GoKawiilHow I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months
...and why I walked away
Posted on April 12, 2026 by Adam Wespiser
I step down my front steps and into the brisk morning. I’m not dressed for January in New England, but fortunately I’m not going far. My hands grip a hastily constructed cardboard package, and beneath me is too much slush for slippers. I pass two houses before reaching my destination, peeking inside the front bay window as I go. No one’s home. I drop the package off on the brick stairs, fire a text—“dropped off”—and return to my apartment to find my dog nervously waiting at the top of the steps. Another 3D printed shipment complete!
This 3D printing business started with the help of my dog, at the time a puppy, and his desire to see my neighbor’s puppy. We (the humans) began talking, and as we ran through a conversation about dogs, the topic came to his trading card business. He’d source cards all over the internet for his daily WhatNot auctions with thousands of followers. Impressive—not only a home business doing real volume, but a lens into a world I had no idea existed.
I eventually noticed he had a 3D printed card stand, and with a printer at home, I offered to make him one myself. “Great,” he said, “I can sell them.”
The first test was whether I could print a functional card stand: hold a card vertically without falling over that wasn’t geometrically impossible to print. This is where I’d like to say, “my years of product design experience made this easy,” but I can’t. In software, you engineer a loop, here was my loop: print a piece, realize it’s unstable, tweak the design, repeat. All while fighting my CAD model in Onshape to stay organized and extensible while using my iPhone 13 as a stability test.
Eventually, the trick became clear: to make a card stand balance, you either use a thicker geometry that slows down printing, or you add weight to the base, seal it up, and leave the customer with something that feels more substantial than a plastic trinket, inspired by the Apple “impute value” philosophy behind their packaging.
With the first print done, the process evolved into a stream of client requests for images and names, design iteration which dominated the timeline, documenting the stand, customer approval, then handing off the production order to my neighbor to ship. All of this happened over text—not an organized workflow system, but good enough to handle a weekend’s worth of work, one weekend at a time. For a moment, the business worked. In reality, this was the easy part.
The first real system test was a piece my neighbor wanted for a family member, just like a regular order, but with a bit more pride on the line. The logo was the Boston Celtics logo. The problem? It’s not a minimal, modern logo; it’s a detailed, hand-drawn image from 1946.
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