbabwe to design some little widget and upload it, and then some woman in New York would buy it, and that kid would get paid. That’s really, really cool. In that individual moment, that’s hugely enabling. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook with a laptop and a weekend, but now we’ve provided the infrastructure to where somebody can do that with a physical product. If you were to manufacture something five years ago, you had to be rich, you had to go pay 10 grand or 50 grand for the mold. It’s just [inaccessible] to the creative people who are young kids just playing around with stuff. Now that we exist, it is possible to create that stuff for free and build a business around it without ever buying machinery.  

Do you feel like your company already has launched other people’s careers? 

Bentz: We’re in the early stages of that. The great big wins are yet to come. The API and many of those integrations are less than a year old. If we have companies being built on top of our company, they’ve got their own 10-year journey. There’s those signs coming up of these nifty little products being created and being released that otherwise would never have been. 

How big can Slant 3D get? 

Bentz: We know the plastics market is about $1.5 trillion per year. About 85 percent of that could be produced with FDM printing as it is today. So, there’s a $1 trillion market opportunity out there. So, we’ve got plenty of room to run. The sky’s the limit, so long as we continue maintaining good parts and reliably producing stuff for our customers.  

We have our core API, but then we build integrations for Shopify and Etsy and so on. All of those require a certain amount of growing time. As they hit critical mass, you get a couple of users and a couple more; it starts breaking loose. That timeline is where companies can fail because you have a period of time where you’re still having to pay all your bills. That’s the start-up conundrum: How long can you survive until your products are successful? 

How’s it going so far?  

Bentz: We’ve always been a profitable company. We started out as just a service provider. That allowed us to grow and scale. As a startup whose ambition is to grow fairly quickly, we take big risks. Because we don’t want to be another injection molding company that happens to use 3D printing; we want to be that enabler, that warehouse where the shelves make the product. If we can’t get there, there’s really not much reason for us to continue to exist. Philosophically, we don’t want to do it unless we’re actually doing that.  

We’re doing the best we can to keep on growing as fast as we can. The expectation is to be at an IPO stage in about three years. 

What do you think revenues could be? 

Bentz: You can use Foxconn as a reference. Foxconn is about a $60 or $100 billion company. They’re making all the iPhones. They have revenues somewhere between $10 and $30 billion per year. We think we can exceed any of the largest manufacturers today. Because [the Slant 3D’s printing model is] so democratizing, we have basically infinite customers. We don’t consider ourselves so much a manufacturer as we consider ourselves an alternative way of doing Amazon.  

How long till you’re on par with Foxconn? 

Bentz: Who knows? Nobody can predict the future. 3D printing is the correct way of making stuff. How quickly can we convince other humans to attempt it and see the value of it? Foxconn was whatever, 60 years old; Amazon is 30 years old. All these companies, there’s generally a really long history behind them. For us to say, “In five years, we’re going to be Amazon,” that seems unreasonable. But if we’re committed to doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, I think it almost kind of becomes inevitable.  

As far as selling platforms, is Slant 3D now available everywhere it needs to be? 

Bentz: Not even close. Just this morning, I was talking to our Etsy team, looking at the number of users on the Etsy plugin there. We looked at the total number of listings that are 3D printed on Etsy. Based on that, we can grow about 1,000 times bigger. That’s how much of a runway we have on that single platform, which is one of the smallest platforms. 

What would you like your legacy to be? 

Bentz: I’m a religious person. After I die, I go up to the Pearly Gates. And I see Jesus or St. Peter, who’s ever standing there that day, and the question is, “What did you do with your life?” So long as you can answer, “All that I could,” I think you had a good life. The particular definition of “all that I could” is individualized to each person.  

What does it mean to you? 

Bentz: It depends on what it is. If I am married and have kids, I hope I raised them well, and, within the business, I hope I take it as far as we can. Right now, we’re working really hard to build a system where manufacturing is free, because that just changes how everything is made and how stuff is sold and moved around. That seems like a worthwhile thing. Being a billionaire or whatever would be wasted on me because almost nothing about my lifestyle would change. I think about a mansion, I just think, “Oh, man, all those rooms you’ve got to clean. Why do you want all this crap?” If I wanted to chase that stuff, there’s way easier ways of doing it. Money is a means of keeping score and an analytics point, but if it’s the goal, that’s very shallow and unsustainable. If money is the only goal, you can’t really change the world. I want to be insatiable. 

Does 3D printing change the world? 

Bentz: It absolutely changes the world. Now, it’s not about being rich to buy a molded part, which means you have way more creation, way more better products, products being created faster and better. You have so many more problems being solved because it’s not expensive to solve the problem.