Overnight Parts — CAD-by-Chat Print Bureau

One line: Message a bot a description or photo of the functional part you need; wake up to a parametric design and a print in progress — designed overnight, printed next morning, most parts in your hands (Berlin) within 24h.

Status: Launch-scoped, NOT launched. Judge score at frontier triage: 7/30 — treat as a cheap-test candidate, not a committed bet. See VALIDATION.md before spending anything beyond the €50 test budget.

Customer

People who need a functional one-off part and have no CAD skills and no patience for a 3-week CAD shop:

1. Etsy/handmade sellers (primary, recurring) — jigs, fixtures, drying racks, packing spacers, stamps. They make money with the part, so €49–149 is a business expense, not a hobby splurge. Recurring: every new product needs new jigs.
2. Board-game / hardware prototypers — trays, inserts, enclosures, brackets. Iteration speed is the whole value.
3. Owners of discontinued gear — camera plates, synth end-cheeks, shelf brackets, appliance knobs. High willingness to pay, one-shot jobs, great before/after content.

Geography: Berlin for same-day pickup/courier; DE-wide via DHL next-day. English + German intake.

Offer

Pricing logic: €49 is explicitly a “launch week” price (scarcity + honest framing); week 2 onward is €59. Anything with two parts gets quoted at €99 by default. That shifts the month-one mix toward fewer, higher-value jobs — same €1,000 with less printer time. Payment: after the customer approves the design preview, before printing (PayPal.me / bank transfer for month one; Stripe only if GREEN).

Not included: load-bearing/safety-critical parts, food-contact guarantees, IP-infringing replicas of parts still sold. Refund rule: if the part doesn’t fit after 2 revisions, full refund and keep the part — the failure becomes content.

Delivery mechanics (the 12-hour loop)

1. Evening (customer): DMs the Discord/Telegram bot — description, photo, key dimensions (“bracket for this shelf, hole spacing 32mm”). Bot asks the 3–5 clarifying questions a CAD engineer would (material? load direction? which dimension is critical?). No payment yet — customer pays after approving the design preview, before printing (a stronger offer than prepay: they see the design first).
2. Overnight (agent fleet, always-on Mac): Agents draft parametric OpenSCAD, render previews from 3 angles + a dimensioned drawing, run printability checks (overhangs, wall thickness, bed fit), and post the preview back into the chat thread.
3. Morning coffee (Joshua, ~10 min/job): Sanity-check the SCAD + preview, tweak parameters if needed, slice, hit print on the Bambu X2D. This human gate is non-negotiable — it’s the quality moat and the liability filter.
4. Midday: Print completes; photo posted to the thread for approval. Revisions re-enter the overnight queue (or same-day if trivial — it’s parametric, so a hole-spacing fix is a one-number edit).
5. Afternoon: Pickup at agreed spot / Berlin courier / DHL. Customer gets the STL and SCAD source with the part — “you own the design” is a differentiator no print farm offers.

Capacity reality: X2D is one printer. ~2–4 jobs/day ceiling. That caps month one at roughly €2–3k gross even if demand explodes — fine for validation, and queue pressure justifies price rises before hardware buys.

Why Joshua

• Agents write OpenSCAD shockingly well, and almost nobody can review it competently. Joshua can. That collision — parametric CAD skill + a real 24/7 agent fleet on an always-on Mac + an X2D — is the moat. Competitors either can’t do the CAD (print farms need you to bring an STL), can’t automate the pipeline (CAD shops quote in weeks), or aren’t awake overnight.
• Infrastructure is already paid for and running: Mac, agents, printer, Discord bot patterns (Muse, Oannes engine). Marginal cost of a job is filament + 10 morning minutes.
• The overnight-agent-work ritual becomes literal overnight manufacturing: he wakes up to physical objects and money. Fun sustains it; each job is a fresh puzzle, not a grind.

Month one, week by week, to $1,000

Budget: ~€80 filament, €0 software. Bot is a weekend of agent work.

• Week 1 — Wizard-of-Oz + showcase (the VALIDATION.md test). No bot built yet. Joshua does 5 free showcase parts for Berlin makerspace contacts (xHain, MotionLab) and Kleinanzeigen “Suche” posters. Every job produces a chat-to-part timelapse: the conversation, the SCAD emerging, the print, the fit. r/functionalprint showcase post goes out only after the first real timelapse exists (hard dependency — no proof, no post). GREEN gate proves ~€150; the intake bot is built the following weekend only on GREEN.
• Week 2 — First paid cohort at €59 (€49 was launch-week only). Target: 5 paid jobs (~€300–350 with one €99 two-part job). Channels: Kleinanzeigen Suche-ad replies (highest intent) + Etsy sellers contacted via their Instagram/website — never Etsy DMs (TOS) — with a photo of a relevant showcase jig. Ship the “you own the SCAD source” line hard.
• Week 3 — Double down on what converted. Target: 7 jobs (~€450 with the €99 default for two-part requests). Ask every happy customer for one referral and permission to post their part.
• Week 4 — Recurring hook. Target: 6–8 jobs + pitch the €149/mo Maker’s Retainer to the 2–3 Etsy sellers who came back twice. Month-one target: ≈18–20 paid jobs at €59/€99 mix ≈ €1,000+ ($1,080), 1 retainer signed = stretch.

Funnel math (how ~20 paid jobs actually happen)

Assumption to validate in week 1: inquiry → paid ≈ 50% (they came with a real part and real dimensions; the design-preview-before-payment offer is strong). If week 1 shows a different rate, rescale week 2–4 targets, don’t wish at them.

Needed: ~40 qualified inquiries over weeks 2–4 ≈ 13–14/week. Where they come from, per week:

14/week × 3 weeks × 50% ≈ 21 paid jobs — closes the €1,000 with the €59/€99 mix and stays under the X2D’s 2–4 jobs/day ceiling. The single load-bearing habit: 10 Suche-ad replies every weekday. If any week’s inquiries land under 10, the fix is volume at the top, not price at the bottom.

Kill/scale gate is in VALIDATION.md — the 7-day test runs before week 2 spends any real attention.