YouTuber NYC CNC Reviews His Xometry Experience
John Saunders of NYC CNC recently gave his thoughts on instant quoting on demand and his "7 Reasons to Add Xometry to Your Toolbox"!
Machinist John Saunders, of the YouTube channel NYC CNC, has over 200,000 subscribers and a passion for all things CNC. He recently tried out the Xometry instant quoting platform and made a video review of his experience. Thank you to John for your candid thoughts!
From the NYC CNC website:
Seven reasons to add Xometry to your toolbox:
Xometry has built a network of over 500 machine shops.
When you submit a solid model to their website, you get a near-instant pricing quote. Xometry then uses its intelligent ranking system to match the type of part with machine shops that have completed parts of similar shape, characteristics or complexities in the past. In other words, they figure out what type of parts are a good fit for what shops – and that’s proven through past work! That’s cool.
(We've actually grown our Partner Network to over 900 machine shops as of February 2018! If you're interested in becoming a Partner, get more info now.)
Consider Xometry one of your Resources.
Entrepreneurial success relies on your ability to take an idea and execute on that idea by building your Team and Resources. Xometry may not be your only source for machined parts – perhaps you have in-house equipment, or good existing relationships with other shops. Leverage Xometry when you’re over-capacity, or want to send out an anonymous prototype to get a quick test part machined and stay under-the-radar on a new prototype.
Xometry's in-house engineering and their various website and PDF resources are priceless.
If manufacturing isn’t your forte, but you need parts made, Xometry’s in-house engineering, their manufacturing background and their various website and PDF resources are priceless. Take a look at https://www.xometry.com/manufacturing-standards. When pursuing my first entrepreneurial endeavor, I did not speak the language of machining (or 3D printing, or EDM or sheet metal). I did not know what a “thousandth” of an inch was. The ability to find CAD and engineering talent (see our article on Upwork.com) then source parts through Xometry is a powerful recipe for a manufacturing entrepreneur.
Instant Pricing: iterate your design-for-manufacturing process.
Instant Pricing: iterate your design-for-manufacturing process by leveraging Xometry’s instant (and free) quoting process. It’s not perfect (and you can request a manual quote review, but we found their pricing competitive when quoting at quantities high enough to bake in the setup and programming costs.
Xometry isn’t pretending to be machinists.
Xometry’s value proposition to machine shops is to let a machine shop do what they are good at: programming parts and running machines. Xometry helps fill the skill-gap so often missing in machine shops: marketing, sourcing work, and maintaining customer-facing processes. Like we talk about in our Lean Organization video, we enjoy working for “the process” – even if we are the boss. Xometry gives machine shops a platform to maximize odds of success – whether checkpoints on ordering material or guidelines on packing parts.
Fail fast, fail cheap.
When you have an idea: get it designed, get it made, and get it tested! And do so with as little money and time as possible! For bootstrapping entrepreneurs, cash is precious; machining or 3D printing in-house may be the best path. But for many entrepreneurs, time is the limiting factor. Xometry handles this process for you, requiring only minutes to upload a CAD model and place an order. For those that have read the E-Myth revisited, think of Xometry as a well to keep you focusing on being the Entrepreneur and Manager, not perpetually trapped in the technician role. We’ve now implemented this strategy for both machined parts and 3D printed parts where we’ll rapid design an idea, send it out for manufacturing and then a few days later, we have a functional, tangible part in our hand with minimal distraction.