Dear Customer, It's Going To Be OK
AI is pretty useful, not world ending, and the hype cycle will end soon.
Who makes good companies profitable and bad companies fail?
Customers do. Customers, the people who actually buy something. Whose money flows to the right use cases in a given product or technology because they, well, use the product or don’t.
Honest customer feedback gets clouded, or short-circuited, when startup companies rely on venture capital rather than customers to fund them. Given a span of time in which the startup company isn’t forced to pay attention to product-market fit, companies accidentally engineer their technology into solutions that don’t solve real problems, and then try to convince the shareholders—their real customers, actually—that the product actually does Solve The Customer’s Problem, if only The Customer would agree.
Sometimes this works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Printing Money
Pop quiz. What’s _____ referring to?
Not long ago, _____ was an idea best left to science fiction authors and speculators. It was often spoken of in the same breath as space travel and supersonic passenger planes… But thanks to advances in technology and higher levels of industry acceptance, _____ at scale is now less a matter of “someday” and more a matter of “right now.”1
Hmm, what could this be? Here’s a hint:
While ______ may seem like the latest technology, it has actually been around in one form or another since the 1980s. Many of the respondents to the survey have been using _____ for several years.2
Oh my goodness! I’d better get on the hype train before my competitors leave me behind!
More and more companies are turning to _____ to give their businesses a “significant” competitive advantage… Nearly half of those polled say it has given them a distinct competitive advantage. Another 55% indicate that _____ is one of their strengths, and because they have adopted the technology, they are staying ahead of the competition.3
OK, you probably got it by now. It’s-
From 2018 to 2019, the percentage of people using 3D printing FOR PRODUCTION increased from 38.75 to 51%.4
Wow! Great! 3D printing.
Definitely the future!
…in 2019.
3D printing, or “additive manufacturing,” saw well over 100 startups funded between about 2016 and 2021. The marketing campaigns of these companies managed to convince lots of people that 3D printing was about to revolutionize manufacturing, for reasons that had nothing to do with additive’s actual capabilities and everything to do with shareholder demands.
This is not to say that 3D printing isn’t useful or good, but such promises couldn’t be met by pretty much anything, and ultimately did not pan out. 2021 was Peak Additive. By early 2023, noted Alex Huckstepp in a widely circulated Medium article, 3D printing companies were “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,5” which is to say, failing to scale and failing to become profitable.
In 2024, leading additive startups Markforged and Desktop Metal (the main offender on the marketing hype train) both got acquired. Stratasys, after narrowly avoiding a merged with Desktop Metal, survived by securing a $120M investment from Fortissimo Capital in 2025. 3D Systems, the oldest additive company of them all, thought about buying Stratasys and then thought better and just did its own thing, presumably the same thing that helped it survive the last 40 years.
And today, additive manufacturing has outgrown its hype cycle and has matured in consumer products that are finally polished enough for mass consumer adoption, namely by Chinese brand Bambu and a few others. Bambu became profitable as the leading consumer brand because it offers automatic print bed leveling, support creation, and filament management, using a cool new technology called generative AI.
…Generative AI. What’s that?
Anyway, my point is this: _____ is a solid, profitable technology for the use cases it’s good at. But the marketing hype train will tell you almost nothing about what those use cases are.
If you’re selling _____, you need to talk to customers to understand what they need.
If you’re thinking about becoming a customer of _____, you need to talk to other customers to understand how they’re using the product.
Customers. You know, the people who actually use the technology. Who make good companies profitable and bad companies fail. When you read marketing hype, you’re talking to VCs, who will never have the perspective to care about whether the product actually works, but only whether it can make people hyped enough to buy.
So let’s all use our common sense. The world’s not going to end. We have a cool new technology again, and it’s going to succeed at some things and fail at others. That’s OK. If you want to dig underneath the hype cycle and understand use cases, talk to some customers, because they already know what’s going to happen next.
https://www.3deo.co/metal-3d-printing/production-3d-printing-is-at-the-tipping-point/
https://www.3deo.co/metal-3d-printing/50-of-survey-respondents-report-significant-competitive-advantage-from-3d-printing/
https://www.3deo.co/metal-3d-printing/50-of-survey-respondents-report-significant-competitive-advantage-from-3d-printing/
https://www.3deo.co/metal-3d-printing/50-of-survey-respondents-report-significant-competitive-advantage-from-3d-printing/
https://medium.com/@alexhuckstepp/3d-printing-companies-are-dying-e604cf7a92c7