I Gave Up 70% of My Gross Income for Automation
And I’d do it again!
And I’d do it again!
When my garage based 3D print business took off in 2017, I was surprised and delighted that I had found a market for something I could make in my garage and ship worldwide. (Or rather, that market found me!)
How I Created a 6 Figure 3D Printing Business from Home
In 2017, I started a 3d printing business from home, and by 2020, I had scaled it to over six figures.
There was definitely a mix of luck and timing involved.
This was a totally new niche, not pre-existing, so there wasn’t any real market saturation when I launched my website — and the product idea was just catching on in a market for which it was intended — cannabis.
Then I happened to name my brand using the word that would become the industry standard name for the product itself, so search engines and youtube shoveled a steady steam of customers my way without any ad spend for the first few years.
My niche is Cannabis Cigar making tools. My brand name and domain name is Cannagar Tools, and the key word was Cannagar.
Cannagar Tools Herbal Craft Molds & Accessories
Tools for making form-factor perfect cannagars!cannagartools.com
Why am I mentioning these things?
It was pure dumb luck that this word is now the worldwide standard for cannabis cigars, which has always helped me in search results.
I don’t want people to think that I had a specific formula to success there. With online business, sometimes there is a bit of dumb luck and timing involving, “the right place at the right time” kind of element to success.
(After the initial good luck is over, the rest is marketing effectively.)
I was very happy about “being my own boss” and “ditching the 9–5”, only …..I was working a little more than I wanted. About 50–60 hours per week for the first year or so.
Eventually I fine tuned it into a part time job taking about 20–25 hours.
Running a print lab in your garage is work.
There is no way around it.
Eventually I decided to outsource the printing so I could work less — and for my particular product, this meant finding a partner willing to take the load and accept lower price per part than is normal in 3d print services.
At first, I was splitting my gross with them 50/50.
I was bringing in about $110,000 gross when I made the deal.
My orders would come in, my partner would see the orders, start processing them, and every Friday I would pay half of my earnings to my print partner.
Then my partner decided that they couldn’t continue at the current rate because I only brought in $90,000 or so in 2022, and I had to re-negotiate the split.
This has happened twice now, and we are currently at a 30/70 split.
He takes 70, I get 30.
So, if I sell $100,000 worth of cannagar molds, I get $30k, and he gets $70k.
Last year was about $95k, and this year hopefully on track to beat that.
Most people think I should go back to processing all the orders myself and keep the gross.
After all, this was a fairly low overhead low risk business I could run at home part time anyway.
While that is true, I am still glad I have this arrangement, and hope that it can last for the long term.
Sure, I might only be bringing in 30%, which is now more like $20k after taxes and marketing, since the total order volume has gone down a bit.
I still do custom work at home, and that’s another $10k–20k per year, which takes minimal time for me. A week here and there.
But the important part — this income is now money that I get without working very much at all. I have a lot of free time now.
I already have my email marketing automated.
It’s as simple as slight modifications to my email marketing workflows at the beginning of the year.
I use Make.com to automate my emails.
I have a chatbot trained on all my knowledge, that can not only sell but teach a customer how to use my products.
I use Orimon AI to automate my customer service.
I use Pirateship to Send my orders to a partner for fulfillment.
My orders come in, and thanks to a shipping plugin through Pirateship, my partner sees the orders in their pirateship account, they know what needs to be processed, and then they send me an invoice on Thursday and I pay it Friday.
They generate the shipping labels and ship.
Cannagar Tools now takes maybe 1–2 hours of my time on the weeks when I need to blast an email, start a sale, or interact with a customer who has pushed past the bot and needed to get to me.
Pretty sweet, if you ask me.
I have several online sources of income, all of which are now mostly passive.
My primary business is now side income.
And I am happy about it.
Cannagar Tools will likely always be a source of side income, why ditch it?
As long as it takes almost no time, I am not concerned if I have to pay my printing partner most of the income.
Now that I have my bills paid without working, I intend to master crypto bots and day trading.
Those two things are my last frontier, and seem like the most interaction free — zero obligation sources of income I have found so far.
Full disclosure, I live in a nice little house in Washington near the pacific ocean in the middle of nowhere. My bills are very low compared to the rest of the state.
I don’t wish for people to think I’m some kind of multi-millionaire.
I’m headed there if I can help it.
But for now, I’m happy generating income and not having to work.
I don’t make a ton of money, but I make it unconventionally.
Without having a job.
I teach about the tools I use here :
Join me, won’t you?
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ Chris Morton YouTube
#botlife #automatedincome #passiveincome #lifestyletips #grossincome #business