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How we're making our GIANT 3D printing farm even bigger - Goals for Slant 3D in 2024

Yes, we know January is almost over, so it's a little bit late for this, but we're still going to tell you what we're going to do this year. Every year at Slant 3D, we always go through and define a core set of goals that are kind of the driving projects that we're going to be working on. We work on a lot of stuff, but these are the core main things that we're focusing on and have to be viewed through and get the most resources at any given time, even though we do all that other experimentation.



Starting off with our Austin Factory, we have had this on the books for a very long time, and one thing or another has always prevented it, generally good things. For example, we were meant to do Austin almost 2 years ago, but then the space for the Mega Farm in Boise, Idaho, opened up, which gave us so much more space and so much more power that would have had to be built custom otherwise. But now, we've fully filled up the Boise Mega Farm, and we are ready to start deploying the Austin Farm. The reason this is so valuable to us is that it gets us closer to a larger metropolitan area, gives us access to a great tech community that we want to continue to engage in, and also gets us closer to the other side of the Mississippi where 80% of the US population is. For all of our e-commerce customers, it decreases shipping cost and it decreases lead times so that we can truly be a warehouse where the shelves make the product, and they can get their parts within a couple of days as if it was plucked from a shelf rather than manufactured, processed, packed, and shipped as it actually is.


The next big core project that we're continuing to work on is our software. The pillar of this is our API. The API will allow other people to access our print farm for their applications and their websites and whatever they happen to dream up, so that they no longer have to build a print farm in order to support their nightlight maker or whatever it happens to be. They can actually sell merchandise without ever actually having to hold merchandise or build a print farm. This is going to let so many more people create products and services that were never feasible before because they can just plug into a giant print farm without having to build a giant print farm. This is one of the most important things that we can possibly enable, and we will be releasing a public beta for the API very soon, early this year. And then, ongoing throughout the year, we will continue to build on that API, creating demonstration apps like the print-on-demand app and that kind of thing to show how the API can work and what type of applications could be built that use it. A lot of that code will be open-sourced, and a lot of those applications will be useful to other industries that are not close to 3D printing, so that other industries can use the capabilities of 3D printing without having to know the nitty-gritty details of how it all comes together. Again, this helps to open it up and grow the market so that more people can use the fact that 3D printing can produce an item on demand without having to know how to 3D model a part, and how to set up a print farm, and how to set up shipping software for that matter. They're able to just create the thing and then plug into the infrastructure to support that thing and scale up from there.


The third thing we're going to focus on is YouTube and media. We're going to continue to expand this YouTube channel and have additional YouTube channels. Many of you already know about Tangled Testing, which is a testing channel where we will be evaluating filaments and print settings and sharing that data with the community to better qualify 3D printed parts because that data just is not universally out there or very broad in its scope. We hope to be able to enable that with Light Tangled Testing, and then we will continue to educate people about how to produce parts for mass production 3D printing here on the core 3D channel, and we have a couple of other projects that might be announced in the near future that we will also be pushing on this year. But the media work that we do is going to be expanded and continued to be focused on here for the next year.


Fourth and last, we will be working very hard on Tangled Filament. Tangled Filament is a project that kind of sprung forth last year, but it has become increasingly necessary as we have scaled up and we've seen the industry continue to grow. Good quality, low-cost raw materials for mass production 3D printing are absolutely essential for us to continue to grow, so even though we will probably take it in the teeth for the next year or two in scaling up Tangled Filament, it is something that is so important in order to make sure that our operations are supported the way they need

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