I Was Just Trying to Make Extra Money. Then I Never Wanted to Stop.
I'll be real with you. Print Haus was not some grand vision. There was no business plan, no investor pitch, no "eureka" moment. I had an app I was building, I needed side income to keep going, and someone told me 3D printing could make decent money. So I bought a printer. That was pretty much the whole plan.
The app was supposed to be the real thing. The printing was supposed to be the thing that paid for it. Funny how that works out sometimes.
I used to dread Mondays. Now I forget what day it is.
Before this I had regular jobs. Normal ones. The kind where you show up, watch the clock, do the thing, go home, and feel vaguely empty about the whole deal. You're not miserable exactly, you're just not... lit up. You're going through the motions and somewhere in the back of your head you're thinking "this can't really be it, right?"
That was me. For a while that was just my normal.
Then I started printing stuff and something weird happened. I stopped watching the clock. I'd start a design at 10pm and look up and it was 2am and I wasn't even tired. Not because I was grinding, but because I genuinely didn't want to stop. That feeling was new. I hadn't felt that about work before and I didn't know what to do with it at first.
Making things for real people is just different.
Every order that comes in is its own little puzzle. Someone needs a rack for a very specific type of drill bit. Someone else wants a lamp that fits their desk vibe but can't find it in any store. A small shop needs 300 identical bin labels by Friday. Each one is different. Each one makes you think. And when someone messages you to say "this is exactly what I needed, thank you" you feel it in a way you just don't feel when you close a ticket or finish a report.
I genuinely enjoy tinkering. I enjoy the designing part, the problem solving part, the figuring-out-how-to-print-something-tricky part. It doesn't feel like work and I think that's the point. I think that's the thing a lot of people are quietly looking for and don't know how to find.
Why Texas? Why 2023?
I'm from here and I like making things for people I can picture. People with garages full of tools. People who want their home to look intentional without paying ridiculous furniture store markups. People who work with their hands and want gear that actually holds up. That's the customer I understand because that's the world I live in.
The timing felt right because 3D printing had finally gotten good enough to be taken seriously. The machines were more reliable. The materials had caught up. You could hand someone a print and not have to apologize for it. The gap between what the technology promised and what it actually delivered had finally closed.
Where things are headed.
Print Haus keeps growing. New products, more custom work, coaching for people who want to start their own print businesses. The app I was building when all this started is still on the backburner and honestly I'm okay with that. More than okay. This is the thing now and it feels right in a way that's hard to explain but easy to feel.
If you bought something from us, thank you. If you sent us a weird design request, we probably loved it. If you're just reading this trying to figure out if a 3D printing business is something you could do, the answer is probably yes and we'd love to help you find out.
-- The Print Haus Team 🤠