Hi @cobnut,
Thank you for your input! You have made some really good points.
I agree that the market is very limited. Only those hubs who have let’s say at least 25 orders or have done business > $500 might find it useful. In addition, most hub owners might need it only once in a year to get a bird’s eye view of their Hub’s performance.
One area where Hub owners can benefit is to see what are the most popular materials for their orders over a given year and make a more educated decision about what materials to order.
The idea is still in a very nascent stage and I hope to offer insights in the report where some, if not all, hub owners will find value in it. I don’t expect the report to be too expensive. It will certainly be within two digits.
Hi @DigiPhy3D thanks for being understanding and not taking my comments in offence!
In terms of ordering materials, I don’t know how other Hubs work, but I’ve always got enough of the most common materials in stock to handle pretty much any order that comes my way. If (I wish!!) I had an absolutely huge order that would wipe out my stock, my preferred supplier delivers reliably next day and I’d expect to negotiate an extended completion time with the customer for that size of order anyway. I feel like I’m dismissing all your ideas, but again, I don’t see a detailed analysis of material popularity being something that most Hubs won’t already know.
To try and be positive, what would be most useful for me would be to know which industry sectors are most active, matched to my printing abilities. For example, do I get a lot of hobbyists, or a lot of prototyping, or a lot of toys, etc. Knowing this would allow me to target these sectors in advertising. Although 3DHubs does provide some insight into this data ( 3D printing trend report | Hubs ), this is too high level to be useful. Most of my orders are reasonable local to me, certainly only within the UK, so I’d really need to know which sector is most active locally to me and which ones are most active for FDM printing (which is currently all I can do).
However, trying to provide this analysis at an individual Hub level is once again likely to run into issues with data significance and volume. What you’d really need to do is provide me with an analysis based upon all Hubs within a (say) 100 mile radius of mine and really that’s a job for 3DHubs themselves, since they’re the only ones with access to the data at the appropriate level.
You can try the beta version here: http://www.myhubinsights.com/